The Green Party’s mayoral candidate has pledged to take a “community led” approach to policing London if elected next month.
Zoe Garbett met with Met Police officers in Croydon on Friday to discuss changes she would make to police practices in the capital.
Zoe Garbett met with Met Police officers in Croydon on Friday to discuss changes she would make to police practices in the capital.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 We know about the decades and decades of police failings and how slow the Mayor of London
00:05 has been to address those. Doubling down on that narrative of being tough on crime, I
00:10 really want to work with communities to understand what they need. I've talked a lot about taking
00:14 a public health approach, making sure that we're investing in youth services, but also
00:18 creating spaces where the community can hold the police to account. I think they are really
00:23 important so that's what I'd make sure that we were doing differently, making sure that
00:27 the community have more say in what happens in their local communities and more spaces
00:31 to hold them to account. The work I've done in Hackney as a councillor has all been about
00:36 looking at what communities need and moving away from a traditional policing model. I've
00:40 worked with police to look at getting police out of schools because we know that young
00:44 people don't want police to be in schools and it often escalates and criminalises young
00:47 people. I'm the only candidate really saying that we don't need to just put more officers
00:54 on the street to solve crime, we need to look at the causes of crime and look at how we
00:58 redistribute resources to make sure that youth services are better funded, but we're also
01:02 deprioritising the policing of cannabis which means that young people are basically over-policed
01:07 and young black people. I see that a lot happening in my borough. So I think it's just thinking
01:13 differently about the way we think about policing. We've spoken here today about fixing things
01:17 like lighting to make women feel safer, so investing in solutions like that rather than
01:22 just over-policing communities.