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Further to explaining the above I also think it is useful to explain how people come in contact with the police and how the police respond to calls and who comes:

The response teams are who 90% of people who call for an officer will meet: they operate 24 hours a day, every day, and turn up in marked police vehicles, such as "panda cars" and vans. as you can see above, they work out of three police stations. In some boroughs they work out of one site and it has been mooted in the past to do the same at Lewisham. (We'll come back to this in a minute.) Some years back every station had response team officers in them.When you call 999 (or 101) and it is deemed that a response is necessary the control room will most probably despatch a response car. when you call police the call goes through to the control room - which is a call centre based in Lambeth (there are three in London, but all Lewisham calls go to the Lambeth one). They then radio out the details of the call - the location and so on... Generally speaking response PCs do the initial investigation of a crime/incident and then it will be passed to teams that are dedicated to investigating particular types of crime - in theory at least leaving the response officers more free and available to answer calls.

The SNTs are "local police". They are much smaller teams (usually only a couple of PCs and a few PCSOs). The SNTs' job is to patrol areas on foot or by bicycle, to follow up with victims of crime, to get to know the area and its problems, to deal with neighbour disputes, to execute warrants, to provide ongoing support for ongoing problems etc. It's rather more slow time and a lot of lower-level issues are delegated to them. They don't work 24 hours - but they do work evenings and weekends and their hours aren't particularly "regular". Anything requiring a quick response won't be handed over to them (unless, they happen to be in the area at the right time etc)

The other way people come into contact with the police is at front counters: i.e. walking into a police station. To be honest, it's not as common as it once was - my gut instinct actually says that the demand isn't there - there has been a trend in recent years (especially with phones, internet reporting and so on) for business to be conducted over the telephone, or for the police to call at people's houses (it's all part of the service!) - to be honest, I don't understand why many calls aren't resulted in a "direction to the police station" rather than the despatch of a car. But there you go, the net result is often a very quiet front office: I've known of Catford and Deptford front office to have absolutely no callers all night. Before the advent of mobile phones, I suspect, where people in distress might have made their way to a police station - now they just dial up. Either way, this is, I believe, the rationale behind studying the footfall at the police stations. (I believe the study is still ongoing - but it might have ended).


The trend in recent years has been towards centralisation: this invariably means smaller, local, buildings have closed and resources have been centralised in larger buildings. On many levels this makes sense - vehicle fleets are easier to manage in one place, it is easier to hand cars over between shifts, custody suites are more efficient if there are, say, 30 cells in one station rather than 10 cells in three. It's about economies of scale and the effective pooling of resources.

But what about response times? Common sense would lead one to believe that if you are further from a response-team station then you won't get as quick a response. I thought so too - that's why I analysed several months' response-time data in my spare time as a bit of a hobby - it simply wasn't the case that places further from police stations got slower-response times. Why? Because the Police aren't the Fire Brigade: they don't sit in police stations waiting for things to happen. When not answering a call, or dealing with the fall-out from a call [paperwork!] police officers are out and about on patrol looking for crime/criminals etc. As such, the chances of a police car being close to a call are a little bit random.