Press Release
Warehouse blues
20 March 2008
When a man in Eltham, south east London, was stabbed in the stomach one day last February, he made his way painfully straight to a place where he knew he would receive immediate sanctuary and succour – his local police station.
Future victims of crime may be denied this opportunity.
For police stations across the capital are under threat, with plans to move thousands of patrol officers out of them and into warehouses on remote industrial estates. The public are to be allowed no contact with these warehouses, which will be called “patrol bases”.
Some traditional police stations are already earmarked for closure after being stripped of their officers, and many others face the same fate.
The Metropolitan Police Service has been conducting a (very) low-profile ‘consultation exercise’ over these fundamental changes to policing in London, some of which are apparently going ahead even before this ‘consultation’ has ended.
The public consultation document issued by Greenwich borough police, for example, asks: “Do you have any comments about the provision of a patrol base in the borough?”
Yet elsewhere in the very same document it tells residents that it has already “acquired a site and gained planning permission” for its new base.
The Met Federation does not believe that warehousing officers and closing police stations is in the interests of either the public or the police.
The ‘police base’ concept smacks of a ‘police barracks’ from which officers will sally forth in their vehicles to carry out enforcement before vanishing again behind their barbed wire security fencing.
It’s a policing style more suited to Colombia than Camden.
Ordinary, amicable, non-confrontational contact between police officers and public will be strictly limited to encounters with Safer Neighbourhoods Teams (SNTs) who are only contactable for a few hours a day on certain days of the week.
And, of course, most SNTs comprise 50 per cent civilian support officers, limiting non-conflict encounters between police officers and public still further.
The ensuing estrangement of police and public will serve nobody’s interests.
We hear increasingly from politicians and senior police officers of the need for ‘re-assurance policing’.
Is not the sight of a police station with real police officers inside it re-assuring? Not for much longer, it seems ‘Warehouse policing’ may also threaten service delivery. Police in Waltham Forest have already adopted the concept only to find that they are not – under the terms of the warehouse’s lease – allowed to use light or sirens on the estate on which the premises are situated, although there is extensive congestion there caused by lorries.
The proposed site of the police warehouse in Barking and Dagenham would be situated at the borough’s south eastern extremity near the corner of the very busy A406 North Circular and A13 roads.
Meanwhile, Greenwich’s warehouse will be separated from practically the entire borough by the A2, which connects the Blackwall Tunnel and the Woolwich ferry. Closure of either of these river crossings causes heavy congestion.
Industrial estates are for industrial use and policing is a public service, not an industry.
We need to preserve a strong police presence at the heart of London’s communities.
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