How is it police could describe part of borough as no-go?

Published: 22 September, 2011

• IT was unfortunate that Camden’s full council meeting on September 12 was truncated by an hour and a half to receive feedback on the public meetings held in the aftermath of the riots this August.

Not that I am opposed to public meetings, far from it, we should have more of them.

However, there are two reasons why it shouldn’t have reduced the time allocated to regular council business.

First it prevented us from having a proper discussion of what happened in Camden just before the riots.

On July 20 around 200 Territorial Support Group (TSG) officers were deployed in Queen’s Crescent leading to a number of arrests.

It was the largest police operation in Camden for many years.

There are three questions in particular which need to be answered regarding this incident:
• Does Camden have a picture of what led to the TSG’s deployment that evening?
• How is it that the senior police officer at the subsequent public meeting could describe this part of Camden as having been a “no-go area” for the several months prior to the raid?
• Did the Labour cabinet decision to move Camden’s community safety officers out of the housing department and into the culture and environment department reduce the effectiveness of interventions in the area in the months before this incident?

Unlike the riots this was an incident where the council and local services are directly involved.

In August riots occurred in many parts of England including Camden.

While there was criminal damage and looting in Camden happily it was largely contained here due, I believe, to our excellent local police force.

Thus my second objection to the full council meeting being truncated is that instead of hearing local people thanking the police for doing all they could in extremely difficult conditions we heard several groups use it as their opportunity to deliver long-standing complaints about particular issues:
stop-and-search, rape, lack of recognition for single parents, not enough for young people to do, it’s all the fault of the cuts, etcetera.

These are all proper issues which need to be looked at.

However proponents of such causes weaken their own case by seeking to tag them on to acts of opportunistic looting and thuggery.

CLLR ANDREW MENNEAR
Conservative, Frognal & Fitzjohns ward