Kings Cross Environment

Living in Kings Cross does mean that many people occasionally find a need to contact the police.  There are broadly three ways you can contact the police without turning up in person at Tolpuddle Street – in order of effectiveness:

1.  phone or email the Safer Neighbourhood Team for Caledonian Ward. 020 84210271
07876 132092 or email them .  These numbers do not give an instant response but messages are followed up.  Sergeant Jon Cairns leads a highly committed team that focuses exclusively on Caledonian Ward.  Their approach is a problem solving one – trying to tackle ongoing local problems at source, rather than just sweeping up the mes sin response to a 999 call.

From my experience this works well and the SNT are making a huge contribution to falling crime in the area.  You even see them on patrol on bicycles in th Bemerton, which was a no-go area four years ago.

2.  999 – for an emergency or when you witness a serious crime in progress this is great.  You get through quickly. the police say ‘you should           use this service to contact police in situations where a crime is happening           now or if anyone is in immediate danger.’ If your call is about a serious crime then there is a rapid response.  But if your call is not about a pretty serious crime (such as assault or robbery) then the operators prioritise accordingly and response is slow.  The incident is not handed off to the SNT so for low level issues it is better to contact the SNT direct.

3.  phone the control room at Islington Police station – 020 7704 1212 – due to overloading it takes about 20-30 minutes to get through.  It is hard to recommend this.  The government is investing in  a new phone line for ASB that will launch soon – the number will be 101 and is in pilot in the North – there is an interesting page here describing 101 – the ‘single non emergency number’

You can also report a crime online at this clunky website – though i have never used it and it is not clear whether this is passed back to the SNT for problem-solving

Download police.doc

On the whole, i think contact islington do a good job, given the complexity of the task they face.  The service they offer is a huge improvement over the situation five years ago – then you had to rememebr about 30 phone numbers for dirrerent bits of the council, there was no performance monitoring and no handover between the different bits of the council.

However sometimes things slip through about 1 in 8 i reckon – i have had to chase up two things recently that have been outstanding for many days.  The box above on Randell’s Road i reported by email with a photo on 7 July but hadn’t been cleared up yesterday.  Also the York Way ‘jungle’ at the entrance to Randell’s Road (see report here) on which i have heard nothing so far.