“It’s local bobbies on the beat who win trust”

CUTS to local policing are endangering national security, one of the service’s most senior officers has warned.

Neil Basu, the Senior National Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator, said funding cuts for local policing will harm intelligence efforts and hamper vital preventative work.

His comments came as a number of senior officers spoke out about their fears over police budgets.

Mr Basu said two decades of progress in neighbourhood policing were at risk and that withdrawing police on the ground would mean losing the relationships and trust that yield crucial intelligence when it comes to fighting terrorism.

He said neighbourhood policing was vital in preventing attacks, adding: “We don’t police by coercion, we police by consent. I don’t win that trust and confidence – it’s all the local bobbies on the street who win that trust and confidence.”

“When we don’t have those people we will become so divorced from the frontline, and the frontline of communities, that [it] will be a disaster for policing in this country.”

At least one plot was thwarted earlier this year because of a tip-off from within the Muslim community and came hours before the alleged terrorist was planning to strike. He said this was the result of trust and confidence in the police from Muslim communities, although he acknowledged that the trust level could be higher.

The senior Met officer told The Guardian that Britain could not arrest its way out of the high level of terrorist threat by building a “bigger and bigger [counter-terrorism] machine”. The country had to build confidence and trust among communities and redouble efforts to prevent young people from turning to terrorism.

He also criticised a Government decision to cut police funding to specifically fight terrorism. A planned funding cut of 7% was based on the lower level of threat in 2015, he said. “The threat has changed. It went absolutely stratospheric.”

See full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/10/police-cutbacks-threaten-national-security-warns-counter-terrorism-head-neil-basu