Open letter to London Mayor Sadiq Khan

• IN the past three weeks, two laptops were snatched from inside a London café by thieves travelling by moped. This is an extremely worrying development and one likely to be repeated elsewhere. Despite this, there has been no action in identifying those responsible.

Your predecessor as mayor reduced the number of police in each London ward from six to just two, despite all the benefits local policing offers in terms of crime prevention and the identification of culprits. The policy of moving officers even before they have completed their two-year stint in a ward means local knowledge is further reduced.

And as an additional problem, while Safer Neighbourhoods teams were in place for two years, the Neighbourhood Policing Teams have been staffed in large part by probationers, not familiar with police procedure and still less the area.

We are reaching the point where police are so thinly staffed they can no longer serve residents. As the mayor, do you have any plans to address this? Or do London’s small businesses and their customers simply have to accept a growing level of crime and intimidation?

VALBONA SADIKU
Bread and Bean, Junction Road, N19