Barnet has launched a new Community Protection Team (CPT) aimed at tackling hate crime and protecting vulnerable communities across the borough. The team, which is scaling up significantly in the coming months, will focus on visible patrols, intelligence-led operations, and building long-term partnerships with community organisations.
Chief Inspector Mark Cash, who leads the CPT, stated that their work includes responding to hate crime incidents and protecting Jewish communities from antisemitism, terrorism, and hostile state activity. Predominantly our focus on our efforts is currently protecting Jewish communities from the combined threat of anti-Semitism, terrorism, and hostile state activity,
he said.
The CPT provides visible and intelligence-led patrols around places of worship, schools, community centres, businesses, and other locations of relevance, which are provided to us by partners or our own intelligence demand.
The team also identify emerging concerns for intelligence, any suspicious activity, always at an early stage, so we can help prevent offending and inform wider policing activities.
The Community Protection Team (CPT) was established to provide a more sustainable model for protecting vulnerable communities, particularly the Jewish and Iranian communities.
The CPT is currently based at Barnet Police Station, with plans to permanently relocate to a more appropriate location within Golders Green. The reason for this move is just to bring us a bit closer to the communities and the locations where much of our work is concentrated.
Superintendent Tanya Lloyd, the new neighbourhood lead for Barnet, expressed her commitment to working with partners to enhance community safety. The CPT's efforts come in the wake of a challenging period for the borough. Acting Chief Inspector Tom Hinson described the period under review (Q1 2026/27) as a particularly challenging time in the borough,
noting increases in several high-harm crime categories, including violence, personal robbery, shoplifting, and hate crime.
However, positive trends were observed in business burglary, vehicle crime, drug trafficking, and domestic abuse violence with injury.
The Safer Communities Partnership Board, which met on Friday 18 September 2026, received a comprehensive update on the CPT's work. The board noted that detection rates for hate crime have been steadily increasing, coinciding with the introduction of the CPT, with rates around 25% in the last two months, a significant improvement from approximately 6% last year.
Chief Inspector Mark Cash outlined the scaling up plans for the Community Protection Team (CPT): Our current establishment, we've got one inspector who sits underneath me, three sergeants and 14 PCs. And over the coming months, the aspiration is that we'll scale up to an additional inspector, seven sergeants in total and 43 PCs.
He also mentioned that phase two will come online in January hopefully, and that's really about scalability across London.
Chief Inspector Cash also emphasized building sustained long-term partnership relationships with residents, with faith leaders, schools, as I mentioned previously, community organisations, yourselves, local authority partners, and other communal security partnerships as well.
Public reports pack 18th-Sep-2026 10.00 Safer Communities Partnership Board
