Some very good points as usual, but I think there is one point which could be expanded on:

One of the frequent complaints we hear about ‘failures’ in policing is when they, or other security forces, are accused of not making connections. Examples would be how records of accusations against Ian Huntley in one area were not available to another force when they carried out criminal record checks on him, or about the bomb plotters who had been linked to members of another bomb plot a couple of years earlier.

OK there are lots of other considerations in those cases, but one thing is for certain: if you don’t collect information in the first place there is nothing to pass on, or otherwise use. If there is a problem it is not that police officers are required to collect too much information but that that nobody has managed to implement a decent system for holding, collating and cross-referencing that information.

The debate we should be having is whether we want that capability. The ability to properly cross-reference all possible relevant information depends on various systems talking to each other, which they are not allowed to do. Proper data-sharing has implications for potential civil liberties abuse. Somehow we have to look at the balance between having an effective police intelligence system and preserving civil liberties and decide what our priorities are – and one or other of them, or both, has to be compromised to some degree: you can’t just have both.

Its a difficult debate and a serious one, in which the whole ID cards issue is also involved, and which has strong opinions on each side. Its also an emotive one which is difficult to discuss objectively.

What is not helpful is ‘dog whistle’ policies and calls for less information-gathering and better intelligence. Its hardly joined-up thinking, but what you would expect from a party who also talk about lower taxes and better services.

The Police also expressed some concerns about the shop and said they had made several recommendations regarding its alcohol licence, and our old friend Councillor Quirk had nothing good to say about the shop – predicting gloom and apocalypse as soon as it opens[*].

I hope they are all wrong. A shop in this end of Broadfield should be a valuable local facility, and it is something we really do need. Whether it has any negative effects is partly down to the design of it, but mostly to do with the way it is managed.

I can’t comment on the design. I can remember approving the original planning application, but what has been built bears little relation to that design as a subsequent application went in and got approved.

As for the management, we will not know until it opens. I met the owner a couple of weeks ago and he seemed nice enough. The other businesses he runs in Broadfield are all above board as far as I know and the staff in the one I use most are unfailingly polite. I am taking an optimistic view until and unless events prove otherwise.

In any case, there is a safety net – the local police have been extremely efficient at tackling the sale of alcohol to minors in the last few months with fines and licence suspensions at several shops, including a couple of Tesco Express shops.

There is also some concern about traffic and parking, but I am not convinced this will be a major problem. It is, in the immortal words of the League of Gentlemen a local shop for local people. I can’t see it attracting much passing trade: if someone is already in their car they would be as likely to go that little bit further to the garage or services at Pease Pottage or the garage and shops at the Barton. The point of the shop is to serve houses in the immediate area which are all within walking distance.

There may be some people lazy enough to drive to a shop which is only a couple of hundred metres away but I hope they are in the minority, and with all the congestion and parking shortages everywhere its easy to forget that many people do not have cars and quite a few of them live in the estates by this shop. You can see the mothers walking their children the mile to their school in the morning. Having made that round-trip twice in a day they will welcome the chance to not have a similar walk to the Barton if they suddenly run out of milk in the evening.

[*] Would this be a good time to remind everyone about the Quirk-authored Tory newsletters which have taken every opportunity to list the new shop as a valuable facility, with the implication that it is all down to their efforts that a shop is opening?

I do not mind someone having an opinion one way or another, but saying one thing in newsletters and then saying the exact opposite in front of an audience with a different opinion is just shabby. I didn’t point this out at the meeting – it is supposed to be a positive, friendly, non-partisan meeting, but I still think it is typical Tory opportunism and bandwagon-jumping which typifies the Cameron approach to try and please all the people all the time.

Of course, by saying totally different things at different times Quirk is at least guaranteeing he will be right half the time which is an improvement…

Not so good that they were just sitting in their car, letching at a passing girl, and they were parked in a disabled bay at the time.

To be more accurate, what was left of the other cars was removed the next day as one of them had been stripped for parts in the evening.

There have been similar activites in the past, but this time it seems to be more effective for two reasons. Firstly the cars were clamped rather than just plastered with a notice, and secondly the clamping was done in the early morning, before many people have set off for work. Doing it during the day means that only abandoned cars are dealt with, and not those which are being used by someone to drive to work.

This week we have seen a few cars in Ifield with the same clamps on them, so it looks like a major exercise going on in the town to eliminate untaxed vehicles. All I can say about that is “good”. By definition, the untaxed vehicles will not be insured, possibly without an MOT and none of us who do fork out for all those costs likes to see someone else evading them and getting away with it, so the Daily Mail reader within is satisfied. (Well partly anyway. A true DM reader would like to see the vehicle destruction followed up by heavy fines or corporal punishment inflicted on the last registered keeper)

Apart from that there is the ‘broken windows’ element to it – if you can get away with that, then why bother complying with other laws? I’m all for taking a laid-back approach and showing a flexible and tolerant approach at the margins of illegality but tolerance can be taken too far.

I imagine that the Police or the DVLA or someone else will release figures at some point in the future, boasting about how many untaxed vehicles in Crawley were found and removed and I will be quite interested to read that when it happens. I will be just as interested to know whether this spate of activity is targeted at known untaxed vehicles, reported to the Police, or is being done by plodding around the neighbourhoods and checking. I know that one of the cars removed from our street had been reported to the Police by a neighbour, but that could just be coincidence.

Mind you… its a good job they didn’t do all this a month or so earlier! It took nearly a month for our Mondeo’s paperwork to come back from Swansea so we could get it taxed.

The idea seems to be that they will hang around in our street for a couple of hours next Tuesday evening with their mobile CCTV van and anyone who wants to can approach them and discuss any issues they might have.

It sounds like a good idea: if very few residents ever get round to going along to the various public meetings at the community centre and other venue why not bring the meetings right to where everyone lives? It is something political parties do with their street surgeries.

Personally I would rather be doing that sort of thing later in the year when it is lighter and warmer, but they must have confidence in those big jackets of theirs!

Anyway, they will be in Farnham Close between 6pm and 8pm on Tuesday 16th January if anyone is interested, ready to answer questions, offer advice on crime prevention and setting up a neighbourhood watch scheme, or just to say hello.

After the chaos and disorder of last week’s constituency meeting, where I believe I offered several people “outside” at one point, it was relaxing to go to a relatively calm meeting. Of course, the presence of 3 or 4 senior policemen does tend to make it less likely to end up as a brawl.

I’m not sure how well they are doing at reaching out to the public though. Of the 15 or 16 members of the public about half were faces from previous meetings or from similar events, but we all know how hard it is to attract anyone to public meetings unless they are very specifically affected by something, and even harder if it is on while England are being humiliated by Croatia.

What disheartens me a bit is hearing all the positive things the top cop has to say. They are always talking about their progress and their plans, but it always seems like the top man is a different one at each meeting. When they talk about what they plan to do next year I can’t help thinking that they are more likely to have been transferred out long before then and replaced by a new broom who changes everything to make an impact.

Of course a senior officer has to do what he can for his career and they will take the opportunities when they can, but it would be interesting to see what would happen if we had a District Commander or Chief Constable, or both, who stayed around for 4 or 5 years.

There was the usual bombardment of statistics. For most (all?) types of crime the reported levels are down and the detection rate is up on last year. It could just be that last year was terrible, but it looks like a good thing.

The thought-provoking part of the evening was the results of a recent crime survey, showing the effects of crime. There was a list of types of crime, with the percentages who had experienced, or seen such a crime. On the more serious crimes (violent assault, burglary, etc.) at least 85% said no they had never seen or been directly affected by them. At the lower end (disturbances etc.) about 45% said they had never experienced them at all. Given the amount of ‘fear of crime’ I was a little surprised that so many people had no experience of this at all – but if you do hang around at this sort of meeting you do only get to meet those with a problem: the audience is hardly representative.

Now for the irony. When it comes to detection rates, the more serious crimes have higher detection rates, but the lower level ones, which could be grouped together as antisocial behaviour, the ones more members of the public have experience of, are the ones with the lowest detection rate. It makes sense, but does explain the general dis-satisfaction with the police.

The police, of course, cannot win. Its the anti-social behaviour which generates most calls and which most people complain about, but if they dealt with it a lot better and let the detection rates for burglary and assault slip they would be accused of having their priorities wrong.

In the same way, there is a lot of unhappiness across the county with road policing – speeding in villages and housing estates, parking in bus stops and handicap spaces, and so on – but although it is one of the top concerns of the public, the police are always harrassed by the small but well-organised and vocal road lobby if they take any action. I think we have all seen letters in our local papers about why are the police harrassing innocent motorists when there are rapists at large.

As it stands it looks like you have about a 1-in-3 chance of being caught if you commit a crime in Sussex. Is that sufficient disincentive? I know it is for me! For assault the chances of being caught are about 50/50, but for burglary the chances are about 1-in-5.

Before the meeting we took the opportunity to ask the Inspector about all the activity up here a couple of weeks ago. He seemed very vague. Coy might be a better word. Certainly he didn’t say anything specific about why the majority of the on-duty police were in one small area at the same time.

One interesting little fact though: so far 1000 motorists have been issued fixed penalties in the county for using a mobile phone while driving. General opinion is that nobody ever gets caught and so there is no risk to it, but apparently that is not the case. Pass the word around…

The biggest surprise was that there was not a single mention of travellers in the entire meeting, which is very unusual for a police meeting. The least surprising comment from the audience was a Tory councillor who tried to turn a comment about the police getting exercise from their bicycles into a dig about the configuration of hospital services in the town. I think he said it was an attempt at humour. The meeting was held in the new leisure centre so thats as good an excuse as any to try kicking a political football around.

I expect many of the topics raised tonight will also crop up at the next Broadfield Forum (2nd November) and if the last one is anything to go by the turnout from the public should be a lot higher.

When I got back to Broadfield there were three police cars parked by the Tollgate Hill roundabout on the A264 , another couple parked at the top of Tollgate Hill, a riot van touring the area (according to Jayne) and a police helicopter circling the area shining its searchlight down. Jayne said this had been going on for about half an hour.

The chopper stayed there for another half an hour at least and a police car came up our road and then back down again.

Being naturally inquisitive, we wondered what the hell was going on, and decided that the best way to find out was to just ask. We delegated that job to Charlie and he went round to Tollgate Hill to ask the group of policemen who were standing by their cars. He came back and told us that before he could ask them anything they just told him to clear off.

A day later we still have no idea what all the excitement was about, so we will just have to wait until next Wednesday to see if either of the local papers know anything about it. (Do us a favour News & Observer – if the police haven’t volunteered any information ask them why they were hovering over my house for an hour on Wednesday.)

On the other hand, there were about 40 people there and at least 25 were normal residents of Broadfield. The rest were housing officers from a couple of housing associations, officers from Crawley council, a couple of Sussex Police inspectors, a PCSO, Kenny from the West Sussex youth services, a manager from the CAB, some borough councillors and Adrian from the Crawley News.

It may not sound like much, but its a good turnout for the Broadfield Forum. There were loads of new faces and many will return next time. Before then they might spread the word a bit and the whole thing will start to gain some critical mass.

Part of the reason for the increase in numbers is that the meeting was advertised, by which I mean it was ‘sold’ as a meeting on a specific topic. Previous meetings were just notified in dry, unattractive terms. Modesty prevents me from saying whose idea that was… Another reason for the increase was that one of the councillors took a load of posters/flyers for the meeting and went round putting them through doors. A combination of having a coherent message and some proactive behaviour got some results which can be built on.

I wish I could say it was a Labour councillor, but it was one of the Tories. Again, most of those who turned up were from the Courts and Broadfield North, with few from the Tollgate Hill area. Whether this is because everyone is happy up here in Tollgate Hill or because our area missed out on the leafletting I don’t know. It is not unusual for Tollgate Hill to be ignored. Next time I will have to talk to the Tories and come to some arrangement – if they are going to publicise the meeting elsewhere, I will do this end of town.

Just before the meeting there was an incident where the unluckiest kid in Broadfield rode past the centre on his mini motorbike as Mathew from the council was setting up the room. He rode the machine down the footpath and stopped just round the corner from the fire door to tinker with his bike, at which point one of the police inspectors went out and confiscated the machine.

It was ironic because when the meeting kicked off, the first topic was mini motorbikes and the conversation only rarely got away from them.

Unfortunately the meeting did get a bit heated. I don’t know if the police were expected to come up with a solution on the spot to a problem which has been around for ages, but some of the residents were getting quite frustrated and there was a bit of a lynch-mob mentality. For example, when Inspector Piper was explaining that you can’t chase kids on motorbikes without the risk of them getting killed some old boy piped up with “whats the problem with that then?”

Another couple were fixated with the police putting too many resources into speed cameras instead of chasing motorbikes. I can see their point of view, but I think the statistics will show that even with the so-called draconian speed traps more deaths and injuries are caused by speeding cars than by motorbikes on pavements, however annoying they may be.

It may be that the meeting served a purpose by letting frustrated residents let off some steam and vent some anger directly at the police, although that is not really moving towards a solution.

A few of the people there really do seem to be living in fear, and its depressing to see that happening. Doubly so because one or two particularly obnoxious and aggressive youngsters have probably got these families to regard all youngsters the same way.

Right next to the centre is an enclosed football/basketball courts, where a group of boys were playing football loudly. There were frequent references to them and their behaviour and language, which most people there said they found to be intimidating.

In a poignant moment at the end of the meeting, I slipped out for a quick smoke and was watching the boys play. It was a four-a-side, shirts v. skins game, with a few other boys sitting at the side watching. A bit boisterous, but nowhere near as bad as Holland v. Portugal last week. A chap came out of the meeting and passed me on his way home. He had said nothing in the meeting, but as he passed me he looked at the football game and said to me “they’re only playing. Its only what we would love to do.”

A shame that he felt unable to voice any sort of moderate comment in the meeting itself, but when these things get into an escalating frenzy of Daily Mail headlines it can be hard to find the confidence to come out with a different view. But I have noticed before how it is those who are most likely to describe themselves as ‘the silent majority’ who are more likely to be the dominating influence in smaller, moderated groups, which rapidly turn into witch hunts.

I don’t want to sound negative though. A lot of residents made contacts with the various agencies and with each other during and after the meeting. That is the sort of thing which can lead to improvements in the longer term – if only some way can be found to include some of those perceived to be responsible for antisocial behaviour. If anyone does come up with some scheme to alleviate problems there is now a larger pool pf potential volunteers to help with it.

No doubt there is a hard core of truly antisocial people – not necessarily all kids – but there are a lot on the fringes. They fall in with the trouble-makers because they are made more welcome by them than by the rest of society generally. Every time someone talks about ‘the community’ and ‘ the kids’ as separate groups it makes the problem worse – the kids are part of the community: let them know that and they just may act like it.

The council are now looking for a suitable topic for the next Broadfield Forum. Any ideas? Anyone know from experience what topics are able to generate the most interest? Fly-tipping, vandlasim and grafitti and other streetscene issues? Parking? Travellers? Is it possible to generate a lot of interest around something positive or do we only get motivated to come together by adversity?

Then I realised it was Millwall supporters coming back from Southampton, which explained the police and the dogs and everything.

The thing is that a train from Portsmouth must be due in about the same time, and all the Charlton fans will be going across to Waterloo East to get the same trains out to South-East London.

I do have a bit of sympathy for the Milwall fans though. Some of them do not live in the New Cross/Lewisham area but they were all still being corralled towards Waterloo East when some of them really wanted to just leave the station or get a train back out towards Clapham, or catch a tube elsewhere. As you can imagine, that really cheered them up… and being bottom of the table after losing 2-0 today they were not in the best of moods anyway.

UPDATE: Well just colour me stupid! Charlton were playing Portsmouth at home… I must have just assumed Pompey were at home because they have so many home games at the end of the season. I still think the police were being a bit heavy-handed the way they forced everyone to go the same way. It reminds me of when I went to a West Ham/Chelsea came in the late 70s/early 80s with friends from both camps. We watched the game from our own ends and had a hell of a time trying to meet up afterwards as the police were intent on segregating fans.

A lady had left her handbag lying around and someone had gone through it and taken some car keys from it. A few days later the car was stolen and abandoned.

Meanwhile a boy had been hanging around the centre a lot and causing trouble. The Manager talked to the PCSOs about him and they were all ready to come down and move him along the next time he turned up.

And then, someone noticed that one of the CCTV cameras in the center was missing, so the Manager went through the recordings to see when it went. What she found was a perfect close up of that same boy reaching out for it before it went dark.

Right on cue, the boy returned to the centre, so the police were called. They turned up and found that the boy had the stolen car keys on him. I don’t think you get much more red-handed than returning to the scene of a crime, with the evidence on you, after making sure the cameras get a good close-up of you.

A good result for the police too. It just goes to show that they can catch criminals if the public will give a little bit of help – like finding out who did it, gathering all the evidence and then locating the person for them. I know the police complain about all the paperwork they have to do, but in this case it was all that was left for them after the public did all the actual police work for them!