Calls have been made for change in the Met Police, with council leaders saying a scathing report on the force echoed their own concerns over a deterioration in community policing.
Baroness Dame Louise Casey found Met Police bosses had “let the frontline deteriorate”.
“Demand is not matching supply,” she wrote.
Her report said bosses at New Scotland Yard “constantly” sap resources from communities, but frontline staff said “nothing they perceive as helpful flows back”.
A failed experiment?
In 2018, London was split into multi-borough areas called Borough Command Units (BCUs).
Three east London boroughs (Havering, Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham) switched in 2017 as a “pilot scheme”.
Wait times for police to attend emergencies ballooned. Many of the most serious cases were not attended on time.
The average wait for a “significant” call – which should be attended within an hour – hit 11-and-a-half hours.
Councils decried the scheme as a disaster.
But the Met rolled it out in 2018 anyway.
Crimes unsolved
In 2020, this newspaper investigated the scheme’s impact on the three boroughs after several years.
The results were not good.
Reports of crime were up 20 per cent compared to 2015/16, but police officer numbers were down.
Response targets were routinely missed and the proportion of cases being solved had plummeted.
“Positive outcome” rates for robbery, homicide, burglary and hate crimes had halved.
Positive outcomes in domestic abuse cases fell from 36pc to 14pc.
In rape and sexual assault cases, they collapsed from 22pc to 5pc.
What went wrong?
Even as one of London’s smaller boroughs, said council leader Darren Rodwell, Barking and Dagenham has tens of thousands more residents than entire cities like Oxford, Cambridge or Southend.
Yet the BCU model left Barking and Dagenham without even its own head officer.
Each borough once had its own commander. Now all three share one.
The BCU model, he believed, had been little more than a cover for budget cuts.
The result, he claimed, was “a real deterioration in the connection between the borough and the police.”
It wasn’t only at senior levels that staffing levels were concerning, he added.
From the moment the BCU was imposed, 25pc of the officers allocated “were not on full duties”, Cllr Rodwell claimed.
“We technically had the numbers, but we never really had the numbers,” he said.
Other officers on the BCU’s books were actually “seconded to central London”, he claimed.
Missing officers
Havering Council leader Ray Morgon noticed the same.
“There were only supposed to be one or two occasions, like Notting Hill Carnival or New Year, where your teams would be impacted,” he said.
But he claimed: “On a regular basis, teams are abstracted to go and do things in other parts of London.”
At times, said Cllr Morgon, “the number of police officers within Havering is quite sparse”.
Despite their own severe government funding cuts, both councils have decided in recent years to fund extra officers to try to keep the numbers up.
Casey Report
Baroness Casey’s report affirmed the east London councils’ long-held grievances.
She found officers were “constantly abstracted” from BCUs for other jobs.
“The frontline is treated by the Met as the least important part of the organisation,” she wrote.
“The BCU commander is often stretched across several boroughs and is largely disconnected from local authority partners.”
The Met had a “one-way, dial-out attitude to engaging the public,” she wrote.
“The Met has become disconnected from Londoners. Their consent can no longer be assumed.”
Cllr Rodwell agreed: “It’s led to a distrust of police because they are no longer in the community. I’m pleased the Casey review has recognised this… This has to be revised.”
Met Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said: “There are external factors – funding, governance, growing demand and resource pressures that shouldn’t sit with policing – that the report has identified.
“Baroness Casey is right to identify the impact these have had on our ability to police London, but there can be no excuses for us. The core of these problems are for policing to determinedly confront.”
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here