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Comment: Boris's plans to tackle crime
Evening Standard Comment13.02.08
There are two issues that come right at the top of the concerns of most people who live in London and which the Mayor has some power to address. The first is transport; the second is crime. Today Boris Johnson, the Tory mayoral candidate, launches his anti-crime agenda. He has a formidable task.
Ken Livingstone has focused on deploying greater numbers of police to the streets of the capital and has backed Metropolitan Commissioner Sir Ian Blair's strategy of using neighbourhood policing teams, which has helped reduce some categories of crime. With good reason, Mr Johnson supports the Mayor's proposal to add 1,000 extra police. Where Mr Johnson goes further is in proposing to pay for more police and community support officers on the Underground, buses and stations by reducing the publicity budget for TfL and the Metropolitan Police Authority. This is the kind of priority-setting the public will sympathise with.
We still need more Met officers released on to the beat from their desks. Mr Johnson wants to address the amount of bureaucracy facing police, although it is questionable how much the Mayor can do about such operational matters. But he also wants to create greater accountability by obliging police to hold regular public meetings. On a very different but equally important issue, he wants to help victims of rape by guaranteeing funding for rape crisis centres.
Questions remain - not least how well Mr Johnson thinks he will work with Sir Ian, for whose resignation he has called in the past. Although crime remains an area where the Mayor has at best limited powers, today's launch is a useful firming up of Mr Johnson's ideas.
