It is now two months since the Conservatives, amongst many others, called on Sir Ian Blair to resign. The Telegraph ran the story HERE.
Sir Ian is holding on. As it happens, I also think Sir Ian Blair should go – but not for the same reasons cited by the critics.
For me, the whole direction of policing in London is wrong. I was privileged to spend most of the years 1991 – 1997 in New York City, and saw at first hand how Rudy Giuliani and various excellent police chiefs turned the City around, with a tough attitude towards crime and a zero tolerance approach. For more on what I learned from New York, see the article I wrote for Conservative Way Forward's Forward magazine last year.
What irritates me most about the Met is how often they have copied New York – not unfortunately from the Giuliani or post-Giuliani era, but from the years before he became Mayor in 1993!
For me, the most compelling feature of this is how victims of crime, in the eyes of pre-1993 New York and present day London, only have themselves to blame. This is the message sent out when the police invest resources – human and financial – into telling the public not to leave their windows open in summer, not to leave valuables on display and so on.
Compare this for one. In his 1993 campaign, Giuliani spoke with conviction about the New York phenomenon of the "No Radio" signs left prominently displayed in car windows. Giuliani said: "this is essentially a negotiation with the worst members of society, a plea to thieves: ‘Don’t victimise me – that other car doesn’t have a sign, go take his radio.’" For Giuliani, this was a sign of a city where the people had no confidence that the law would be enforced, and were left to plead with the criminals.
Now compare this with today’s Met. Take a look at this, which the Met were planning to launch in my constituency in conjunction with the local Council in 2006. The signs were all ready to go, and the initiative was only nipped in the bud by the change in control of the Council.
Now, sensible people don’t leave valuables in their cars. But for the police to be telling you that sends entirely the wrong message – it can be paraphrased to "the law is not enforced in this area." We desperately need new thinking at the Met - which needs a new Commissioner and a new Mayor.
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