Street Crime: Can police do more?

Talk about it

At first sight, the statistics on street crime that Met Commissioner Sir John Stevens delivered to MPs sounded impressive. His officers in London are arresting more street robbers than at any time in history, Sir John told the home affairs select committee. Detection rates had gone up 26.6 per cent compared to the previous year, and the police chief promised: "We are certainly on top of the job."

However, a closer look at the statistics reveals a completely different story. Police may have arrested 26 per cent more suspects so far this year (ending in April 2002), but figures for 2000-2001 show the improvement comes from a virtual standing start. As the table below reveals, barely one in 20 muggers were being caught in parts of London in the 12 months to April last year.

Sir John spoke of taking the battle to the muggers, telling how his 500-strong robbery squad would target the most prolific offenders using surveillance, extra police patrols, more CCTV on bus routes and extra resources for forensic efforts to gather suspects' DNA.

But his words will not convince the Londoners mugged at a rate of 183 per day in December last year. The public's fears may well be out of all proportion to the likelihood of becoming a victim, but there is little confidence a hard-pressed, over-stretched police force can protect them from predatory criminals.

Most people want more bobbies on the beat and commentators point repeatedly to New York, where a similar-sized city has 42,000 police compared to London's 26,500 - that massive gulf in personnel comes despite the fact London spends £1.9 billion on policing while New York has a budget of £1.7 billion.

There is no denying the sense of urgency within Scotland Yard about street robbery. In a four-day period last week 1,300 people were arrested, 70 prolific street robbers charged - including two 13-year-old girls - and overall street crime was down 10 per cent on the previous week.

But as the detection rate table shows, police face an uphill battle. In Lambeth, the street robbery capital of Britain, only 265 out of 4,691 offences led to an arrest. Even in Lewisham, the borough where police had the best record, fewer than one in four crimes led to an arrest, and the average for the capital as a whole was a clear-up rate of just 11.9 per cent.

Latest data supports the view that police have raised their game. In Lambeth, where a robbery happened every 73 minutes in December, the arrest rate has more than doubled since last year, but still only hits 12 per cent.

Glen Smyth, as chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation a spokesman for London's frontline officers, says his members are too thin on the ground, and are still reluctant to use their stop-and-search powers after the Macpherson Report into the Stephen Lawrence case branded the force institutionally racist. But the picture is more complicated. Street robbery is one of the most difficult crimes to detect because muggers rarely leave forensic evidence behind.

And normal police intelligence methods like surveillance of known suspects have been of limited value because, as Sir John told MPs, three quarters of the teenage offenders his officers arrest turn out to have no previous convictions.

Sir John is in no doubt the best way forward is prevention: to "get in upstream and stop the crimes being committed", as he puts it. His aim of targeting the 320 most prolific offenders, coupled with the mobile phone industry's moves to make handsets more traceable and less attractive to thieves, could offer a glimmer of hope.

However, the worry in Whitehall and Scotland Yard is the disturbing sense that everything has been tried and nothing works for very long.

Numerous academic studies of London street robbery in the past two decades suggest police can make a short-term impact but struggle to get on top of the problem for long. A Home Office study in the late Eighties proposed four points for action: intensive policing; education of offenders about the harm they cause to victims; "social interventions" to improve opportunities for potential criminals; and publicity to help people in high-crime areas reduce the risk of being a victim.

Three years on a follow-up study described how mugging fell for several years after a sustained rise of six per cent a year from the mid-Seventies to the late Eighties, when 36,000 offences a year were committed in London. It concluded that considerable inroads into street crime were possible, but at some cost to policecommunity relations in areas like Brixton where the atmosphere was already strained.

But by the mid-Nineties the Met's creeping gains had been lost. A fresh initiative - Operation Eagle Eye - was launched in 1995 at a time when Home Office analysts said "the incidence of street robbery has increased significantly, while clear-up rates have remained static".

By 1998, though, a gloomy Home Office report said that in spite of early success in controlling street crime, robbery was back on the rise. Initial improvements in detection were not maintained and there was evidence of muggers simply moving from heavily policed areas into neighbouring zones.

And as police recruitment problems reached crisis levels, it was clear the Met's ability to be pro-active was seriously eroded.

Today's tactics are strikingly similar to previous operations and if London is to fight back now, the latest drive against street robbery will have to be more than just a flash in the pan.