Spending cuts proposed under London mayor Boris Johnson's (draft) police and crime plan mean that the Hackney police station in Lower Clapton Road, opposite Clapton Square, is earmarked for closure. Diane Abbott is quoted in the Gazette criticising the decision. She points her finger at Westminster rather than City Hall, claiming the decision shows Hackney is "one of the victims of the way this government is ripping into frontline policing."
But will policing be less effective if the police station goes? Will crime increase as a result? I think it's very unlikely. In the 21 years that I've lived near Clapton Pond I've quite often reported crime to the police - perhaps 50 times, probably more - but only once at the local cop shop. That was many years ago, but I recall standing at the counter for a very long time, wondering if a kindly constable would ever emerge from within and say hello, hello, hello. No other member of the public dropped in while I was there.
Every other time I've felt the need to report something to the police I've used the telephone. And that, of course, is what most people do. Three top criminologists who were recently quizzed by London Assembly members about Johnson's plan seemed unperturbed by concerns about station closures for that very reason. They hardly jumped up and down about proposals for reorganising safer neighbourhood teams either - something else Labour politicians are unhappy about.
Those experts were far more concerned about the shallow populism of Johnson's plan than the number and location of "bobbies on the beat" or the bricks and mortar that will be sold to make budgetary ends meet.
Where, they asked, were the thought-through measures for improving and tracking that all-important public confidence in the police, especially among people living in high crime areas? Amid all the vote-seeking talk of protecting "the frontline" - whatever that term actually means - where was any grasp of the need for different layers of the police service to work together more efficiently, from the neighbourhood officers we pass on the street to the civilian staff who ensure that information they pick up is efficiently acted on to the satisfaction of the person who provided it?
That stuff is almost non-existent in Boris's Blueprint. And its absence is a far greater cause for concern than the closure of a police station to which very few people who need the help of the police actually go.
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