By the end of May, Londoners will start seeing more police officers promoting diversity and inclusion at community events and festivals.
The first of its kind London police Ambassador Team will be made up of six officers from each section of the force, who will join the current diversity officer in attending a wide variety of community events beginning May 29.
"We have one diversity officer in London and I'm not able to attend so many amazing community events that are happening," said Constable Theresa Allott, London police diversity officer. "The impact will be that people will be seeing more officers at community events. The big thing for us is that it is going to give our officers information about what is happening in the community and also knowledge about different faiths, cultures, or ethnic backgrounds."
While out in the community, the new team will talk about internal and external efforts to promote acceptance within the city.
"One of the big things is the partnerships between the London Police Service and our community. Just talking about what we are doing internally and also demonstrating the importance of diversity in our community by attending these events and supporting what they are doing. So saying 'what you are doing is important to the community, it's important to us and we want to learn more about that,'" said Allott.
London has had a diversity officer for 11 years but the idea to expand to an ambassador team had only surfaced over the past couple of years. After several weeks of hammering out the logistics of the team, the force put out a call to its uniformed officers to join at the start of the month.
Officers will be assigned to the team by the end of April and receive special training at the start of May.
"We're going to have one day of full training. We are going to have a number of community members come in and speak about different organizations in the morning so that officers can have a better understanding of the resources that we have. Those speakers will also talk about some of the difficulties that some community members are having," said Allott. "In the afternoon we are going to do site visits to a different number of organizations as well."
Allott, who currently attends a handful of community events each week, feels the team won't just be a flash in the pan for London police.
"When I speak with my supervisors, they understand the importance of it and I can't see us saying we'll just try it out for a couple months and see how it goes. I think we are going to have a trial period, see how it's going, and obviously it's going to be amended but I can see it expanding to include our civilian members as well," said Allott.