Let’s be completely clear: homelessness is a housing and human rights crisis, not a police matter.
At Streets Kitchen, our entire ethos is built on trust, dignity, and radical solidarity. You cannot build trust with people surviving on the street while sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the very people paid to move them on, confiscate their survival gear, and criminalise their existence.
The idea that the Metropolitan Police should have a seat at Camden’s homeless forum—or walk alongside frontline outreach workers—isn’t just bad policy. It’s dangerous.
You Can’t Offer Support with One Hand and Handcuffs with the Other
When you’re sleeping rough, an interaction with a police officer almost never means “help.” It means dispersal orders, threats of arrest, and watching your only shelter thrown into the back of a rubbish lorry. We’ve seen it happen right here in Camden outside UCH, where people’s tents were destroyed under the guise of public order.
If police are in the room at a forum, you create an atmosphere of surveillance, not safety. How can anyone speak honestly about their struggles when the person seated nearby has the power to arrest them the moment they step back onto the pavement?
Forum or Information Gathering Exercise?
Let’s not kid ourselves about why enforcement agencies attend these spaces: they are gathering intelligence.
At the same time, police involvement serves as a conveniently cheap PR exercise. It allows the Met to pose as caring, community-minded partners in local council press releases, masking the reality of heavy-handed street enforcement. A forum meant to deliver genuine communication and a safe space to discuss how best we all tackle the growing ‘homeless’ crisis locally ‘working’ together in simple solidarity, must never be turned into a photo-op or an intelligence pipeline for law enforcement.
Under the guise of “multi-agency collaboration,” forums like this are routinely used by police to build profiles, map out individuals, gather location data, and log vulnerable people into enforcement databases. Attending a forum shouldn’t put a target on someone’s back.
The Casey Review Proved What the Streets Already Knew
We aren’t talking about a few bad apples; we’re talking about a fundamentally broken system. The Met’s own independent review by Baroness Casey confirmed what marginalised communities have been saying for decades: the force is institutionally racist, institutionally misogynistic, and institutionally homophobic.
- Racial Bias: Black and ethnic minority Londoners are disproportionately over-policed on the streets and over-represented among those experiencing homelessness.
- Failed Women: Women sleeping rough are among the most vulnerable to domestic abuse and sexual violence, yet the Casey report proved the Met routinely ignores and deprioritises violence against women.
- Targeting LGBTQ+ People: LGBTQ+ youth make up a disproportionate percentage of unhoused people, often pushed onto the streets after fleeing hostile home environments. Expecting them to seek sanctuary in a space shared with an institutionally homophobic police force ignores the direct discrimination they face both on the streets and within the justice system.
Forcing traumatised people, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and vulnerable women to seek assistance in front of an institutionally oppressive police force is a complete failure of trauma-informed care.
Draw the Line
Nearby boroughs like Islington and Haringey manage mostly to keep outreach and law enforcement strictly separate. They understand that frontline workers cannot double as tour guides, and outreach cannot double as policing.
If Camden’s homeless forum is meant to be a space for real change and unvarnished truth, it needs to be truly independent. No uniforms, no enforcement, no intelligence gathering, no PR stunts.
Keep policing out of homelessness.