The next meeting of the East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team Police ward panel is on Monday.
The current priorities set by the panel are –
1. Youth Priority
2. Offences within the vicinity of licensed premises
3. Vehicle Crime
Do you think they are the right priorities?
Please let me know what you think.
London Mayor Boris Johnson has announced the closure the Commercial Vehicle Education Unit. This group of 3 Police sergeants and 9 Police constables specialise finding defective lorries and taking them off the road and working with haulage companies to reduce collisions with pedestrians and cyclists.
Not enough was being done to reduce such collisions. HGV lorries are the number one killer for cyclists in London. Even less will be done going forward.
The announcement was almost exactly nine years to the day when a previous treasurer of Southwark Cyclists, while I was the chairperson, Brigitte Robinson, was killed by a left turning lorry whose driver had a young child in the cab and had been working 12+ hour shifts 7 days a week for many months.
Loosing a close cycling friend was incredibly distressing. How many more people have to die to HGV’s before the few exempt from sideguards are no longer exempt and the limited resources are withdrawn from educating lorry drivers and cyclists.
Talking to East Dulwich Police the majority of Violence Against the Person – people hitting other people and worse – is behind closed doors and usually alcohol related….
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recommended as part of its latest advisory document on public health that each alcohol unit should have a minimum price.
NICE says “Making alcohol less affordable appears to be the most effective way of reducing alcohol-related harm. There is sufficient evidence (within the published literature and from the economic analysis) to justify the introduction of a minimum price per unit. The evidence suggests that young people who drink and people who drink harmful amounts of alcohol tend to choose cheaper drinks. Establishing a minimum price per unit would limit the ability of these groups to ‘trade down’ to cheaper products. A minimum price per unit (unlike a tax increase) would prevent retailers from passing on any increase to producers, or absorbing it themselves, so it would prevent them from selling alcohol below cost price.”
This contrasts nicely with a survey of 10,000 teenagers by Prof Mark Bells from Liverpool John Mores University showing that alcohol is so cheap kids can get plastered on pocket money – 17p an alcohol unit or £1.36 for a 2 litre bottle of very strong cider.
Contradicting this is ASDA supermarket executive Paul Kelly & Sainsbury’s Nick Grant to a Commons Health Select Committee.
It will be interesting to see if the supermarket chiefs win over peer reviewed scientific research.
Will NICE be nobbled by the Department of Health. Sadly my money is on those supermarket drinks promotions selling at ridiculous prices winning at an ever greater cost to society of drunken behaviour.
Latest East Dulwich crime stats taken from the mets Police http://maps.met.police.uk/tables.htm show that in the last year August to August the crime rate has dropped such that East Dulwich has moved from 4th lowest crime rate in Southwark to having the lowest crime rate in Southwark.
This is despite having 1/4 of Peckham Rye, 1/8 of Village and 1/8 of College wards most problematic areas counted against East Dulwich ward. So the real underlying story is even better than this.
It’s so improved that the East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team have been straying outside East Dulwich to help out in Dulwich Park – which has seen a 37% decrease in robberies.
When I became a councillor this was one of my personal ojectives – to have the lowest crime rates in Southwark in East Dulwich. We started our campaign to become East dulwich councillors with a Crime Survey. the survey results helped us decide to target a lot of the resources we as councillors allocate. We’ve still more work to do. I want East Dulwich to be better compared to London as a whole. We’re currently just outside the best quarter for London.
How can we improve it further?
After pressure from local Lib Dems, Southwark Council is to start using two cars equipped with cameras to get tough on people who ignore traffic rules by monitoring school gates in the mornings and afternoons. We’ve had complaints about this from parents with kids at Heber and Goodrich Schools. Footage will be used to issue penalty notices of up to £120, with revenue from the fines directed back into road safety projects and traffic calming measures outside schools and across the borough.
Clearly illegally parked cars outside schools create dangerous situations for children and parents. The School Keep Clear road markings are there for a reason and I suspect with these camera cars coming people will take those markings much more seriously.
It also means our local East Dulwich Police and community Wardens can spend more time doing other tasks.
The East Dulwich Police Safer neighbourhood Team now consists of 1 Sargent, 3 Police Constables and 5 Police Community Support Officers. 9 officers in total. Amazing.
This might be related to the Police being unable/unwilling to correct their Police stats computer to reflect the actual East Dulwich boundaries. Currently East Dulwich includes 1/4 of Peckham Rye, 1/8 of Dulwich and 1/8 of College. Changing the Post Code lookup table in a computer file is dull but really very simple to perform. Only then will we truly know whether the efforts of councillors, council officers and Safer Neighbourhood Teams are working.
So even a team of 9 is hardly enough to cover 150% of the intended area for a Safer Neighbourhood Team.
For some time I’ve been following this Act from its initial proposal onwards. It aims to give communities the opportunity to take back powers for things pointlessly decided by central government or its quango’s.
As part of this Act I applied to Southwark that its asks for Southwark to have its own Safer Camera Partnership – speed and red light running cameras. Effectively opt out of the London wide scheme. Full council agreed to approve this and it is now with the next filter organised by the Local Government Association. If they agreed it, then it is formally lodged with central government. They then decide whether to implement this change or not.
My idea relates to the fact that for several years no new cameras have been installed in Southwark by the London Camera Partnership.
The idea came from attending a Southwark Living Streets presentation where they showed that virtually all collisions on our roads occur on major roads and that the primary cause is speeding. They also explained that lots of research that such fast roads, such as the Old Kent Road, result in deprivation via ill health, injuries, noise, social dislocation (not knowing your neighbours).
Hopefully, I’ll get to present my case to the LGA soon.
What do you think – more cameras?
Alleys are magnets for anti social acts and worse. A simple measure to drastically reduce such problems is gating alleyways. Sounds easy – so I thought. The first act as a councillor was to arrange a pot of money to fund gating alleyways. Boy, is it hard to gate them. You have to obtain agreement from everyone who has legal access. Once you have agreement to gate an alleyway you need to arrange keys for everyone, who can provide emergency access. The list of issues and problems is long, very long.
So I’m delighted to report that the alleyway from Northcross Road behind the Palmerston has now been gated.
That an alleyway on Ashbourne Grove is imminent. We’re working on an Elsie Road one, and a Chesterfield Grove alleyway. We’re working on another but need to talk to residents more before telling anyone else.
If you know of any alleyway in East Dulwich that would ideally be gated please do get in touch.
A study by the University of West Virginia in the US has found that owners of ‘vicious’ dogs are more likely to commit vicious crimes themselves.
Owners of dogs classed by the American Kennel Club as breeds with a high risk of causing injuries to humans – i.e. vicious dogs were asked to take part in a questionnaire. The study showed revealed that American owners of vicious dogs were significantly more likely to admit crimes such as fighting people, vandalism, illegal drug use.
I wonder if this applies to Brits and their dogs?
Last year the East Dulwich councillors Richard Thomas, Jonathan Mitchell and myself established a £50,000 Crime Reduction fund.
One idea from the East Dulwich Police Safer Neighbourhood Team Sergeant Duncan Jackson was for a hand held metal detector. I warmly accepted it and we quickly made our first purchase. The idea being that Police officers with a pocket metal detector could sweep someone they stopped for metals objects whether knives, guns or even needles. The first type we purchased was a big flat thing that could with a squeeze fit in a large pocket. Not very hand held. So we tried the next type. This attaches via a holder to a standard issue Police belt. They’ve tried it and found it works a treat and it has made searching must less intrusive and much safer for officers. It has sped up searches and we’ve made sure that the sgt. and both police constables have them.
In fact they’ve been so helpful in reassuring Police officers, being less intrusive during stop and searches and finding things that a finger tip search might not, that I suggested to our Executive member Paul Kyriacou and council Leader Nick Stanton that we had a winning idea and that we should find the money to kit out all frontline Police and enforcement officers in Southwark. That money was finally agreed early January and an order placed.
That order delivered in early March and now all frontline Police and council enforcement officers and our Community Wardens have them.
If you carry guns or knives or needles in Southwark your chance of being caught has been dramatically increased.