Every London borough will maintain a police station open 24 hours a day

There was an article (£) in The Times this morning about plans by the Metropolitan Police to reduce the number of buildings they own. This is both to reduce costs and release funds for more police on the beat. Some police stations have very low numbers visiting to report crime. Increasingly people prefer to contact the police by phone or email. So some police stations will close and instead the police will open reporting counters at places like supermarkets, cafes, churches and football clubs. It means contact between the police and the public should increase while costs are reduced.

What if you want to report a crime confidentially?

At the Mayor of London Question Time meeting with the London Assembly meeting on November 21st, Boris Johnson said:

Every borough must have a 24 hour police station where the public can go in confidence and report serious crime; that is absolutely essential.

This is a significant point which was not mentioned in The Times splash. Instead we had Labour politicians such as the Labour MP David Lammy and the London Assembly member Andrew Dismore suggesting that reporting crime confidentially and in person, would cease to be possible.

Mr Dismore was at the meeting on November 21st. He knows that is not true. It is scaremongering and comes fro people who fail to offer realistic alternatives to reducing crime while faced with the constraint of a smaller budget.