The Chair welcomed the South West BCU Commander, Chief Superintendent Elisabeth Chapple, to the meeting.

The Borough Commander described her current priorities to the Commission Members as follows;

We have a really good complement of officers now in Merton so we have been able to put more resources in and around schools - We have done this because with new pupils joining and older secondary school children learning to be independent they are potentially more vulnerable to robbery.

Any offences that affect violence against women and girls - As we've talked about in previous meetings some of those offences that are affecting women, particularly domestic abuse, have stayed quite high. We have also seen an increase in calls relating to mental health issues

Sanction Detection rates - This is a national policing issue but does also apply to Merton. This is how many crimes we're solving and they're really low nationally. It’s a really complicated picture to try and understand exactly why that is and why there has been a decline in recent years.

We've been working with the Crown Prosecution Service on a lot of the issues including the backlog of cases and also on the full code test (whether cases progress to prosecution). One of the issues around this is how much digital data do we need to look into, which particularly affects crimes like sexual offences and it’s been a period of negotiation between us and the Crime Prosecution Service to get to a balance of what the right amount of detail is to prove a case but yet not impinge on the privacy rights of victims and people associated with that case.

In response to supplementary questions from Commission Members, the Borough Commander gave further details where possible;

Stop and search

2011 was the last cut of the population data and we are hopeful we'll get a new recut of that data imminently. I do believe there is an ongoing disproportionality in terms of the demographic of people that we’re stopping and I think that it's a societal and community cohesion issue as well as a policing issue so questions are rightly being asked of policing in terms of whether we have any inherent biases when we're stopping people.

In terms of positive outcome, we do require our officers to have detailed and varied grounds for stop and search but I do not have the data to hand.

Action: Borough Commander agreed to provide further detail on the number of positive outcomes for different stop and search categories.

Burglary

Over the last month Merton has seen a 24.5% increase in burglary, likely as people are starting to leave their homes and go back into their workplaces, so we're renewing our efforts in terms of both our dedicated ward officers going around as well as visually looking out for any vulnerabilities on premises.

Knife crime

Merton has a really good multi-agency response with regards to knife crime. Safer Merton have been very heavily involved in looking at what we can do to prevent it, as well as dealing with the traditional police role of being reactive to any issues. This includes work such as lighting particular areas to the education about this issue in schools.

Action: Borough Commander agreed to bring data of weapons based stop and searches by age demographic to a future meeting to allow for a more structured discussion about it.

Slammin Events in Morden Park

The events on the weekend of 4th and 5th September were mostly a positive picture although there are a number of licensing issues that we will be working through with the appropriate parties.

From a public safety and vulnerability perspective it didn't go quite as well as we would want and we think it could have been done better but from a crime perspective it was fairly smooth.

The Bronze Commander, who is the person responsible for the public order policing on that weekend, reported to me that there was around 7000 people in attendance each day.

Saturday, which was attended by an older demographic of people, was very trouble free. There was one arrest for affray but it was on the periphery of the event right so cannot absolutely be attributed to that event and there was one community resolution for drugs.

On the Sunday there were two arrests - one for drug supply offences and one for common assault which was on one of the stewards. There was also an allegation of a sexual assault in the queuing area.

In conclusion, for that number of people, licensing issues aside, we were happy from a policing perspective with the safety outcome of that event.

Future of Wimbledon police station

My understanding is that MOPAC will shortly be opening discussions to understand the strength of feeling around this and other estates. I've not heard in any forum recently that we're in danger of losing Wimbledon police station but I would like that to be confirmed formally.

The Chair thanked the Borough Commander for her attendance this evening.