The message from the Met is clear: do not try and see the police in the one place where you might think they’d be available, in an actual police station. Just call them instead. And if you are rash enough to be mugged or assaulted and want to make your way to the safety of a police station, do make sure you do it in the right place at the right time.
As we report today, the Met is planning to halve the number of stations with front desks open to the public to just 19. And of those, 11 will close from 7pm at weekends or 10pm weekdays. Just as well there’s so little crime on a Saturday night, isn’t it?
The other day I watched that brilliant Ealing comedy, The Ladykillers, and the one thing that seems almost miraculous now was that the little old lady in it was forever nipping into the local police station to report her suspicions to the coppers. That was 1951.
This planned reduction in station numbers is plainly at odds with the Met’s promise to keep at least one station open in every London borough: there are 32. But that’s not how it’s going to work out. In south west London, Twickenham, Merton, Wimbledon, Lavender Hill and Mitcham will lose their front-desk stations. The station at Chingford is to close – and getting from there to the nearest station, at Stratford, is a two-hour round trip.
The Met’s defensive response to the public fury this has elicited is that people only report crime at stations in five per cent of cases. Well, this isn’t quite so shocking when you consider that several stations have in fact closed already, and you can’t report a crime in a station that doesn’t exist.
But it’s the availability of a front desk at a police station to report crime or concerns about crime which is crucial to public confidence. It’s a bit like police on the beat. They very rarely catch criminals, but it’s their presence that’s reassurance, and deterrent.
They may rarely catch criminals, but it’s their presence that’s reassurance, and deterrent - not unlike bobbies on the beat
And spare a thought for those accused or convicted of crime. As this paper’s Tristan Kirk reports closing police stations will mean that courts will stop ordering defendants on bail to report to police stations if it’s practically impossible to find one. And given that the Government’s policy is to put as few people in prison as possible and to prioritise tagging, it means that people will probably still be getting bail but they’re likely to be monitored less. How does that make you feel?
The proposed cuts are attributable to a £260 million budget shortfall for the Met. And as the Commissioner has said, the cupboard is bare. There are no reserves. But that means that what funding there is needs to be spent effectively and that includes keeping stations open. And the record of the Met is, frankly, dismal on the crime figures that matter.
Knife crime in London, as this paper reported, is up nearly ten per cent since last year: London now accounts for one in three knife attacks in England and Wales. A report from the think-tank, Policy Exchange by former Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector David Spencer, says that during the last decade, the Met managed to catch only one in 20 robbers and an astonishing one in 170 snatch thieves – that includes mobile phone snatchers. It’s all the more disturbing given that knife crime overall has increased by nearly 70 per cent nationally in the last decade. Granted, this includes simple possession of a knife; it’s still bad.
The element of the report that will strike most of us though is the finding that knife crime in London is concentrated in quite a small area around Oxford Street, Regent Street and Westminster. This may of course be influenced by where police actually try to catch knife criminals – if you don’t look, you don’t find – but it’s startling to learn that 15 per cent of neighbourhoods account for half of offences, which may include possession.
Look, if we’re not safe going down Bond Street – where are we safe? I wrote about this very issue in yesterday’s paper.
Sir Mark Rowley has another two years of his five year term left. If he wants to make the most of them, he should channel that long-departed, legendary Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, who served from 2000 to 2005. Home Secretaries were scared of him. And that’s how it should be. Sir Mark should make a stand on the closure of London’s police stations; if the Government and the Mayor won’t enable him to keep them open, he should resign. They really wouldn’t like that.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist at The London Standard
