LETTERS Policing muggers
Sir: One also lives near Tottenham — in my case on the Hackney-Islington border. But unlike Daniel Johnson (7 October), I do not blame my fear of walking the streets alone at night on the local authority. It seems to me the problem is much more the discrepancy between what the public wants of the police — safe streets, drug addicts moved on from parks so that one's children don't fall over their discarded needles and what the police themselves see as their role.
The chairman of the Police Federation, Mr Alan Eastwood, told me last week that he believes the public's highest priority is neighbourhood policing — moving on noisy kids at night, dealing swiftly and firmly with vandals, 'doing something' about litter. But these concerns are not shared by young policemen, he says: 'They all want to catch bank robbers. If we told them they had to deal with litter and clear drunks off the street they'd be queueing up to resign. They joined the police for excitement, job satisfaction, the feeling they're at the centre of things.'
Yet we, the citizens, pay for the police, and we have a right to demand that they fulfil at least some of our requirements. The alternative — already with us on council estates in Bromley to Mrs Thatch- er's retirement estate in Dulwich — is to employ private security guards. The Adam Smith Institute may be quite happy with this, have indeed recommended ex- perimenting with private streets (in their pamphlet Streets Ahead); but I do not want to have to bring up children behind heavy iron gates, suspecting that the problems have merely been moved in to the less adequately policed world outside. Nor do I want to rely on 'police' who may be enforcing less the law than the require- ments of their employer, and for whom there is no complaints authority.
Daniel Johnson is right to demand, on behalf of the middle classes who can no longer live in Chelsea, that the inner city boroughs not be allowed to sink into squalor; but it is to the police, and the Government, that he should address him- self.
Geraldine Bedell
71 Cleveland Road, London N1
Previous page
