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Protests put fight against knife crime at risk, says Yard chief
Justin Davenport18 May 2009
THE fight against knife crime is being hit by the demands of policing public order events such as the G20 and Tamil protests, Met chief Sir Paul Stephenson warned today.
He said the scale and unpredictability of the Tamil protests were diverting resources from fighting crime.
Speaking exclusively to the Standard, Sir Paul revealed that one recent operation to target gangs was scaled back when officers had to be switched to the Parliament Square demo. He warned that the recent success of the Met in cutting crime was under threat.
His comments came on the first anniversary of the anti-knife crime initiative code-named Operation Blunt 2.
Figures released today show in the first four months of this year the number of knife offences fell by 11.5 per cent compared with the same period last year.
Police have seized 5,480 knives after nearly 300,000 stop-and-searches and 10,000 arrests in the past 12 months.
The number of teenage killings has fallen to eight so far this year compared with 14 last year. But police accept this is often due to paramedics preventing a stabbing becoming a murder.
Acting Deputy Commissioner Tim Godwin said he expected the operation to continue for the next two or three years.
He said that police were now charging over 90 per cent of people caught with knives, compared with 75 per cent previously.
Sir Paul said: “There are still far too many youth homicides and there are still too many young victims, but when we launched Blunt 2 we were seeing that dreadful carnage with an increasing number of victims.
“Since the launch of Blunt 2 we have managed to see a reduction, but I am far from complacent and we have to reduce it even further.”
He warned: “We have had an extraordinary drain on officer numbers in London when you put together G20 and the Tamil dispute. That is bringing officers in from around the Met, but particularly from our boroughs, to police something when actually we want our officers back on the boroughs and doing key Blunt 2 operations. I am very concerned about that.
“I want to be able to support lawful protest, but this protest and the way it is going on is causing problems for the people of London. My view is it cannot help our abilities to maintain the progress we have made on crime.”
Sir Paul admitted the Blunt 2 methods — extra searches and the use of knife arches — had involved “intrusive tactics”.
He said figures showed a clear disproportion in the number of black people stopped and searched but pointed out the percentage in London was half that of the national average.
In London black people are 4.1 times more likely to be stopped compared with nearly eight times in the rest of the country.
He said police had set up community boards to scrutinise their use of this power, adding: “We have been keen to ensure that while using this intrusive tactic we have done everything we can to carry the communities with us.”
He said: “It is an important power and one we do not want to lose but I have said for some time that we have been using it far too widely and I think we need to use far greater discretion.”
