S Times: If New York can tame them, so can we

Sunday Times (London)
December 05, 2004

If New York can tame them, so can we

Americans say London¹s increasingly lawless streets resemble New York¹s in
the 1980s. ŒZero tolerance¹ changed all that. Now British police have to
follow suit, experts tell Jack Grimston

Hampstead Garden Suburb was one of the jewels of the Edwardian town planning
revolution. For nearly a century its mix of Arts and Crafts cottages and
grand mansions among woodland and lawns in northwest London seemed an
idyllic community, only seven miles from the heart of the capital.

No longer. Former Gurkha soldiers now patrol pavements, flush out intruders
and escort scared residents into their homes. A security firm on the
suburb¹s website offers ³plainclothes, alarm, armed response, internal theft
and loss prevention services².

Rosemary Gardener, an artist living in one of the grander houses, has felt
the dread grow daily. Both her elderly neighbours were mugged, she was
robbed twice and her car broken into three times. The police did a good
follow-up job but she lost faith in their ability to prevent more crimes.

Then one afternoon she saw a prowler peering through a window. Ducking under
her kitchen table, she watched as an axehead smashed through her front door.
Her collie dog, Tulip, confronted the intruder, a tall blond man in black.

³She was barking at him and he was kicking at her, trying to shut her up and
swiping at her with a steel bar,² Gardener said last week. ³I was so scared
I just stayed crouched there while he bashed my poor dog over the head. He
smashed her skull into pieces, so goodness knows what he would have done to
me if he had found me.²

Gardener (not her real name) was an eager subscriber when her neighbours
clubbed together soon afterwards to set up a security firm employing former
soldiers to mount patrols on their streets that the police did not provide.

³When I come home I call them as I am approaching the road and a Gurkha
always meets me from my car and escorts me to my front door and carries my
bags,² she said.

The well-heeled residents of Upper Cheyne Row in Chelsea also took their
security into their own hands after a crimewave in their street, one of the
richest in Britain. But the security cameras they installed could not
prevent a murderous attack last week.

Intruders stabbed John and Homeyra Monckton in the hallway of their
four-storey home at 7.30 on Tuesday evening. Monckton, a City fund manager,
bled to death; his wife was saved by an ambulance crew called by the
couple¹s nine-year-old daughter.

The attack was one of a series of high-profile crimes this year that have
stoked middle-class fears of crime in the capital. One night in August
Amélie Delagrange, a French student, was clubbed to death on Twickenham
Green, west London. The following month Derek Robinson, a retired
paediatrician, was stabbed to death with his wife, Jean, at their home in
Highgate, north London. In October Robert Symons, a businessman who had
retrained as a teacher, was also stabbed to death at home in Chiswick, west
London.

Increasingly, residents feel afraid to walk the streets at night. And even
at home they feel vulnerable: London¹s elegant townhouses not only act as
beacons to criminals but also open straight onto the pavement, offering
little defence against invasion.

³It¹s an insidious fear that creeps up on one,² said Vanya Lambert, a
neighbour of the Moncktons. Other neighbours have suffered burglaries and
knifepoint muggings.

Throughout the capital well-to-do enclaves are trying to protect themselves.
Private security firms patrol parts of Kensington, St John¹s Wood, Primrose
Hill and Little Venice. But the number of attacks continues to rise. The
number of people mugged in October was up by 16% in London compared with the
same month last year ‹ and by 70% in Chelsea.

Figures collated for Civitas, the think tank, show that muggings used to be
rare. Between 1893 and 1941 there were never more than 400 a year recorded
in England and Wales. Between February and December 2001 there were at least
400 a month in the London borough of Lambeth alone.

Is London suffering the same spiral of decline as New York did in the 1980s
and early 1990s?

THE symptoms are depressingly similar to New York¹s, where muggings climbed
from 83,000 in 1975 to 107,000 in 1981. Residents of some wealthy areas
would not consider walking the streets without a bodyguard.

In 1987 Tom Wolfe portrayed New York¹s meltdown in The Bonfire of the
Vanities. The same year a jury reflected a growing public backlash by
refusing to convict Bernard Goetz, the ³subway vigilante², of attempted
murder after he shot four unarmed youths. Then in 1993 the city elected the
energetic Rudolph Giuliani as mayor and he appointed a police chief, William
Bratton, who had novel ideas about crime prevention.

Bratton practised so-called ³broken windows² theory, which challenged the
prevailing wisdom that poverty, racism and social breakdown had to be
tackled before the police had a hope of curbing crime.

³Broken windows² theorists ‹ who preferred this name to the more racy ³zero
tolerance² ‹ argued that serious crime and social breakdown grew out of
prevalent low-level criminality such as graffiti, vandalism, small-time drug
dealing and fare dodging.

Giuliani diverted city funds to recruit thousands more police and Bratton
told them to arrest troublemakers for the smallest misdemeanours. He also
set rigorous clean-up targets, monitored daily, and bawled out senior
officers if they failed. The authorities talked of ³retaking² the city from
the hoodlums block by block.

It was a success. In 1991 New York City had 100,000 muggings to London¹s
22,000. By 2002, the situation had flipped: New York muggings had fallen to
27,000 while in London they had soared to 44,600. New York continues to have
a higher murder rate than London but this reflects a higher level of armed
gang warfare. The subway and streets feel safe.

If London is suffering the same disease as New York, the question is whether
the same medicine will cure it. More importantly, are the authorities
willing to apply the same techniques? George Kelling, one of the New York
academics behind broken windows theory, thinks the comparison is apt. He
says: ³What has happened is that as London has become an increasingly
pluralistic city, the kind of ethos of social control has broken down. I
view London as being in the kind of situation we were in in the late 1980s
before a lot of ideas came together.²

According to the City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute,
London¹s crime ³has festered out of control in poor and minority
neighbourhoods (and) is cascading into the rest of the city².

Some broken windows medicine is being applied against low-level London crime
with antisocial behaviour orders issued widely. The incoming commissioner of
the Metropolitan police, the liberal-minded Sir Ian Blair, has made
Brattonesque noises, speaking of the need to deal sternly with young
troublemakers who may ³turn up as the street robbers and muggers and
burglars of the future².

After he takes over next month, Blair plans to station small combined teams
of police and community service officers permanently in neighbourhoods
across the capital, with the aim that residents should know and recognise
who to turn to about crime and disorder.

Critics accuse the government of a lack of consistency, however:
semi-digested scraps of American policy are mixed with liberal measures such
as softening the law on cannabis and round-the-clock access to alcohol and
gambling.

It is also hard to see some of the tougher policing methods permitted in
Harlem and South Brooklyn being adopted in London or other British cities.
Bratton¹s police could lock up ³squeegee men², beggars and fare-dodgers
overnight.

The average London police officer, under the shadow of the ³institutional
racism² charge levelled at them by the Macpherson report into the murder of
Stephen Lawrence, has become more politically correct and sensitive to
individual rights.

The other big difference in New York is local scrutiny and political
accountability. Giuliani took responsibility for broken windows ‹ and pushed
out Bratton for wanting to share the kudos. British police forces, by
contrast, enjoy operational independence.

Here political responsibility lies in a murky area between the mayor of
London, the home secretary and the prime minister. Ken Livingstone has no
real power over the police, while directives flow haphazardly from Tony
Blair and David Blunkett to tackle the political priority of the moment.

Blunkett has turned to America for help. A year ago he brought Paul Evans,
Boston¹s veteran former police chief, to London as head of the government¹s
Police Standards Unit, with a remit to reform British policing.

Evans used sophisticated systems to measure police successes and failures
and pushed forces to put more officers on the streets. Like Sir Ian Blair,
he sees police on the beat as the key to reducing offences and the feeling
of insecurity that can linger even if crime figures are falling.

Can Evans have any effect here? Marian FitzGerald, who was Home Office
director of research from 1997 to 1999 and now teaches at the London School
of Economics, thinks it will be tough.

³The issue of policing here is very complex and the political environment is
often treacherous,² she said recently. In her opinion Evans would be limited
in his efforts by a government agenda that was ³neither serious nor well
thought out².

In contrast with London, the north of England has enjoyed a revolution in
policing triggered by local government reform. Ray Mallon, alias ³Robocop²,
was hailed for bringing down crime when he was a senior police officer in
Middlesbrough. He has been successfully pursuing Brattonesque methods since
becoming the town¹s first directly elected mayor. Crime in the year to July
was down 11%.

The irony is that, if these American and northern ideas reach London, they
will revive an attitude to policing that was born in the capital nearly two
centuries ago.

When Sir Robert Peel, as home secretary, set up the Metropolitan police in
1829 he told constables ³to recognise always that the test of police
efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder and not the visible evidence
of police action in dealing with them².

Additional reporting: Will Iredale


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