Interview ANDREW TROTTER
Not happy to pay
A big issue for the BTP according to Trotter has arisen in designing out ways that people can avoid paying for their fare - a development which constitutes an affront to some of them apparently. ‘It’s a key reason for a lot of the disorder. Where we have a service that people have previously abused a great deal, and then suddenly, between ourselves and the industry we put in checks to stop that, there is objection.’ Pointing out of the window to a London Overground
station: ‘It’s a fantastic success’ said Trotter, ‘but half of that was achieved not only by investment, but by the fact that we went along in considerable numbers at first to help enforce the fact that passengers had to pay. And it was quite difficult for a while. People had been jumping on and off that rather decrepit old service intimidating the few rail staff and getting away with it. In fact it’s changed a bit now, but if you were to draw a line across north London linking its crime spots, it would look like the Overground route. So much has changed now with the gentrification of many parts of London though, and the rolling stock that LOROL has makes people feel safer – you can see right down the carriage, CCTV and staff are everywhere. And if you look at the passenger satisfaction scores, we played a part in that, a small one, but a part in bringing order to decent places.’
Best and worst memories
One can only wonder at the richness and variety of experience gathered in such a long and high-profile career, and Trotter pointed out that ‘every operational cop has horrors stored in their memory…things I’ve dealt with whether it be fishing dead children out of a pond or carrying a man out of a fire – I wasn’t being heroic and he’d lost a child in it. They’re things I still have flashbacks about. And then of course you have the major events like Ladbroke Grove and 7/7, both of which I was closely involved with. From a professional officer’s point of view, you
can be satisfied with the way you’ve responded but you think about the human tragedy that sits behind it. Only this morning as I was cycling through Hyde Park on the way back up here, I passed the 7/7 memorial thinking, ‘it’s not that long ago’. You think about these things because you just do. Names crop up in traffic reports for example and it just clicks - something about the event and what happened. All you can take from it is not satisfaction because there are things we did well and things we could have done better, but you just think ‘We did our job’, and I think on those occasions we did.’ On the highs, there are ‘loads’ but Trotter is still thoughtful. ‘Again all police officers have really good arrests that make a difference...when I was a rural Sergeant in Kent, taking over a surprisingly rough area and dealing with some very violent characters with very little back up. Running my own division in Westminster when I was with the Met - crime came down by 30 per cent through the application of very simple principles, dealing with basics such as drunks, beggars, thieves and drug users with visible, intrusive policing...’ At this point Trotter wryly diverted ‘Had I been an American I’d have written books and done world tours for the police’... and trying to apply those same principles to the BTP.’
‘If I go and wander around a railway station I expect the place to look right. I expect my officers to spot things that are out of place and to deal with them. And I want people to feel that railway stations are safe. Now we can’t say that for every single UK station, and we’ll always have problems with late night drinkers, football fans and so on, but my goal is that rail staff and passengers can view them as a good place to be. It helps the retail side to flourish, and it’s an important part of people’s end-to-end journey.’
Sounding every inch a Chief Constable, Trotter discussed the transformation of King’s Cross. ‘15 years’ ago it was synonymous with drugs, prostitution, crime. But the investment from
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