Giuliani's message of hope for capital

Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani will this week bring a message of hope to Londoners that violent crime can be banished from the city's streets.

He will meet Home Secretary David Blunkett and Tony Blair to propose a "zero tolerance" policy as the cure for the spiral of violence that has seen robberies, muggings and gangland gun battles up by a third in less than a year.

Senior Scotland Yard officers are comparing London's crime wave with New York in the Eighties. Mr Guiliani inherited a city overrun with violent crime when he took office in 1994.

Among the measures to be proposed by Mr Giuliani, who will also hold talks with Ken Livingstone, is the introduction of the "broken windows" method of policing, where small crimes are targeted to prevent more serious offences. The first targets under "broken windows" were beggars and "squeegee merchants" along with vandals, graffiti artists and small time drug dealers.

While police in London do little more than record many burglaries and car break-ins, Mr Giuliani has stressed the dangers of allowing even petty criminals to escape. "We can't ever think like that again," he told New York police chiefs two years ago. "Because if we do crime will go up in the city and quality of life will deteriorate."

In the eight years he was mayor, crime plummeted in New York. Murders fell by nearly two thirds and robbery and burglaries by nearly half.

Latest New York figures show murders in January dropped by 40 per cent to 33 killings, with most other crimes down by nearly 10 per cent. The figures mean that Londoners are now six times more likely to be robbed or attacked in the streets as New Yorkers.

Phone theft heads rise in crime