Meet PCSO Steve. He’s a much-loved character in Sutton created by a real-life PCSO who pounds the beat in my ward. The foam copper turns up at community fun-days and schools and is sometimes spotted waving at passers-by in the High Street. He is immensely popular. However Sir David Attenborough could have been talking about PCSO Steve as the tele-environmentalist launched the Endangered exhibition at the Natural History Museum today.
You see PCSO Steve, or rather the real-life PCSO’s pounding London’s streets, are indeed an endangered species as the policing chief to mayor Boris Johnson indicated this evening.
Stephen Greenhalgh, the bottom-slapping policing chief at City Hall, graced Sutton’s Seacombe Theatre with his considerable bulk tonight to reveal that 900 PCSO’s will get the bullet in a major – and ill-thought out – reorganising of the capital’s force.
Over 900 PCSO’s – Police Community Support Officers – are to be axed across London according to Greenhalgh, the former leader of the controversial ruling Tories in Hammersmith and Fulham before Boris asked him to run the Metropolitan Police on his behalf. Boris doubles up as the elected Police Commissioner in the capital but has to delegate the job as he’s far too busy writing well-paid columns for the Daily Telegraph.
Once upon a time PCSO’s were the subject of much derision as “plastic police”, part-timers without powers of arrest who have to call up real coppers every time they encounter a situation. Some of the initial public scepticism was down to a rebellion by ‘proper’ officers and their Police Federation union who waged a media war against this army of green volunteers thinking they know how to uphold law and order.
The rest of the blame was because the PCSO’s champion was called Sir Ian Blair, the much-maligned former Met commissioner who couldn’t seem to put a foot right between being accused of ‘political correctness’ and being labelled a New Labour lackey eager to please government ministers.
Greenhalgh and Boris
But times have changed. PCSO’s have grown on the public especially in London’s suburban donut, in places like Sutton. If walking inner city streets represent a trial of terror for PCSO’s the leafy suburban streets are the polar opposite, a place where the sun always shines, at least in the eyes of grateful old folk who feel safer. The PCSO is there for them and has time to talk without having to cut short their first sentence to dash off to the next emergency.
The sight of a couple of PCSO’s is normally enough to make can-kicking youths temporarily cease their anti-social ways as effectively as any ‘official’ constable. PCSO’s in Sutton spend time sitting on people’s couches discussing an event that has troubled them. They conduct house-to-house satisfaction surveys and work with residents groups on a range of activities such as establishing neighbourhood watches or training locals to use speed-guns.
Their job is genuinely pro-active and community-orientated and reaps enormous benefits in terms of community confidence. Yes, the often spend time in areas with a relatively low crime rate but that doesn’t mean low-crime neighbourhoods are without the fear of crime. Far from it.
Ultimately they help set the tone of a safe place to live by being there every time something minor happens, preventing it turning into something major. PCSO’s really are about zero tolerance with a smile. The policing equivalent of the bright-lights theory; light up the dark corners and crime and graffiti will slink away.
Myself, my ward councillor colleagues and representatives from residents associations regularly meet with the Safer Neighbourhood Teams – a proper sergeant and PCSO’s – to discuss issues and set priorities for the Sutton North ward. These ‘ward panels’ also allow the sharing of information about problems and actions as well as upcoming community fayres. Of course PCSO’s also deal with sharp-end policing challenges too. One PCSO arrested a man wanted for paedophile offences in my ward.
PCSO’s and ward panels are generally liked and appreciated in places like Sutton, and the culture of partnership working between the Council and police pioneered by the Liberal Democrat authority has contributed to one of the lowest crime rates and highest rates of resident satisfaction in London.
With crime falling and the public happy the most obvious thing to say is ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.’ Regrettably such sentiments are lost on Planet Boris and the super-sized Greenhalgh meteorite and threatening to make PCSO’s extinct.
Greenhalgh told tonight’s meeting that he was creating a “thicker blue line.” Well, things don’t get much thicker and bluer than him. By axing large numbers of PCSO’s and sinking the money into employing a few more fully-fledged constables we’re likely to end up with fewer law-enforcement bodies available.
As one of my colleagues, Simon Wales, pointed out at tonight’s meeting the statistics we were being bombarded with appeared to be a smoke and mirrors trick. Certainly I noticed that Greenhalgh was careful to boast about the anticipated rise in real PC’s while excluding the (almost certainly larger) fall in PCSO’s from the equation.
What it means for the Sutton North ward is that we will lose two of our three PCSO’s while the borough as a whole will have a (supposedly) larger team of ‘community officers’ who won’t be ward-based and will be expected to patrol the hot-spots. In other words Boris and his sidekick Greenhalgh have kicked away the very foundations of community policing in the leafy backstreets to chaperone everyone to over-police the town centres.
As I pointed out at the meeting, Sutton has already struck a successful balance between taking care of crime and disorder in the town centres and ward-based community policing in residential areas. Council leader and ward colleague Ruth Dombey summed it up perfectly at the end when she said these proposals might be appropriate for other boroughs but it smacks of a one-size-fits-all approach imposing a model that simply isn’t the right one for Sutton.
I certainly think it’s a top-down model that erodes ward panel priority-setting between police, councillors and residents groups and will lead to less PCSO’s in the side-streets to reassure locals about safety where they live and stop anti-social behavior at source.
Whether these changes are the result of a Tory vendetta against the Labourite former Met boss who introduced PCSO’s, I don’t know. But it certainly looks like the wrong change for Sutton which threatens to undo years of good work at the grassroots. Save our PCSO Steve’s!
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
