The Community Protection Team

What is the Community Protection Team?

The Community Protection Team (CPT) provides a dedicated, specialist and intelligence led policing capability focused on protecting communities at heightened risk of hate crime, terrorism and hostile activity.

The CPT is designed to:

• Deliver high visibility, reassurance and prevention focused policing.
• Identify and manage risk at an early stage, including leading and supporting hate crime investigations.
• Build sustained trust with communities.
• Provide a consistent and specialist approach to community protection.

The CPT operates alongside local ward teams, complementing rather than replacing this function.

The CPT provides a specialist focus on community protection, risk and partnerships, whilst local ward teams retain responsibility for ward level policing, local engagement within their areas, and broad community contact.

Why do we need a Community Protection Team?

The team has been introduced in response to a sustained increase in antisemitic hate crime across London, continued community tension and vulnerability, and evolving counter terrorism and hostile threat.

Previously, response to this has relied on short term surge deployments of officers from other areas of London to bolster the protection towards impacted communities, and this is difficult to sustain.

Introducing the new team establishes a permanent and locally focused capability that moves from reactive to preventative, ensuring that when tensions rise, policing can respond quickly and protect at risk communities.

This capability is key to support the Met’s ongoing commitment to tackle all forms of hate crime and put community crime fighting at the heart of policing.

What are the teams priorities?

The CPT will prioritise the following:

• Protect communities at risk.
• Prevent crime and reduce harm.
• Improve the response to hate crime.
• Increase trust and confidence.
• Provide a specialist capability.

Ultimately, the team aim to deter crime that is targeted towards at risk communities and ensure members of these communities are safer.

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How to report a hate crime 

You can report a hate crime, including online hate crime and planned marches or events online.