13 Feb 2024
As a young man growing up in a crime-ridden West London council estate, Simon Totten realised he had two choices: to follow other people of his age into a life of law-breaking, or to get away and start afresh somewhere new.
“At that turning point in my life I knew I had to get out of the area and make different decisions or I would have ended up in prison with my friends and neighbours at the time.
“When I left London there was certainly no intention to join the police. The reasons for leaving were purely to get away from the situation I was in, to try and start a life away from this world and to prevent myself getting in any trouble.”
Today he couldn’t be further from his roots, having recently been appointed as St Albans’ new Neighbourhood Sergeant, taking a proactive and community-driven role in tackling crime and anti-social behaviour across the city centre as part of the Neighbourhood Policing Team.
But Simon is still keen to use his experiences and background to shape his approach to policing.
“I have a level of empathy that maybe other people don’t have in this job. I’m a lot more understanding of the younger generation, the ones that are bordering on heading towards crime or already involved in crime. I have a little bit more understanding about what they’re going through and what challenges and barriers they might be facing. So that’s why I wanted to do this kind of role in the police, something more community based.”
Having worked in St Albans for seven years, with a brief break in East Herts for a year, he is pleased to be back in the city he says he knows “like the back of my hand”, accompanied a strong grasp on the main issues relating to crime in the area.
“It’s not the same sort of crime that I’m necessarily used to from where I grew up. When I was growing up, there was a lot of violent crime, knife crime, but generally in St Albans it’s more acquisitive crime, like thefts, burglaries. You also get quite a lot of anti-social behaviour in some of the more socially deprived areas. Drug dealing is also massive thing.”
Many people living in St Albans are perhaps unaware of the large number of Class A drug users in the city, and how their need to feed addictions often results in them stealing to fund their next fix.
“As a response officer, they’re the people that I’ve had a lot of involvement with over the years. I also worked on Operation Scorpion, which is a proactive team which dealt with a lot of class A users and alcoholics who were committing crime to fund whatever habit they might have. I’m trying to get involved with some of the projects being run and trying to get these people away from crime but as you know it’s a bit of a circle sometimes.”
One of Simon’s major successes with Scorpion was helping to close down the ‘Nino’ drugs line that London offenders were running from Bardwell Court off Holywell Hill. The main offender was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for being concerned in the supply of Class A drugs in 2021.
“It wasn’t necessarily having a massive antisocial impact, but it was certainly having an impact on the residents of the block, with these people coming and going from their property.
“The person running the drug line, it was a huge line in St Albans and he was probably supplying 70-80% of the crack cocaine, heroin users at the time. So it was a good police operation to get involved in and to run myself.”
Nature abhors a vacuum, so is it only a matter of time before someone else steps in to take over that trade?
“Sadly, yeah. It will get filled. There will be a bit of a dry spell for these users and they might have to go a little bit further afield to get their Class A drugs. But there will always be someone to fill that gap.
“It’s a tough challenge for the police to target these county lines. There will always be someone to fill that hole unfortunately.”
As a response officer when still a PC, he had a peripheral involvement in Operation Luge, the initiative targeting a teenage gang committing violent knife attacks to maintain their hold over another drugs operation.
“I wasn’t necessarily involved in the longer term stuff, but I’m very, very aware that it did have a massive impact on the community and was a select few young individuals. Sadly we as police didn’t get to them soon enough and now they’ve obviously been locked up for a significant amount of time.”
It’s on the back of this that Simon is keen to develop closer links with local schools: “I didn’t have the best experience growing up and I saw friends being arrested. I want to encourage young people on to the right path, away from knife crime and drugs and the best way to do this is early intervention.
“So the Mini Police stuff that we’re doing is focused on primary, Years 5 to 6, and I’m trying to target that towards schools that will benefit from it more. With secondary schools we go in to engage with students and I’ve got a lot of good PCs that have good relationships there, especially in some of the more troublesome schools.
“I also want to be out and about with my team all the time, being visible, whether that be on foot around the city centre or patrols in our hotspot and priority areas. I will always be about and always try to talk to people. It’s something I want to develop and I want to run more events so we can get into the communities that really need us.”
His focus on old school policing, namely going out and meeting people and visiting areas where there are issues, is something Simon says reflect the core principles of policing as established by Robert Peel, and is carried out in close partnership with other agencies like the district council, Open Door and the youth offending team.
“We want to be involved in the community, the community is the key to preventing crime and preventing offending. But people need to tell us and that’s the thing, because you can only be so visible.
“We want to be approachable, but at the same time, people have to approach us. And I know we have to create those environments where we can be approachable, but people shouldn’t be afraid to come and speak to us, because I’m keen to tackle problems head on. If we don’t know about it, we can’t act on it.
“I’m very proactive. I want to disrupt criminals and have a positive impact in the community. But it’s not always about locking people up, it may be that other agencies need to be involved.
“Information from the public and other source can lead to warrants, and we might not find drugs or criminals at a premises, but a lot of it is deterrence and disruption. So that person whose house is getting cuckooed [where the premises of vulnerable individuals are used by gangs to peddle drugs] might not be strong enough to tell the criminals to leave, but if the police come round and carry out a warrant they’re not going to use that person’s property again, so it’s almost protecting them a little bit more.”
Residents can report incidents online at herts.police.uk/report, speak to an operator
in the Force Communications Room via the online web chat at herts.police.uk/contact or call the non-emergency number 101.
If you want to report anonymously contact the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or via their untraceable online form at crimestoppers-uk.org#.
