London could see burglaries halved under a Green Mayor with Siân Berry’s plan to provide Safer Neighbourhood Team patrols round-the-clock. A pilot in Fulham cut the rate of residential burglaries by 52% , and the Greens argue that officers should be diverted from less vital areas to improve street-level policing.
Siân said:
"If we’re serious about cutting crime, we need to get more police on the streets. The most effective way to do that is through Safer Neighbouhood Teams – trusted officers who are known to their local community and who can do the vital work to reduce crime as well as prosecute it. Instead we have Gordon Brown pushing ID cards, Boris Johnson hinting at racial profiling and budget proposals from Ken Livingstone that would assign 297 officers to an Olympics still 4 years away.
"We want to feel safe in our local area when we get home late in the evening and when we are asleep, not just during office hours. We’ll beat crime not by tough-talking gimmicks, but by real community policing."
In the Hammersmith and Fulham pilot, residential burglaries dropped to 38 between April and September 2007, compared to 80 in the same period the previous year.