After receiving a blizzard of e-mails, I agreed to go on the Met Community Crime Fighters day in Vauxhall this past Friday. Riding up on the train that morning I had no idea what to expect: was it going to be a complete waste of time? What was the point to the day (the pre-event information was a bit vague), and would I get an official mask and cape but also have to wear my underpants on the outside of my trousers? Read more...

Our local police response team, in co-operation with a Met bomb squad team, detonated a controlled explosion on Streatham Common this morning. The explosion, witnessed by Lee Alley and friends, was about the size of a standard ordinance grenade explosion - slightly larger than big explosive fireworks used on Guy Fawkes night. The detonation was carried out to destroy a suspicious item left on the common partially up the hill near the Streatham Common North side. The Common was cleared of people for the duration of the exercise and a team secured and destroyed the item within minutes. Read more...

Our vice-chair, Alan Davidson, passed away last week. This has come as a great surprise and shock to us and we, the officers of the St Leonards Ward Safer Neighbourhoods Panel extend our deepest sympathies and condolences to his family and friends. Read more...

In continuation of the previous post we would like to welcome our new Safer Neighbourhoods Sergeant Martin Wild to the team! We look forward to working with him and seeing lots of him around St Leonards ward. He should know his way around as he was the Streatham homebeat officer here in the 1990's for quite a while. Indeed, his first foray across Streatham Green was apparently met with surprise by individuals known then to Sgt Wild (and to the police!) with something of an exclamation (by the individual, not the Sgt) of "you can run but you can't hide" or similar! Read more...

I wish to take this opportunity to wish all the best to Sgt Trevor Struthers and to PC Gary LeHaine both of whom have been promoted, either in action or in spirit to other things. Sgt Struthers is most likely Inspector Struthers now and will be working for the Internal Investigations team which has an official name that escapes me at the moment. PC Gary LeHaine has been promoted in a manner of speaking to a job that will entail riding motorcycles and being paid to do so. Apparently this is a dream job for certain coppers of whom Gary is one! Read more...

Posted on local Newspapers web forums and sent to local journalists.

Statement:
"We, the chairs of the Safer Neighbourhoods Panels in Streatham, send out
our heartfelt sympathies to the family and friends of young James Andre
Smartt-Ford. We are shocked and saddened by the needless and senseless
violence that has taken his life at such a tender age. We deplore these
acts in all their forms, and at any age, and we urge anyone who has any
information about this, no matter how seemingly insignificant, to
contact the police with it. Those who do not wish to speak to the police Read more...

Recently we've had a plethora of meter readers coming round to read various meters at our place. We became a bit annoyed when we had two people come round in the same week to read the electric meter so we queried this with our utilities provider and got an interesting answer.

Our particular utilities provider (one of the new breed that bundles utilities with phone, Internet, etc. together) informed us that only one company was authorised by them to do meter readings and no one else was to be coming round. At all. For any reason! Hmmm, interesting... Read more...

On the same day as the rest of the SNT and the Streatham Task Force were raiding premises on the Streatham High Road, PCSO Mustafa Abdulhusein was flagged down by a distraught mother near the police station. She had been waiting at a Streatham bus stop for her two children to return but they didn't show up at the arranged time. Read more...

The St Leonards Safer Neighbourhoods Team has had some recent results we want to publish widely. Although much of the ethos of the team is to create links with the community for good community relations and communications, actual on-the-ground results are another aspect and our team hasn't been slacking. Read more...

The St Leonards Safer Neighbourhoods Ward has again set the standard by going live with what is believed to be the first Safer Neighbourhoods Team podcasts in the country! I was able to record Streatham police Superintendent Jonathan Tottman delivering two separate podcasts this afternoon. Both of these, and all future podcasts, can be downloaded from the podcast page where we will be uploading new podcasts on a weekly basis. Read more...