Precise community crime fighting: a conversation with church leaders

Last week I visited Ruach City Church in Brixton to meet with leaders from London’s majority black churches. I was very grateful for the invitation and for the warm welcome.

Rebuilding the trust in policing in communities across London’s is essential if we’re to achieve our mission of delivering more trust, less crime and high standards.

That is particularly important in black communities where we know trust is at a lower level than elsewhere.

The responsibility for driving that forward lies with us and it starts with listening.

We are at our best in tackling crime when we work closely with communities. Initiatives like street pastors and Neighbourhood Watch, which actively involve the public, have shown great successes already but we can do more.

I came away from Brixton inspired by the possibilities for finding new ways of working together, knowing that across London there are so many people willing us to succeed.

During the event, I was rightly challenged on standards. We’re taking action to root out those who corrupt our integrity and who fail to live up to the values the public rightly expect.

We also talked about the use of stop and search, disproportionality and its use in communities where trust is already strained.

Stop and search is an important tactic and it has an operational value, but it also has a cost in terms of trust if it is used badly.

I’ve commissioned some work to look at how we can be more precise in our use of stop and search and how can we do it with more consultation with communities.

We’re also looking at bringing the outside in by involving community representatives and a more diverse range of voices and insights in the training of our new recruits.

We all need to work harder to genuinely understand London and the complex, diverse communities that make it such a vibrant and interesting city.

This is all part of our aim to rebuild neighbourhood policing in communities across London, not just by putting more resources on the streets but by delivering precise interventions, backed by data and insight gained from genuine relationships between officers and the people who live and work in those areas.??

It’s not just enough to deploy more people in an area. We need our officers, at all ranks, to really invest in getting to know the communities they’re serving so that they can spot the issues and have a better appreciation for the impact and effectiveness of our interventions.

Building that trust and those relationships is the foundation of local policing. Everything else follows from there.

We’ve seen great examples of community engagement in different parts of the Met and we need to take that best practice, learn from it and apply the understanding in other areas.

The conversation I had on Wednesday morning is just the start. I would love to see similar conversations happening across London led locally, particularly with communities whose trust in us has been shaken.

I look forward to continuing the discussion with church leaders in the future and to building on some of the positive ideas that were put forward during the event.