The Mayor should lead London's crime fight

Ever since the New Year the headlines have been relentlessly depressing. Read them and weep. Four men murdered during the holidays. A girl shot in the head for her mobile phone. Two girls raped by bogus minicab drivers. Street-crime figures hitting 5,000 a month. When a senior police officer warns that with so many officers assigned to anti-terrorist duties post 11 September, the Met is being overwhelmed - as Deputy Commissioner Ian Blair did a fortnight ago - surely it is time for someone to push the panic button. But who?

In New York, the answer would be simple. Indeed, it was in 1993 when Rudolph Giuliani, the recently departed mayor, saw the chaos in his crime-blighted city and drew an unmistakable line in the sand. The foundations of what became known as the Zero Tolerance initiative were actually laid by Giuliani's predecessor David Dinkins and the work was done by police chief Bill Bratton, but it was Giuliani who gave the political leadership.

Since 11 September we have looked in vain for civic leadership of the kind witnessed in New York. But we have also been lacking anyone with the stature and bravery to look at the crime turning London into what one writer described as a "carnival on the edge of frenzy" and say, "Enough is enough".

There is little of significance from the Mayor of London's office. Lord Harris of Haringey, the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority - the body empowered by law to impress the public's concerns upon our police - seems mute. Sir John Stevens, the Met Commissioner, switches traffic cops to anti-mugging duties and tells his officers to act like leaders, but finds them disillusioned about their status and suicidal about cuts in their budgets. None of this will do. But what can be done?

As New Yorkers bid farewell to Mayor Giuliani, they also began reading a recent academic analysis of how he and his team rescued the city from anarchy. In it, George L Kelling of the Manhattan Institute tells how a tough attitude to trivial offences led to a drop in serious offences. But it was not the inflexible doctrine perceived by many as Zero Tolerance, where all offences are pursued and Draconian punishments meted out. Instead the " Broken Windows" policy - so called to emphasise that even small offences mattered - meant many approaches were used. Police officers were as likely to issue warnings and give reminders as they were to make arrests.

One cannot gloss over the fact that some officers abused their powers. But the report claims that more than 60,000 violent crimes were prevented from 1989 to 1998. Calculating that one violent crime was prevented by every 28 misdemeanour arrests, the authors identified a five per cent reduction in crime.

They said great reliance was also placed on the Compstat computer system. This allowed local police commanders to pinpoint where and when specific crimes were being committed and to devise solutions. The objective was "a baseline expectation of public order".

Kelling witnessed an encounter which summed up the thinking behind the strategy. As an officer cautioned a youth he saw carrying an opened beer bottle, the young man protested: "What's the big deal? It's just a beer." The officer replied: "Yes, it is just a beer, but if you had been here a few years ago, and it was a little later and you were a little drunker, maybe you would have bumped into someone accidentally who also was drinking. That's how fights start and violence breaks out."

Kelling does not analyse the political fallout, but we know that for the most part Mayor Giuliani was under attack for letting the NYPD off the leash and encouraging brutality towards minorities. He did seem to turn a blind eye to examples of police misbehaviour. But even the middleclass liberals of New York were prepared to tolerate a hardline Republican mayor and a string of civil-rights controversies to see the crime rate fall.

So are there lessons for London? Maybe so. There is hope in the fact that Home Secretary David Blunkett will meet Mr Kelling in New York in the spring. A low-tech version of Compstat is already in operation, allowing Scotland Yard and borough commanders to concentrate on street-crime hot spots.

But replicating the kind of encounters on the street which made the Broken Windows initiative such a success would be difficult. The NYPD was not much loved but is not generally viewed as a hostile, alien force, which is how many communities see the Met. The problem is particularly acute in minority communities. In New York, non-whites comprise 34 per cent of the police force. Here the Met's best hope is to hit a 10 per cent target by 2004.

The fact that young black men are disproportionately involved in particular offences is a problem for many agencies and not just the police. But the police will find it hard to be more interventionist in the areas most seriously affected by those crimes without repairing fractured community relations first.

The bigger question concerns leadership. Would a Labour chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority and Mayor Livingstone, who retreats to his spiritual home on the Left at the first sign of trouble, be willing to weather the political storms a Broken Windows policy or similar would create? The signs are not good. At present neither has full responsibility for the way London is policed. Neither ever has to take full responsibility for rising crime.

We have good police officers, and after the Mayor's first budget we are getting more. We have an able Commissioner. But where is the figure of political stature to spearhead London's fight against spiralling crime? We have plenty of chiefs. What London now requires is a leader.