Verbal Update
Minutes:
The Borough Commander, Treena Fleming gave a verbal update to the Panel on the Police’s perspective on the previous presentation, current performance levels and how well the integration of the Haringey and Enfield BCU’s had gone to date. The key areas highlighted were:
· The Borough Commander set out that she was very pleased with a number of the headline performance figures in the borough, including a 30% reduction in robberies which was excellent and was well above the London average.
· Haringey was one of the boroughs with high levels of serious youth violence, so the fact that knife crime had reduced 27% was also an excellent result.
· The merged Borough Command Unit (BCU) between Haringey and Enfield was implemented in April 2019 and the Borough Commander suggested that the performance figures provided an indication of the success of the merger.
· The Borough Commander advised that robbery would continue to be a key priority for the BCU and that high visibility uniformed patrols were on patrol every day in robbery hotspot locations to try and reduce offending.
· In April 2019, London went from 32 police boroughs down to 12. The Borough Commander advised that joining up resources with Enfield and Haringey had provided additional capacity to flex policing resources locally to respond to demand. There were a number of cross border problems, particularly around gangs and allowed the response teams to respond in a much more flexible way.
· The North Area tasking team was the violence suppression unit which was responsible to dealing with violent crime related to drugs. This unit comprised of over 40 high visibility officers who did a lot of work around robberies other violent crime.
· Traditionally, Haringey received a lot of central support from across London, however in light of the success of driving down violent crime this was no longer the case and the BCU no longer had priority status. This was seen as a significant milestone and it took around 18 months to achieve, involving the use of close joint working arrangements with partners.
· The Public Protection Unit, is what was previously called the Safeguarding Unit. This was a specialist unit that linked together rape investigations with domestic violence and child abuse investigations to provide a more holistic response. Previously, some of these areas would have involved a centralised response and that this could have resulted in three different investigating officers.
· There was a lot of cross working with Council partners around safeguarding. This included Operation Alliance, which was a joint piece of public protection work with the local authority and the custody suite at Wood Green to introduce four outreach workers. The outreach workers worked with every child that came into custody to provide a teachable moment and to then follow that up with visits to the child and their parents/guardian.
· The Neighbourhoods Team was in place and each war had 2 dedicated officers and a PCSO. A youth independent advisory group had also been set up and the Committee was advised that police cadet numbers were growing.
· CID were responsible for investigating serious crime outside of the public protection sphere. It was commented that whilst some of the reduction in crime levels was due to lower footfall levels during lockdown, part of it was also about some of the work that was being done by Police. The examples of Operation Venice and Operation Prosecco were given which had been high profile operations targeting drugs, violent crime and robbery and had achieved good results.
· The BCU command unit were responsible for monitoring performance and driving continuous improvement. The command unit also contained a performance and ethics board than analysed information conducted in depth analysis in relation to crime data.
RESOLVED
That the update was noted.