The Hyde Park Safer Neighbourhood Ward Panel has its meetings three to four times a year. 

The meetings are typically attended by residents, representatives of the local Amenity Society, the Church Commissioners, who are significant landowners on the Estate, and provide some level of security for their buildings, one of our Councillors, the Marble Arch and Paddington BIDs, who also provide private security patrols (we are a mixed-use area with a large number of businesses in our Ward), a representative of Westminster Council’s street team, and the police, both the Met, and the BTP (Paddington Station is in our Ward). As St Mary’s Hospital is also in our Ward, some of the incidents of ASB and assault are reported there. Our local vicar from St John’s Church also attends. 

The priorities rarely change, and consist of robbery, burglary, antisocial behaviour, theft of and from motor vehicles, drug dealing, prostitution, and, increasingly, misdemeanours by cyclists, both pedal and motorised varieties. 

Our problems have been worsened by the fact that our Met police team have so often been “abstracted” to police street protests in and around our area. Worse, our police team rarely works at night, when a significant amount of the crime takes place. 

Recently, the Met team has been augmented by two officers from Hyde Park, as that police station has been closed down and our team, now located at that station, also has to police the northeast segment of Hyde Park.