Andrew Dismore

Dear editor

Your coverage  last week of the HM Inspectorate  of  Constabulary  report  into the Metropolitan  Police, finding it to be  ‘in need of improvement’, comes as little surprise. The problems facing the Met. are not due to any lack of effort or commitment by our  warranted officers and PCSOs. Rather, they are the product of the cuts and reorganisations imposed on the police service by the Conservative Government  and Mayor of London.

The report talks of poor investigation of ‘volume crime’. ‘Volume crime’  is a euphemism for offences  like burglary, mugging, vandalism, vehicle  theft , and some violent crime. The fact that these serious offences are now dismissively lumped together as ’volume crime’ is itself an indicator of the extent of problem.

We know from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s Barnet  roadshow last month that these offences  are on the increase year on year in Barnet ( as is overall crime) and we have some useful indicators in the HMIC report as to the reasons. 

When I questioned the Deputy Commissioner about the report at last week’s City Hall Police Committee hearing, it turns out that we are short of between 700 and 800 trained detectives in London. Officers in training are used to cover the shortfall. There is a problem getting enough officers to volunteer to become  detectives. The Deputy Commissioner said it was going to take up to 2 years to get up to strength.

He admitted that the poor detection rate for example for burglary in Barnet (just 6% with only half of even that low figure resulting in a prosecution) was in part attributable to the detective shortage.

An additional factor was the extent to which our officers are taken away (’abstracted’) for duties in central London, an issue I have highlighted before. There was a loss of no fewer than  222 officer shifts taken off the borough over the last month for which we have the figures.

When the popular ward based Safer Neighbourhood Teams were abolished by the Mayor, we were told that crime would be better investigated in the new ‘clusters’ of wards, with specially allocated detectives in those clusters. Clearly that was pie in the sky. On this as on so many other aspects of crime and policing in London, the Conservatives have fallen woefully short of their promises, as the Inspectorate have now shown.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Dismore

Labour London Assembly member for Barnet and Camden