This is the first of Haringey Police’s weekly columns in the Tottenham and Wood Green Independent and we wanted to start with something that is an issue across London – violent crime involving young people.

We cannot shy away from the fact that Haringey deals with this problem too and that the effects of it ripple outwards. We also know that it is our responsibility to support our community around this issue.

Whilst our response teams are always ready to help if an incident occurs, there is a lot more that goes on besides. For four weeks during May and June, we had the assistance of the Territorial Support Group, a specialist team that supports local police with a variety of tasks. They have been focussing their patrols in areas known for violence or responding to specific intelligence, and the results speak for themselves, having made 49 arrests for violent or weapons offences, alongside 62 arrests for other offences. Our Operation Marlin, launched in February, also proactively continues to conduct extra patrols in the Northumberland Park area and locals report to us that this is having an effect on youth violence and ASB in the area.

However, in the long term, prevention is the best approach and a lot of the behind the scenes work we do is about building links with our community to try and avoid crime occurring in the first place. Our violence engagement strategy has 4 strands – ensuring that our work has support from our communities; building trust so that those in Haringey feel that they can talk to the police; working with other organisations to address the causes and results of youth violence; and making sure that we can spot when tensions are rising and work to reduce them before incidents ensue.

What does this mean in practice? It means hosting meetings with key community leaders whenever something serious happens, it means holding events with primary school children to help them understand what the police really do and it means running reverse stop and search workshops where teenagers begin to understand the challenge the police face in trying to take weapons off the streets. Every Friday evening our officers attend the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation ‘Community League’ run in partnership with the Metropolitan Police where teams of local Tottenham youngsters compete – it is an excellent way for us to talk to them and their parents informally – and it is exactly the kind of way we want to build bridges with the community we serve.