Neighbourhood Action Team: another ‘cosmetic exercise’
The Blackbird Leys Neighbourhood Action Team is the latest New Labour gimmick, hailed as ‘a new way of policing the estate’ in which ‘the public decide what issues are the most important to them and the police respond.’
However, the reality is rather different.
Recent meetings of the Neighbourhood Action Team have been attended by a host of council officers, police and other local functionaries, but only one genuine resident.
Most of the attendees are paid out of our taxes to be there (which prevents them from doing other more useful things) yet the issues discussed at the NAT meetings are similar to those raised at other meetings such as the council’s South East Area Committee.
IWCA councillor Stuart Craft commented: ‘Residents are constantly being told about new ways to contact the police, including so-called consultative bodies like the Neighbourhood Action Team and hotlines.
But people’s general experience is that the police aren’t really interested in tackling the issues they are contacted about.
‘The situation with NAT is not really any different.
There is no evidence that the police are acting directly in response to the issues raised by residents.
It’s basically a cosmetic exercise designed by New Labour to make it look as if something is being done.’
The Neighbourhood Action Teams are the latest in a long line of government initiatives which are supposed to tackle crime.
One previous scheme was the Leys Communities Against Drugs project (CAD), which was hastily launched in the wake of the IWCA’s public meetings on the Blackbird Leys drugs problem in 2002.
Like NAT, Communities Against Drugs also consisted of numerous representatives from the voluntary sector, council and police but had very little involvement from the actual community.
However, after the scheme had faded from the headlines, a number of local residents started to participate and the project was successfully operating as a drug rehabilitation drop-in centre.
At this point the Labour-run city council refused any further funding and, as a result, CAD folded.
Presumably, it was felt it had outlived its political usefulness.
Like previous initiatives, the Neighbourhood Action Teams have been criticised as being more about spin than substance, resulting in police activity aimed at grabbing headlines rather than responding to residents’ genuine concerns.
Cllr Craft explained: ‘The dramatic increase in raids on cannabis growers in Oxford suggests the police are seeking an easy target so they can say they are targeting drug dealers.
While such activities can cause disruption to neighbours, by far the biggest concern residents have is crack and heroin dealing.
This tends to be accompanied by much greater levels of violence and clients are more desperate.
Yet police activity against hard drug dealers appears to have tailed off in the wake of the new NAT strategy.’
Leys Independent, issue 33, August 2006
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