The Met needs a change in philosophy, not just leadership

Mark Field's post yesterday on the departure of Sir Ian Blair and the comments thread revealed one of politics' worst-kept secrets: that Sir Ian Blair was very unpopular amongst Conservatives. Nevertheless, I for one believe that there was no politics at all in Boris's desire to see change, and that complaints from Jacqui Smith and (God help us) Ken Livingstone simply show Labour's failure to realise that Boris really did win the election and that the London Mayor is the right democratically-accountable person to make the decision on who is in charge of the capital's policing.

More important than who is in charge, however, is how we change the Met's culture and philosophy of crime fighting.

Many commentators have talked about the New York City experience for some years now. As one example, you can read the article I wrote in Forward! magazine last year. Despite all the talk, nobody in the UK has ever implemented the lessons from New York. Crime was halved in New York under Giuliani, and has been halved again under Bloomberg. I was privileged to spend most of the years 1991 – 1997 in New York, and saw at first hand how Rudy Giuliani and various excellent police chiefs turned the city around. 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!

One of the first things that needs to go in London is the Met's habit of blaming victims of crime for their own plight, the "what do you expect if you leave valuables in your car?" approach, summed up by the distribution by the Met this summer of signs saying "no valuables in this car". Compare this with what Giuliani said in 1993 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.

I have had two appalling personal experiences with the Met in recent times that show for me how pervasive the problems are. The first was in 2004 when I walked past my neighbour's house, and the front door had clearly been forced open, and one glance inside showed that a burglary had likely occured, but there appeared to be nobody in the house. I called 999, reported the crime, and was promised that a team would be there soon, and for me to wait there. I had to go to a meeting, so 15 or 20 minutes later, when no team had arrived, I called again and told them I would have to go soon. I had become an irritant to them, and was then warned that I could be in trouble "for leaving the scene of a crime." The experience would have led most people to conclude that it was better just not to bother, and to let one neighbour's house be turned over again and again until he came home. By the way, you come across stories like this all the time in the comment pages of the Evening Standard, mainly written ironically by despairing left-wing journalists.

The second experience I had was on the evening of the 7/7 bombings in 2005. I was in the House of Commons and took a call from a senior officer in the Met to "update me on the ongoing situation". His opening gambit was that "the (Parsons Green) mosque had been secured". "Secured from what?" I asked. "Secured just in case of attack," I was told, even though there was no evidence of any intent. I was then told there had been "one arrest". Naively, I thought it must be an accomplice of the bombers, but the senior officer explained that a drunken man had shouted racially-charged abuse at an Indian shopkeeper on Fulham Road. This was an awful thing to happen, but in the context of 56 dead and 700 injured it was a surreal moment, as I realised that the purpose of the phone call was not to update me on the investigation into the bombings, but to give me a round-up of local "community cohesion" and how well we were all rallying round, how the racists would not divide us and so on. I thanked the officer, and asked "And what about the bombing victims - are any of them for example my constituents, and is there any word on who is responsible?". I was told that on all this he didn't know and that it was "too early to tell," but said he would call back in a few days with news of a forthcoming meeting with local religious leaders (by which he meant the mosque again).

In Hammersmith & Fulham, we have been trying a new approach to crime, which you can also read about in the Forward! magazine linked to above, written by Cllr Greg Smith. We are all hoping that the change at the top will not just be a new face, but a new willingness to face up to the need to change the Met's whole approach.

One of the first things that needs to go in London is the Met's habit of blaming victims of crime for their own plight, the "what do you expect if you leave valuables in your car?" approach, summed up by the distribution by the Met this summer of signs saying "no valuables in this car". Compare this with what Giuliani said in 1993 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.

I have had two appalling personal experiences with the Met in recent times that show for me how pervasive the problems are. The first was in 2004 when I walked past my neighbour's house, and the front door had clearly been forced open, and one glance inside showed that a burglary had likely occured, but there appeared to be nobody in the house. I called 999, reported the crime, and was promised that a team would be there soon, and for me to wait there. I had to go to a meeting, so 15 or 20 minutes later, when no team had arrived, I called again and told them I would have to go soon. I had become an irritant to them, and was then warned that I could be in trouble "for leaving the scene of a crime." The experience would have led most people to conclude that it was better just not to bother, and to let one neighbour's house be turned over again and again until he came home. By the way, you come across stories like this all the time in the comment pages of the Evening Standard, mainly written ironically by despairing left-wing journalists.

The second experience I had was on the evening of the 7/7 bombings in 2005. I was in the House of Commons and took a call from a senior officer in the Met to "update me on the ongoing situation". His opening gambit was that "the (Parsons Green) mosque had been secured". "Secured from what?" I asked. "Secured just in case of attack," I was told, even though there was no evidence of any intent. I was then told there had been "one arrest". Naively, I thought it must be an accomplice of the bombers, but the senior officer explained that a drunken man had shouted racially-charged abuse at an Indian shopkeeper on Fulham Road. This was an awful thing to happen, but in the context of 56 dead and 700 injured it was a surreal moment, as I realised that the purpose of the phone call was not to update me on the investigation into the bombings, but to give me a round-up of local "community cohesion" and how well we were all rallying round, how the racists would not divide us and so on. I thanked the officer, and asked "And what about the bombing victims - are any of them for example my constituents, and is there any word on who is responsible?". I was told that on all this he didn't know and that it was "too early to tell," but said he would call back in a few days with news of a forthcoming meeting with local religious leaders (by which he meant the mosque again).

In Hammersmith & Fulham, we have been trying a new approach to crime, which you can also read about in the Forward! magazine linked to above, written by Cllr Greg Smith. We are all hoping that the change at the top will not just be a new face, but a new willingness to face up to the need to change the Met's whole approach.