Green Assembly Member Jenny Jones has released a report advising Mayor Boris Johnson to disband the Met’s Riot Police, in a push to improve trust in the police among young people.
Green AM Jenny Jones has called for all public facing police officers
to receive greater training for working with young people
“The Kids are All Right: How the Metropolitan Police can gain the trust of young Londoners”, produced as part of Jenny’s work in the London Assembly, reviewed the Mayor’s aim of boosting confidence in the police by 20% by 2016. Finding that trust in the police is particularly low amongst young people, who have been living with increasingly levels of crime since Boris Johnson became Mayor, Jenny has advised the Mayor to improve training of all officers with public facing roles to ensure they are able work with young people.
In addition, the report recommended that the Territorial Support Group (TSG), commonly known as the Met’s “Riot Police” is scrapped and that funding is instead directed towards training a greater number of police officers for public order situations. A number of the young people Jenny spoke to as part of the research for this project referred to the TSG vehicles were often refered to as the “bully vans”.
Speaking in the report, Jenny said: “I heard across my visits how the TSG is damaging the relationship young people have withthe police overall. This one team appears to exemplify the problems between young people and the police.”
“The TSG has been heavily criticised in other areas, for example in their policing of demonstrations, and I think it is time to rethink their purpose.”
Please see here for BBC coverage of the report.