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For the past few months, people in authority have been telling us not to let the murders of Steven Bigby and Jimmy Mizen stop us from realising that London is a safer, happier city.
In the mayoral elections, Ken Livingstone ran as a crime-cutting leader. "Londoners wanted it and I have delivered it," he declared, and was promptly thrown out.
Just after Boris Johnson took over, Sir David Normington, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, told the Commons Public Affairs Committee that violent crime was just a small proportion of overall crime, and only seven per cent of violent criminals used knives. MPs muttered their support and blamed the press for inciting a moral panic. Yet if Sir David had to stand for election, he wouldn't fare any better than Livingstone.
It is not as if the politicians and civil servants are lying. All sides twist the statistics, but no serious person doubts that crime has been falling since the early Nineties. The trouble is that the last people voters want to appear pleased about the fall are those in charge of the criminal justice system.
Put it like this, if you were in a hospital ward you wouldn't be reassured if an NHS manager told you to be grateful that deaths from MRSA were well down on last year. You wouldn't congratulate him and dismiss the nervous patient in the next bed as being in the grip of an irrational "moral panic".
Above all, you would hope he would regard one MRSA death as one too many and see the existence of the infection on his wards as an insult to his professionalism.
Whenever I hear senior officers from the Met shake their heads at the public unwillingness to recognise that crime is going down I always think: "Well, journalists can go on about irrational fears as much as we want, but you're a copper. You ought to have an irrational aversion to serious criminals. People want you to be thoroughly unreasonable about them."
In any case, Londoners' fears may not be as irrational as the authorities imagine. Buried in the testimony to the Commons was the news that knife crime has doubled since the Millennium.
Meanwhile, friends who work in A&E departments say that coping with random stabbings is becoming the worst part of their job. Young men attack other young men for next to no reason. "People haven't begun to get their heads around the scale of the problem," an A&E administrator told me.
In other words, the authorities should be careful of claiming there is an irrational fear of crime at large. Londoners may not be needlessly terrifying themselves. They may be responding rationally to the routine carrying of knives by young men and be panicking most about the failure of the authorities to deal with them.
Reader views (5)
Sorry Hank - but your claim that you feel safer on the streets of Detroit than London is preposterous. I've been to Detroit - it's like a ghost town. To coin a term, the city has been 'donuted' - nobody lives in the centre and all activity appears to be in a ring of suburbs and industrial parks. London by contrast has a lively street culture in its down town area and relatively low gun crime - far lower than US inner cities. Even the likelihood of being mugged is much lower than in Detroit or Los Angeles where it is endemic.
I was fleeced in San Francisco, so much for the city of love and saw an army of "panhandlers" pushing shopping trolleys up and down Market Street - a really depressing scene you never see here. Most of this knife crime in London is between kids who know each other and very little of this crime involves wealthy jet-setting Americans passing through on their holidays and nervously watching over their shoulder for a crime that isn't going to happen.
- Tony Mcmahon, London, UK, 06/06/2008 13:40
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Buddy, USA: Your argument is a nonsense. Are you suggesting that those youths involved in knife crime come predominantly from homes where both parents are working, contributing to society and thus instilling the work ethic into their children? This is a crucial part of 'making reasonable home lives', i.e. you earn what you have, you don't take it at knife point. Have you anything to back your theory up with and, more importantly, have you ever been to the areas of (particularly but not exclusively)South and East London where knife crime is at its most endemic? Do tell.
- Ruth, Hampton, 03/06/2008 13:23
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Where legitimate self-defence is banned and/or discouraged, violent street crime ensues, the weapon is irrelevant, the willingness of the criminal to act is. There is something seriously wrong when one feels safer from street crime in Detroit than in London...
- Hank, San Mateo, USA, 02/06/2008 21:15
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Seems as if the proportion of young psychopaths in society has been creeping up for decades. The cause is probably because most families want more materialistic benefits; hence parents are more involved in workplaces and the salary from same than they are in making reasonable home lives. No, I have no suggestions; it's just my observation that decay in western societies is in an advanced stage.
- Buddy, Henderson USA, 30/05/2008 01:46
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Not all Londoners are needlessly terrifying themselves, but many are. If you're young, male, particularly if you're black, particularly if you live in south or east London, then yes, you have some justification in worrying; if you're not, then you're really at very low risk, compared to even the recent past.
Of course it's still too much, but that's no reason to claim violent crime is worse than it is, or that it's increasing when it isn't; that will not only lead to people feeling frightened, and perhaps changing their behaviour to their detriment in order to defend against a non-existent thread, but may well lead to kneejerk calls for changes to policies that are actually working, replacing them with 'common sense' policies that have failed time after time.
- Tom, London, 28/05/2008 23:05
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