The community events programme kicked off on Monday, reports Olivia Opara

The Metropolitan Police service held its second community engagement event in Haringey this week, following the launch of its new policing plan for London.

On Monday, 17th July, the Met launched its ‘A New Met for London’ plan in which set out its priorities to deliver better policing, regain trust and reform. Following this, the Met held its second of a three months series of community events taking place in Haringey on Tuesday.

In attendance were the Met Police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley QPM, the BCU Commander for Haringey and Enfield, detective chief superintendent Caroline Haines, key community leaders and stakeholders and senior members of Haringey Council.

Speaking at the event, Sir Mark Rowley said that the Met plans to police its foundation with the quality of police engagement being at the core of its new policing plan.

“Today’s conversation is about having a shared understanding of what are the biggest issues in this borough and secondly how do we [the community and the Met] work together because trust will build as we work together to create a sense of safety.

“[We want the community] to be satisfied with how we do our job and effectively dealing with day-to-day crime such as petty crime, reducing serious crime (knife crime as an example), violence against women and girls. It is also about how we can raise the standards across our organisation including dealing with disproportionality and becoming a fairer organisation.

“That is what we are setting out to do and to do that, we have to reform.”

Sir Rowley added how this new policing plan for London is about “tipping the balance of power” in terms of operations to allow local policing to be sensitive to the right solutions in the capital, led by local needs and “less by Scotland Yard”.

Hosted by Reverend Nims Obunge MBE the event focused on nine key areas of improvement for the Met: victim satisfaction/care, community engagement/communications, youth, women and girls’ safety, neighbourhood policing, mental health, stop and search/use of force, hate crime and professionalism.

Discussions and feedback emphasised the need for accountability and transparency through continuous open dialogue and communication between the Met and communities alongside cultural and historical understanding of Haringey and how this impacts community engagement especially for young people and when dealing with violence against women and girls. More first aid, mental health and trauma-informed training for police was also stressed.

Police engagement with young people was a recurring subject of discussion due to the lack of young people in attendance – which many pointed out.

“The Met needs to think about how can young people get involved in these types of community event because personally, I think that we do a lot on ‘what is the issue’ and not enough on ‘what initiatives can we bring them together,” said Ahmed Mohammed, founder of You vs You, a community organisation that offers development programmes for young people.

Detective chief superintendent Caroline Haines told HCP that she is grateful for the support that the Met has within Haringey and the organisation is committed to reforming and regaining trust.

“It was a fantastic event and it was so great to have so much representation from across many parts of the community of Haringey. We need to make changes and fully we understand that and we accept that we have lost trust, particularly in certain parts of Haringey.

“The New Met for London is very much about focusing and putting the community at the front of everything that we do and I think that there’s acknowledgement that things have been driven from elsewhere and that we have forgotten about the community voice and that has been made very clear tonight. It’s about local policing that is responsive to the needs of the community [which] has a massive part to play and will have a massive impact on local policing.

“The commissioner has set out the priorities for the organisation and what we have to do now is translate that into local policing and what matters most for the community in Haringey for us to build trust across and how we can make stronger bonds with the community and a meeting like today is just a number of things that we will be doing in the future to connect and get [the community’s] voice on how policing looks locally.”

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