British police train Jewish vigilantes

Acknowledgements to the Jewish Chronicle Online for the following extract from one of their recently published articles.

One law for them and another for the English

Continually Spreading Trust

By Geoffrey Alderman, June 10, 2011

A month ago today, the second most senior police officer in the Metropolitan Police, Deputy Commissioner Tim Godwin, chaired a meeting at New Scotland Yard. A source close to the Community Security Trust told me that the meeting had been held, and that, apart from Deputy Commissioner Godwin the only persons present were representatives of the CST and the Jewish Police Association.

According to the Met's press office, the reason for the meeting was to deliberate on how these three bodies might work together "to achieve a secure and confident London Jewish community." How curious, therefore, that while the CST had been invited, the Board of Deputies had not.

In my JC column of April 15, while acknowledging that the CST probably did valuable work providing security and security advice, and collecting and publishing security-related data, I asked whether it could justly claim to "represent" the Jewish community.

I asked this question in the context of its sizeable budget, the large salaries paid to certain of its employees, and the fact that the names of its trustees were hidden from public view.

This seemed to me a perfectly reasonable question to ask. When the JC published in response a letter of condemnation signed by no less than 27 communal grandees, including six vice-presidents of the Jewish Leadership Council, I knew that I had been right to ask the question, and that it had been the right question to ask.

But what I did not know when I researched and composed that article was that other members of British Jewry - rather less self-important individuals than the aforementioned 27 protesters – felt exactly as I did.

Take, for example, the Manchester-based rabbi who contacted me to say how deeply he resented the intrusion of the CST into the affairs of his community - he meant the CST's insistence that he consult them when planning any communal event.

Take the south-of-England rabbi who phoned me to complain of the telling-off he had received from the CST because, without their consent, he and his lay leadership had agreed to permit a local non-Jewish group to meet on synagogue premises.

Or take the Charedi community activist who asked to meet me (which he did) in order to unburden himself of the deep cynicism with which he regarded the CST.

It had, in his view, got too big for its boots while basking in the privilege and protection it received from the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police. [Emphasis mine, AE].

End of quotation.

"The CST has five offices, 55 members of staff and a network of 3,000 volunteers from all parts of the Jewish community, who are trained by the CST and the Police. The organisation's philosophy is that the Jewish community is responsible for its own security. It works closely with Police Services around the country and is recognised by Government and Police as a model of a minority community security organisation."

From the "Community Security Trust" article in Wikipedia