Councillor Gary Malcolm, leader of Ealing Liberal Democrats shares his latest update following a recent meeting between LibDem councillors and Ealing Police and the work the Met are doing in the borough.
Myself, and the other Ealing Councillors, were invited to a meeting with many of Ealing Police’s higher ranking officers.
I attended with Liberal Democrat Councillors Jon Ball from Ealing Common and Connie Hersch the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for crime, anti-social behaviour and community matters.
When I walked in I was one of the first councillors to arrive and saw about twenty police officers. Quite a site.
Liberal Democrat councillors regularly liaise with the Ealing Police and speak when there are meetings every month or so.
This meeting was the first I had seen and was led by the borough’s recently new police boss Chief Superintendent Jill Horsfall. It was good to speak to many of the officers and hear about the issues they were seeing as well to marry up what residents across Ealing were telling us.
I make a few observations and thoughts about the meeting and the future of policing in Ealing.
Despite the Ealing police being ‘out of special measures’ and saying they have aims to achieve goals in certain areas I find many people understandably do not trust the police and feel afraid when they walk the streets either when dark or in some of our centres like West Ealing where much anti-social behaviour takes place.
One example raised by a few councillors was the murders and rife drug taking seen in Hanwell seemed to prompt a response that the police will not make very many arrests because they are waiting to get the bigger drug bosses. On one level understandable but the Liberal Democrats feel that local residents deserve to see the police take action, but people still keep buying drugs and nothing appears to be happening.
This is one area the police need to be much better. If I was in charge of the local police, I would ensure that I and my officers more regularly updated not just councillors but members of the community at public meetings. I would make sure that progress was achieved through greater dialogue and liaison with residents, residents’ associations, the council and other stakeholders.
The police did admit they did not communicate well enough, but it did not appear on their slides of actions they would be taking so I am not confident of this.
It was said that the borough was fully staffed which is encouraging but we need to see that the number of police abstractions (where local police are taken out of duty to another location where a large event is taking place so they cannot serve local people) does not take place at the same level as before.
Stop and search was mentioned as it seemed they will do so in a manner that the community is more accepting of, given that for many years it was felt that many non-white communities had been victimised by being stopped and searched more often but the police arrested a lower than an average share of those they stopped. We will be monitoring this to see what happens.
They talked about their work to reduce violence against women and girls which in some areas has been very positive.
They said they had no plans to (re)open closed counters in the borough sadly as we feel people like a local station to help report crimes as many do not do this via website.
The police said they would continue to do community policing with engagement by attending local meetings, so we hope they do this as it is vital for the police to be seen in our communities to gather local intelligence and make people feel and be safer.
They stated one of their goals was about ‘High standards’ and this I feel is strongly linked to the lack of trust in the police. We have seen with how the police have handled the policing of significant community events, some of Ealing Police’s top officers arrested or forced out of their jobs, the offensive WhatsApp messages and other scandals that people do not trust the police in the way they did before.
When the formal meeting finished, we discussed with an Inspector the topic of facial recognition which the police have started to use. This has allowed a small police team to be present in an area and when a known criminal with an outstanding crime is spotted by the camera (using facial points of reference) the police can arrest them for those outstanding crimes.
Councillor Jon Ball asked about the data and the civil liberties of this, and the Inspector responded to say that the data was deleted almost immediately as it only flashed up possible criminals then the data is deleted automatically. When they ran this in Ealing, they reported lots of criminals being identified but none when they were in Acton.
I’ll end by saying that I often hear particular senior police officer say the right things but what I want is the police to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.
