Police must concentrate on schools and railways if numbers are cut, says former chief

Police in London will need to focus patrols on high population areas including railway stations and schools if officer numbers are cut, a former police chief said today.

Bernard Hogan-Howe, a senior member of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, said police would need to concentrate officers where large numbers of people meet and congregate.

In particular he said it was vital to patrol around schools where officers could build confidence with children and parents.

Mr Hogan-Howe, a former Chief Constable of Merseyside, was speaking to a City Hall committee on how Government budget cuts could affect front line policing.

His comments will raise questions over the safer neighbourhood model of patrolling in London in which each ward is covered by teams of police and community support staff regardless of crime levels or population size.

Mr Hogan-Howe said: "There has to be a patrolling pattern where thousands of millions of people congregate."

He said similar patrolling patterns had been successful in New York where officers concentrated on areas such as railway stations.

In London he singled out the West End and local schools as areas for concentrated patrols.

He also said the committee should challenge the Met on its allocation of resources to specialist squads. He said: "You might ask why murder teams are the same size if the murder rate is reducing."

Doctor Tim Brain, a university academic and former Chief Constable said police had only been able to provide effective community policing in recent years because of a huge increase in police numbers in the last decade.

He also said that police stations played a less important role in policing than before.

Few people now visited police station front counters and he questioned the cost of employing officers and staff in keeping stations open when they were visited by perhaps only one person a day.

But he said closing stations had an impact on people's confidence as the same way as the closure of post offices and schools.