City Guardians - Safe streets in Westminster - London/uk

City Guardians are basically the eyes and the ears of Westminster Council. We're there, out on the streets, every single day. We're listening to peoples problems and we're helping them to find solutions. We have very close links with the police. We're here to make a healthier, cleaner, safer Westminster. I'm just here to talk about some problems you had over the last week.... My name's Claire Hardy. I'm a City Guardian based in Church Street, which is in the Marylebone district of Westminster. City Guardians work around 3 core areas of concern within our remit. That's environmental, crime disorder & reduction and community. Our main duty is to be out on the street. To gather the information to bring it back, in order to then put it to the different services within Westminster. There's no steering wheel in the vehicle and the tax ran out last month... In the areas where City Guardians are actually based, the fear of crime has reduced dramatically. By providing a high visual patrol, I think that actually encourages people to feel safer at night time. It prevents people from doing things. If they can see us coming from half a mile away, they're not going to break into that car. They're not going to abuse that person walking down the street. We are actually closely linked to the Youth Offending Team. So, therefore, they can provide us with the anti-social behaviour contracts that any of our youth in the areas have signed and agreed to. If they are doing things that go against the contracts, then again we can go back and we can enforce in a way by reporting to the Youth Offending Team about the things that they are doing wrong in order to make everybody aware. And to make the Youth actually responsible for themselves. We provide youth diversion, so we can get the kids off the streets. Who might not be doing anything wrong but be causing fear just because of their numbers. We can put them in places where they'll get something out of it. They'll benefit and the community will benefit from being a bit quieter and a bit safer. 8 bags of builder's, 2 bags of rubble and a toilet cistern. City Guardians can respond to anywhere within the ward, within about 10 minutes. We're on feet. As long as it takes us to walk to the problem. If we came across fly tipping, and it was actually on the highways, we can phone it up to our environmental action line and we can have that cleaned and removed within 2 hours. Being so secluded and being off one of the busy main streets and there's a few pubs here. It gets used as a public loo and also provides perfect cover for people who take drugs to come in here and slip into one of the corners and inject themselves. If we do find a needle, we do report it in and the cleaning team are quite responsive. They get down here and they get it cleared away and that clears the danger to the members of the public. We would also like to say thank you to some of the members of the Harrow Road City Guardians for volunteering to help at WECH events and proactively looking after the safety of WECH residents. Stand up Guardians and give a round of applause for the Guardians.... We are very much a part of the community. We're on the streets from 8 o'clock in the morning, through to 10 o'clock at night. The residents know us, we're trusted. We have very close links with the elderly and vulnerable people in our ward People come to us with all sorts of problems and thats things that are in their families to just a local environmental issue that giving them a bit of a bug bear. If you can make one person's life better in a year, that is more than enough for me. But I think we make more than one person's life better every day, by the work that we do.