There is a way to tackle street crime

Two carjackings in south London and a handful more in Essex have made headlines. There's news of posh estates hiring exclusive security patrols.

Mobile phone theft seems to be everywhere and we've had some shocking, high profile episodes of carjacking. Street crime in London is reported to have risen by 35 per cent in a six month period last year. Once again it seems we're in the grip of a new orgy of crime.

But we should not despair because there are ways of tackling such crimes. Most of us think crime is caused by 'criminals' who are different sorts of people from you and me, but the more complicated truth is that the sort of mass crime that affects most people is carried out by ordinary young men, almost all of whom grow out of it. A third of all males have a criminal record by the time they reach 40, and most of the rest of us weren't caught - or, as in my case when shoplifting aged 11, weren't reported or prosecuted.

If we could only stop this opportunist crime we could free up the police to deal with the much smaller number of true social deviants, the really bad guys, the sort we appeal for on Crimewatch who show extreme violence and persistence and commit a hugely disproportionate volume of crime.

Designing out mass crime means reducing opportunity and temptation . After a tidal wave of car crime, manufacturers started fitting car radios which won't work if they're stolen, along with steering wheel locks, deadlocks on the doors, immobilisers, alarms and all the rest of it. In fact the only reason a few cars have been hijacked is that newer models are hard to steal.

It's notjust physical goods that can be better designed - by re-thinking vehicle inspection, registration and insurance systems we could cut car crime much further. So crime is declining because of this and many similar examples where opportunities have been reduced, but let's take mobile phones as the best illustration of what's gone wrong and what could so easily be put right. It happens to be close to my heart because I was one of those (one of many I might add) who saw it coming.

Before Tony Blair came to power I warned him there would be a growing problem of mobile phone thefts - the crisis was utterly predictable and utterly preventable. Mobile phones fit every category of criminal temptation. They are valuable, portable, concealable, re-usable and fashionable. The dismal truth is that the makers, distributors and insurers can all profit when a mobile phone is nicked - because the owner buys another and is more likely to step up the insurance. I tried to persuade Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, to lead a crusade against phone thefts but he declined maintaining nothing can be done.

Far from it. Orange and One2One already embody security features - which reckless of the danger to their customers Vodafone and BTCellnet won't adopt - and there are any number of technologies which with a little investment could immobilise stolen phones and even report their whereabouts. Belatedly the government has started to bang heads together, but we may have already muffed the chance to make security a key issue for the next generation of mobile phone technology.

During the last century crime grew in most countries in proportion to gross domestic product - there was simply more opportunity and temptation. The task now is to promote a policy of "polluter pays" to ensure companies cannot dump crime on society any more than they can dump toxic waste. My view is straightforward. Let those who lead us into temptation deliver us from evil.

All credit to Labour at least for setting targets in car crime, but bits and pieces, however good, don't make a coherent policy. You can tell that none of the parties has much confidence in their own strategies because none will publish overall targets for what they can achieve.

As for private police patrols, that's fine by me. After all we used to have park attendants, station porters and a small army of informal guardians which has disappeared in the name of efficiency. If rich folk want to supplement their security with alarms or men with walkie-talkies that seems no worse than buying private healthcare. I do not believe we are witnessing a great new social exclusion.

On the other hand the police are sadly underresourced and over-politicised. We need to free chief constables from dozens of 'performance indicators' and simply demand that they cut people's actual experience of crime. We need to grasp the nettle and force rationalisation on Britain's 50 different forces. We need radically to cut the paperwork in which we have swamped the police so that a simple arrest does not take an officer off patrol for the next several hours.

We need to be more systematic in shifting emphasis from detection to community policing and be more proactive about teaming from patterns of crime and disrupting the trends before they spread. We ought to have league tables of local authorities so that they really coordinate crime prevention strategies as they're supposed to do. We need to emphasise zero tolerance in the way it worked in New York, which does not mean sending litter louts to the electric chair, but redesigning the environment and working in partnership with the community on the little crimes so big crimes come down too.

Despite the attention we are now, rightly, giving to the outburst of crime on our streets, we should remember that crime in Britain is actually going down.

Never mind the official police statistics - though they too are recording an overall decline. People's actual experience of crime shows it is dropping. In the latest British Crime Survey, a sort of regular giant opinion poll, 12 per cent fewer citizens reported being hurt or having something stolen than in 2000. In fact ordinary people reported that the chance of being a victim in Britain was the lowest last year since the survey began in 1981.

And the reason crime is failing is that we are starting to do the right things even though the government is half-hearted about it and most people are unaware of it. We are starting systematically to design out crime.

Crime is not an unstoppable tidal wave. Private patrols are merely a small distraction. What we need is someone with faith and ambition to really do something about it.