The City of London, also known as the Square Mile, is the historic heart of London and one of the world’s leading financial centres. It is home to approximately 8,000 residents and a working population of over 513,000 people. Each year the City welcomes over 10 million tourists, in addition to those visiting for business.
The City of London has an ever-increasing working population and a growing number of visitors. To ensure the Square Mile remains a great place to live, work, study and visit, the streets and spaces must respond to these changes in order to maintain the area’s attractiveness, safety and welcoming ambience.
To deliver significant improvements to the safety of Square Mile residents, workers and visitors, the City of London Corporation and City of London Police have jointly launched the Secure City Programme (SCP). Using technology in an innovative way, the programme has set out to achieve more effective management of the City streets. Increased situational awareness will facilitate significant improvements to incident identification, decision making and incident response capabilities.
SCP is an effort to make the City of London the safest city in the world through the use of cutting-edge technologies and enhanced collaboration between the City Corporation, the Police, and local partners, such as businesses, organizations and residents. Ensuring that the City is somewhere “to be safe and to feel safe,” now and in the future.
The City’s Accommodation Programme is seeking to rationalise its property portfolio resulting in the closure of police stations across the Square Mile. Digital Service Points will help address that reduction and advance the Secure City effort by providing physical locations to integrate new technologies and to allow for effective, seamless interactions between the Corporation, Police, residents, visitors and local businesses.
SCP is supporting the strategy to create the new Digital Service Points [DSPs] that will bring the traditional Police Boxes into the 21st Century. The issues identified are:
- Police Boxes are obsolete and no longer used.
- Security challenges have changed; policing strategies and technologies need to change to keep the City safe.
- A stronger local authority and Police presence is needed in highly populated strategic locations across the City.
- Police Station closures support the need for modern digital and physical support points to provide an enhanced service and user experience.
- Digital systems allow the public to be served in a faster and more seamless way.