ACCORDING TO police records, knife crime has risen by 21 per cent in the past year, and gun-related offences by 20 per cent. There were over 37,000 arrests for knife offences and over 6,000 for gun crimes. All recorded crimes were up 14 per cent.
For the communities, families and individuals caught up in these crimes, they are tragic in the extreme. Disproportionately they occur in the most deprived and poorest areas, as well as those with the highest black and Asian populations. These are the places where austerity policies have most devastated communities, with youth services hit particularly hard.
Interestingly the same police figures show a dramatic reduction in online and fraud crime. As ever the protection of property, not people remains their priority.
But Sadiq Khan, has reacted to the crisis with a populist, right wing, law and order response: increasing stop and search operations and introducing “weapons sweeps” across whole communities. He has called for more police officers in the capital, in line with Jeremy Corbyn and shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott’s demand for 10,000 more “bobbies on the beat”.
Khan maintains that stop and search under his administration will be significantly different to previous periods when the tactic was utilised. It will be “targeted” and “intelligence-led”. Officers will wear body cameras (will they, really?) and they will be overseen by Community Monitoring Groups (what, like the Independent Police Complaints Commission that has rolled over every time there has been a death in custody?).
When he was quizzed by Tory London Assembly member Shaun Bailey, Sadiq was unable to say what, if anything was different about “intelligence led” stop & search. The truth is you are eight times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black, more if you are a young black man. Who provides the “intelligence”? The police.
The Mayor quotes 74% public support for the tactic, though he doesn’t provide a racial breakdown of this figure. Nevertheless, it is particularly ineffective.
The police themselves have reported that between 2004 and 2014, stop and search only reduced non-violent drug-related offences, not violent crime. A 10% increase in stop and search would only reduce gun and knife crime by 0.1%; 15% of stop and search operations target weapons, 60 per cent target drugs.
And as Labour mp for Tottenham David Lammy commented:
“As we speak, there will be a young, white, middle-class man smoking a joint with impunity at a campus university, and the police will be nowhere in sight. But a young black or Muslim man walking through Brixton or on Tottenham High Road will be stopped and searched, and end up with a criminal record that blights their life chances for ever.”
Leaving aside whether smoking cannabis should be an offence at all (clearly not, eight us states have decriminalised it), his point is irrefutable.
Stop and search is not just an inconvenience. It is a daily reminder of institutional police racism. And the racism doesn’t stop there. Black people are more likely to receive a custodial sentence and receive longer sentences than their white counterparts. And neither do Britain’s dangerously overcrowded prisons work: 44% of ex-prisoners reoffend within a year of their release. Rehabilitation rates are the worst in Western Europe.
Finally, more police is not the answer either. Crime has actually fallen over the longer period – since 2009 – that police numbers have fallen by 20,000.
On this question Lammy – by no means a left mp – is dead right and Corbyn, Abbott and Khan are wrong. Instead of invading communities with police raids and ignoring the human rights of innocent and unsuspected individuals with stop and search, Labour should demand the full restoration of youth services; Tory cuts have slashed youth service funding by £22 million and closed 30 youth centres in London alone.
Labour should point to the real correlation of ingrained poverty and social exclusion to knife and gun crime and demand real regeneration schemes, controlled by local communities and offering decent jobs on trade union rates of pay.
You can’t out-Tory the Tories and the opportunist chase for votes cannot outweigh the importance of building a future with and for Britain’s youth.
