Cabinet starts working, Community Safety Priorities and Millwall at Wembley!!!

It was a long hard week last week taking over control of Southwark Council and taking on my role as Cabinet Member for Community Safety with lots of Briefings on my Portfolio as well as the pressing matter of the Elephant & Castle Regeneration!! In terms of community safety my priorities are developing a coherent Violent Crime Strategy, upgrading and extending CCTV coverage around the borough where it is needed, taking action on dangerous dogs and adopting a zero tolerance approach to anti-social behaviour on the streets and on the Estates!
We will upgrade the CCTV Monitoring Centre to make it digital and then extend our network and we should have this all up and running over the next few months! There is also possiblity of linking in with other existing systems to increase the coverage further and so delivering quiickly on a key Labour Manifesto Pledge!!
We also need to focus our ever more limited resources in areas where it is needed therefore reorganising the Community Wardens to Town Centred Teams seems sensible to me!
I am keen to see significant progress on all of these fronts over the next 3 months and want to take a cross departmental approach to Youth Crime looking at Education, Youth provision as well as regeneration and the environment to tackle the causes of crime at source. I do support the use of ASBO's and ABC's to deal with offenders and think that they have been and remain a useful tool in tackling Youth Crime. I am also keen to develop better victim support in all areas of crime including domestic violence!
I do think that we need to work on closing the gap between the publics perception of crime and the reality so that people feel more safe and that may include more CCTV, more visible police presence and even better street and Estate lighting.

I went to a couple of Election Celebration Parties at the weekend, one for DAWN arranged by new Councillor Sunil Chopra of a fantastic hot day in Dulwich!!
The second was for South Camberwell at Councillor Veronica Ward's and a good time was had by all!!

Another busy week ahead including a Tour of the Borough with the Cabinet on Friday!
Saturday and off to Wembley again to see if Millwall can do it this time and beat Swindon to get a richly deserved place in the Championship!
The pic is from last year when they had it snatched away from them by Scunthorpe in virtually the last minute!! COME ON THE LIONS!!!!