Paul McGregor updates residents & invites them to a live forum on twitter
It's been another busy week on the borough with lots of activity and some fantastic results.
Firstly, a huge thank you to everybody in the community for making the period of Halloween to Bonfire night the safest and most peaceful in the past five years. We have seen our fifth consecutive annual reduction in anti-social behaviour with 50 fewer incidents reported across that period than during the same time last year. This is testament to people within the community being more considerate of each other and parents maintaining greater focus on the activities of their children.
I am also very grateful to my team who implemented a comprehensive policing plan to deal with the peaks that always occur at this time of year: They dealt with incidents very quickly. To put this into context, on most days we would expect to deal with something like 35-40 Immediate calls (the really urgent ones) and 60-65 Standard calls (important but not urgent): On 31 Oct we dealt with 54 Immediate calls (I) and 82 Significant calls (S). We set ourselves challenging targets of 90% for I calls within 15 minutes and 90% S calls within one hour. My teams maintained a service level in excess of 96% and 98% respectively, against their performance targets of 90%. This was a phenomenal work rate in the face of 25-35% increases in call demand. In the month of October we received a total of 1,300 I & S calls. There are of course dangers in focussing purely on targets. Behind every call is a potential victim of crime, anti social behaviour, vulnerable missing person or other incident that needs police attendance.
I promised you a regular update on Operation Safer Places. We have continued to target those offenders who cause us most problems. We have now arrested 11 out of the 30. I am anticipating at least 5 more arrests at the most evidentially-opportune moment. At least one of the 30 has chosen to leave the borough and move to another part of the country. The local police have been warned! We are unrelenting in tackling those individuals who choose to commit crime here.
We still have some challenges. I would ask all of you to spread the word about looking after your properties as we lead up to Christmas. We are investigating burglaries being committed in the Tooting area and in particular the Nightingale and Bedford wards. Often the houses that are attacked by burglars have inadequate locks on the front doors and it is a simple case of 'slipping the lock' to get in. We need to get people to invest in protection for their homes and I ask all of you to be vigilant in your neighbourhoods. You can call us on 101 about any of your concerns or 999 if you think a crime is being committed or about to be committed. You can see from the figures above that we'll be with you pretty quickly.
Lastly, I invite you to join me for a live forum on Twitter on Thursday 28 November at 1pm. I will be free to take questions or comments and will answer them in 140 characters or less but will also provide more detailed answers on our internet page. I hope you will consider joining me. This is new territory for me but I am keen to give it a go and join the 21st Century!
T/ Borough Commander Paul McGregor
November 19, 2013