Deterring, Detecting and Disrupting
The first thing we did was make some enquiries and found that the Metropolitan police had conducted a multi agency operation in relation to the illegal gambling in 2015 known as Operation Westminster Bridge.
The result of that operation included;
This was a good result, however it was 11 years ago and the operation was not victim focussed.
The key measure of the operation described in the report was to reduce calls to the location via the police control room by members of the public.
This does seem to be a common theme where apathy has crept in with little appreciation of the bigger picture or for our tourists and vistors.
Further enquiries would be required with boots on the ground to see what was going on which would result in various developments and liaison with the Metropolitan police including writing to the Commissioner of Police Sir Mark Rowley.
We undertook plain clothes and uniformed patrols including maintaining surveillance and disrupting an 8 person illegal gambling team before they were able to scam their first customer.
Our plain clothes volunteers disrupting illegal gambling team, calm heads, no violence, photos of all team players.
Our approach to disrupting the cup and ball scammers is markedly different from the vigilante content creators. We haveas part of our role reported several crimes to the Metropolitan police concerning the vigilante content creators.
Although the same police force, Lambeth police officers who deal with the half of the bridge on the South Side appear to be more proactive.
The following video has been edited to reduce the viewing time and includes violent disorder incidents by the vigilante content creators.
We will always do something rather than nothing when necessary as highlighted in the following post to protect users of the Bridge.
We are conducting further enquiries including submitting Freedom of Information Act Requests for statistics from recorded incidents / crimes on Westminster Bridge and will publish those as and when they are responded to.
Research is continuing and we will also publish anything else of interest that we find out.
