Last night, about 30 local residents and four local councillors braved the horrendous wind and rain to attend a Police communications event at Coulsdon Court Hotel.
Supt Mitch Carr is in charge of Safer Neighbourhood Teams (SNT) across the borough; he introduced a team of several local 10 PCs and PCSOs, and he explained the MET's greatly increased recent emphasis on neighbourhood policing teams which are specific to each ward.
Other points of note:
The SNT teams have been expanded recently with the appointment of extra sargeants
There was a spike in personal robberies in Purley in 4Q23; a plan had been drawn up to tackle this with additional covert and overt staffing and it had been very successful, with a dramatic reduction in reported crimes.. though there was always more to be done.
There are additional patrols at night which have been successful in catching some thieves of high value vehicles.
More officers have been trained in the use of speed guns, and these will be selectively deployed to known speeding hotspots.
A new IT system called CONNECT will soon be implemented; this should reduce the amount of manpower wasted in duplicate data entry and searching of different databases.
There is now greatly improved communication between the MET, Surrey police & British Transport Police, and this is helping to catch criminals commuting by public transport to commit their crimes.
The MET is currently below its target headcount and is still actively recruiting.
After the initial presentations and some sumptuous snacks, the second half of the evening was devoted to answering lots of questions from the floor, followed by the opportunity for chats with individual officers at the end.
Following a series of shocking incidents over the last year or two, It was very heartening to see the hugely increased effort which the MET has put into improved communications with the public, and last night's event was a very good example of this.
Cllr Simon Brew
