Having just read that the UK suffers a heightened threat of ‘plot after plot’ and looking at the diminishing numbers of police officers, I am starting to worry.

The outlook for Britain in an easy to understand graph

Comparing our officer distribution with other European countries, we see that officer numbers are getting thinner and thinner.

The headline in the Daily Mail reads:

“Death of the bobby on the beat: Parts of England and Wales now only have one neighbourhood police officer for every 12,000 residents… so how bad is the situation in YOUR area?”

It’s not just that the Metropolitan Police was accused of failing to recruit officers with financial sanctions for not doing so, it’s all around Britain now that police officer numbers dwindle.

Not even Met Police Volunteers can function without appropriate supervision. To employ volunteers Police needs to make a responsible officer to take charge and those officers get harder to find.

Just looking at an engagement event in Tower Hamlets Near Brick Lane, that is on for 2 hours, that Tower Hamlets Enforcement and Tower Hamlets Met Police Officers meet up to look through Allen Park.

A Met Volunteer could not just join them because there is no proper allocation available to insure the volunteer or ensure that the activity is properly supervised.

Yes, you may say but there are already enough officers. But when did you see so many officers in one spot, available for local law enforcement usually?

You can watch a discussion by the London Assembly about Public Order policing, which is online from 9.10.24

The quality of policing is of utmost importance but the Local Authority, in this case Tower Hamlets Enforcement Officers, who actually earn more than Bobbies, have less power.

We need police officers to enforce the law in all aspects of law breaking. We need to ensure that we do not get vigilante activities and that all Police Officers, Volunteers and other patrols are properly licensed and trained.

Other patrol services include Park Guard or Shomrim.

In the case of Shomrim that is a professional Neighbourhood Patrol organisation, which has been getting special dispensation from then Commissioner Hogan-Howe.

Having been member of many WhatsApp groups, I’m fully aware how much vigilante will is out there and again must emphasize that we do not follow those who just want to bash the regular offenders. Such people are not welcome as members with us.

Unfortunately Neighbourhood Watch is not an option as the registrants on such sites are not Police approved nor checked. We have decades of experience with this.

We offer a secure membership service for people who are fully enrolled and can participate in advisory chats. To become a member we do charge an enrolment fee.

We can lobby appropriate organisations for a change in Police Recruitment strategies, which would be our best way forward.

We are currently making enquiries about Ward Panels and Safer Neighbourhood Boards. Both seem to suffer a lack of advertising and participation.

Speaking to Police Officers, it becomes apparent that the rate of leaving the service is high. The amount of criticism police officers have to endure is unreasonably high too. No other organisation would be completely transparent and publish how many of their staff have been reprimanded, investigated or sacked for potential wrongdoing. Most organisations keep such information hush, hush and private with strict non-disclosure clauses.

Yet because the Met Police discloses every instance of wrong-doing they put themselves into the firing line for even more criticism, whilst other professions don’t.

The systematic dismantling of Police stations is not helping at all.

For example there is no police station in the huge Borough of Westminster. The nearest one is Charing Cross. Find a station.

People are advised to report online, yet, many will use shared Internet to do so, which is not secure. Not even anonymous reports to CrimeStoppers are guaranteed to be safe if used with shared WiFi. This is a strong indicator that the quality of our police confidentiality gets systematically eroded by not thought through strategies, which unfortunately have been instigated by government policies. This includes the fact that individual police officers have individual police email accounts, which can be up-loaded to social media as part of a person’s personal address book, which can include Police officer’s official email accounts.