Iain Dale has an interesting post about the policing of Party Conferences. The costs do seem to be obscene, and I’m not looking forward to most of City Centre Manchester being fenced off again – as happened two years ago when the Labour Conference last came to town. Of more concern to local residents, however, is the effect that these Conferences have on local policing.
When Manchester last held a major political Conference (the aforementioned Labour Conference in September 2006) I asked in Council about the effect the Conference policing would have on neighbourhood policing. I was assured that it would not have an impact – only for many of our officers (including the neighbourhood inspector) to be dragged into Manchester to preside over the Conference. I remember we had a community meeting that at which the police were due to give an update to local residents and not one officer was available to attend even for half an hour to talk to residents. The assurances were worthless and residents lost their local police officers to fortress MICC. Definitely a good week to be a burglar.
I hope things are better planned for the Labour Conference this year and of course the Conservative Conference in autumn 2009.
Events such as this inevitably impact on community policing. The GMP units usually deployed to big events will be stretched far too thinly to deal with an event of this size and at the end of the day the officers have to come from somewhere… Community policing teams are an obvious place, as response teams (which are already short of officers) cannot afford to to lose units from dealing with emergency calls.
I believe the solution to this is, and always has been, the creation of a single national police force. I’m not talking about scrapping local forces, but having a ‘Crown Constabulary’ working nationally along side these forces to ‘protect the nation’s assets’. This would be achieved by merging the current national forces (BTP, MOD Police and CNC), the proposed policing element of the new Borders Agency, the Met’s Diplomatic Protection group and a few other random units. Such a force could theoretically take on special branch and serious crime units and would solve a lot of the issues that led to the doomed proposals to merge smaller local forces. It could police big events without impacting on local policing (the MOD Police are an excellent example of the ‘surge’ capability of a national force). It would be centrally funded meaning council tax payers would foot the bill (I know for a fact that, whatever is claimed, they pay a fair bit of it) for policing an event that does nothing but inconvience them.
This makes sense, most people in policing circles know it makes sense, but it will almost certainly never happen. The funding of the forces to be merged is too complex to agree a centrally funded compromise, the politics of the Met giving up high profile sites such as Downing St, Buckingham Palace etc is complicated (although some senior Met officers would love to)… Still if any budding MPs are reading this – it’s a policy idea for the future!
All fair comments Chris. What was particularly grating was to be told that everything would be continuing as normal when they knew damned well that that wasn’t going to be the case.
Sadly the neighbourhood policing teams in Greater Manchester are much more vulnerable to “poaching” for major events as they the complements of officers are much lower than their equivalent neighbourhood teams in London. The chances of seeing a beat officer on the streets of Walkden during Conference week are pretty negligible I would imagine…
The chance of seeing a beat officer with out without conference in any part of salford is slim. I like some of the ideas chris puts forward but theres little chance. Yesterday i was driving in swinton and again another serious inccident. These men and women are streched to breaking point. There jobs are getting harder.I hope one day a senior officer as the guts to come out and say so
Joe