FOCUS Compartmentation A personal view
Mark Pollard speaking at the SBD National Training Event in Northamptonshire in March 2018
AT OUR annual National Training Event in Northamptonshire in March, I gave a presentation about compartmentation to more than 200 SBD trained police officers and staff who work with the construction industry and local authorities to design out crime. It was an opportunity for me to give
my own personal insight, based on my experience as a beat officer covering some of South London’s toughest estates. When I started working for the police during the 1980s – and throughout my career – we would receive lots of calls to estates about low level incidents, such as antisocial behaviour. They were mostly minor matters, but could easily escalate and get out of control. Fires started deliberately in communal
areas, such as stairwells, were also a major cause for concern. For residents who were living nearby, it could mean a poor quality of life, even if they were not victims of crime themselves. In terms of police response, we would attend with at least one other officer, and these incidents used to take up a lot of our time. One of the problems was that there
was free movement on estates for residents and visitors, without any controls, so people
could go anywhere. On one estate in North Peckham, you could run three quarters of a mile using the sky walkways between buildings without your feet touching the ground. When they were following up a report of an incident, police officers would have to call on many front doors in order to speak to residents about what they had seen, and to find out who had buzzed open the communal door. Victims and other residents who helped us faced a real threat of reprisals. Fortunately, technology in the form
of visitor and access control systems incorporating video monitoring has come to our assistance, and put a stop to free movement. It has disrupted criminal and antisocial behaviour and has led to a fall in crime, although the fear of crime persists. Modern access control systems on
blocks of flats have data logging systems, and these can give us all the information we need for investigative purposes. For example, we could find out quickly which flat had been responsible for allowing entry to a large group of youths, who would torment children playing in private gardens at 5pm each evening. We could identify the flat and take the evidence to
32 MAY 2018
www.frmjournal.com
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