The crime statistics are piling up, and all of them are scary. Knife crime in London, according to this paper’s correspondent, Ross Lydall, is up nearly ten per cent since last year: London now accounts for roughly one in three knife attacks in England and Wales.
Meanwhile, 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 has managed to catch only one in twenty robbers and an astonishing one in 170 snatch thieves – that includes mobile phone snatchers.
Actually, I’d be inclined to discount most statistics about mobile phone thefts on the basis that – like bikes – it’s hardly worth anyone’s while reporting a theft to the police, so every figure is an underestimate. And 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 Policy Exchange 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 – after all, even if we can’t buy things, there’s normally no harm in looking - where are we safe?
It’s at this point that most of us will start to perk up. If the respectable classes can’t go shopping in the West End, this is everyone’s problem. And that’s the point at which the Mayor and the Home Secretary should have registered alarm; it’s not gang-ridden council estates we’re talking about, but the sort of places we go to see the Christmas lights, the sort of places that visitors to London make for.
If you can’t send your teenage children into the West End to meet their friends without worrying, you may start to consider the attractions of Norfolk
If you can’t send your teenage children into the West End to meet their friends without worrying, that translates into the kind of middle class angst that causes people seriously to consider the attractions of Norfolk. And the upshot of that is that the capital becomes more hollowed out.
Of course much of this is drugs-related; a friend of mine who lives in Covent Garden in social housing is terrified – and this isn’t hyperbole - by the brazenness of dealers and the signal absence of the police whose station is just yards away.
One man I know who stayed in a Mayfair hotel for several weeks told me that after the shopping day is over, the place takes on a very different, much more sordid and threatening, quality. Equally plainly, some of the problem is to do with young people who have far too little provision for positive activity.
One man I know who stayed in a Mayfair hotel or several weeks told me that after the shopping day is over, the place takes on a very different, much more sordid and threatening, quality
There should be a push to restore a whole raft of youth clubs where teenagers can socialise in a non-threatening, fun environment, where young men can play pool or darts or take boxing lessons without their mothers being fearful that they’ll end up in bad company. But there’s no sign of that happening, although the Mayor did open a useful youth sports camp for the summer holidays the other day. We need more good options for teenagers.
This paper has already identified the effective amnesty for shoplifting in London, where shopkeepers can count themselves lucky if police turn up to the crime scene.
Policy Exchange has identified one element of the overall problem with crimes of theft and robbery, which is that very prolific offenders can assume that they’re unlikely to get a custodial sentence: of “hyper-prolific offenders” who had 46 or more cautions or convictions, fewer than half got a prison sentence.
Now I do realise that judges who hear all the circumstances of a case are uniquely qualified to make the punishment fit the criminal, but this seems bizarre. Even to get these busy bees off the streets for a year would make a discernible difference to overall crime rates.
But there is a reason why the Government has cut down on custodial sentencing and it’s because our prisons are so dangerously overcrowded. As our courts correspondent, Tristan Kirk, observes, conditions in prisons are dreadful… Inmates can remain in their cells for up to 23 hours of the day. There’s little chance of rehabilitation and education in that environment.
That is, of course, largely the responsibility of the previous government, but it also suggests that spending on the criminal justice system, including prisons, needs to get far greater priority from the Chancellor. Doctors’ pay is more glamorous than prison spending, but prisons need the money more than BMA members. Sorry.
Another issue is our old friend, visible policing
Part of the solution is, as David Spencer observes, an acceptance that stop-and-search is a good solution to knife crime, and he means the Mayor here – though I’d be wary of his other focus, on facial recognition technology, which could be problematic in the wrong hands, including those of future governments. But the other issue is our old friend, visible policing.
And there’s less and less of it around, possibly because police attention is occupied elsewhere. Over the last five years the Met logged no fewer than 15,000 non-crime hate incidents, a category I think should be abolished, which means police time not spent arresting shoplifters. The force has actually cut back on the numbers of front line police when it should be increasing them. This paper’s Anthony France says that the police will shortly be announcing increased numbers to its West End team, but he reflects, “I fear it's only replacing those taken away in the first place, specifically, the Flying Squad”. So when the announcement comes, you know what to make of it.
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.
The Met can’t solve the social problems that underlie knife crime and shoplifting – nor should they try to – but it can do an awful lot more to push back against the crime which makes ordinary people frightened of going into central London. Meanwhile, Sir Mark should remind us that the buck doesn’t stop with him, but with the Mayor – London’s very own Crime Commissioner – and the Home Secretary. Over to you, Sir Sadiq; what about it, Yvette?
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
