http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives2004/comment/0,15018,1322592,00.html
Actually, I think this warrants being posted in full...
A Scary Night In Brixton
When Michael Howard went on the prowl for a quick-hit crime story he didn't let the facts get in his way
Polly Toynbee
Friday October 8, 2004
The Guardian
The police in Brixton are outraged. The community in Brixton is outraged and the Community Consultative Group, which links police and people together, has written a furious letter to Michael Howard.
It was this section in Howard's conference speech that caused the trouble: "Three weeks ago on a Saturday night, I went out on the streets of Brixton. I saw the problem their community is up against. In two hours we didn't meet a single policeman, not one. This was inner-city London just before midnight, on a Saturday night. No wonder people feel the police have become distant and remote."
Leave aside the unpleasant "black mugger" racist overtones in choosing Brixton in the first place, just look at his failure - yet again - to do the most rudimentary research. A cursory phone call would have revealed the excellent state of genuine community policing here. (Did he even forget that Lambeth is now run by his own Tories, together with the Lib Dems?) There were plenty of police out and it was a very low crime night: one robbery, one burglary and one serious incident all that Saturday night. Michael Howard must have been one of the scarier midnight things roaming around Electric Avenue.
Here is why they are so angry with him. Crime in Brixton has been dropping like a stone. In the last year alone robbery is down by 21.5% - 330 fewer street robberies. Burglary is down by 16.8% and car crime by 21.9%. There were 2,000 fewer crimes this year and that comes on top of three years of falling figures: robbery dropped by 36% the previous year, remarkable results year after year.
This is what Detective Chief Inspector Glynn Jones of Brixton said to me with angry relish - firmly on the record: "Basically, Mr Howard, go and shove it. If you want a lesson in leadership and delivery you could get it from no one better than Lambeth borough Commander Richard Quinn, awarded the Queen's Police Medal and one of the masterminds behind the London-wide Operation Safer Streets".
At the last community consultative meeting, an elderly Brixton resident got up to say he had never in 50 years known the place feel safer - and he was outraged by Howard's ignorant hit-and-run attack.
Lee Jasper, black activist and spokesman for the Community Consultative Group, describes how well things work. When the police go out to arrest a big drug dealer, he goes too, together with others, to reassure local people. They hand out leaflets to explain what's going on. "As the police frog-march the guy away there is not a murmur. When people see us with the police, they start to say it's a good thing, to get rid of the trouble they've had in the area."
Now the community has taken over a private house impounded from a convicted drug dealer and turned it into a mini-police station and community centre. "This is the best partnership and Quinn is the third of three excellent commanders we've had here," Jasper says. Where the police knew of 85 crack houses a year ago, now they think there are only five left.
So into all this success stalks Michael Howard one dark night, on the prowl for a quick-hit cheap crime story, clueless about any of this. If that is Howard's idea of a new era of political honesty to engender new trust from the people, forget it.
Crime is the best reason why politicians often well deserve the deepest distrust. They use it shamelessly to frighten the living daylights out of voters. They do it worst in opposition - Labour was shameless too - but they are scarcely better in office. The Tories this week were at their most unscrupulous: "Crime is out of control!" Howard said, lying through his teeth and knowing it. (But note how this barrister weaselled the truth: he didn't actually say "crime is rising").
It wouldn't matter much if this were just ordinary ya-boo political mendacity, part of the game. But in stirring up crime panics, politicians are reckless of the real unhappiness they spread. It's not just fear, but that wretched, life-sapping sense that society is beyond saving, all is decay and sadness. It makes people depressed and pessimistic; it is the wicked thing that politicians do quite routinely. And then they wonder where "trust" went. If they want trust, they should agree the base line on crime figures and call a truce on scaring the public witless.
And witless the public is, through no fault of its own. Two-thirds of people think crime increased in the last two years, half of them think it increased "a lot", according to the British Crime Survey.
As attentive Guardian readers should know by now, nationally the risk of being a victim of a crime has fallen by 40% since 1995 - the longest continuous fall in crime since 1898. Burglary has fallen by 39% and car crime by 31%. Violence has dropped too, by 24%.
The media and opposition parties get away with pretending it is not so, by quoting the police recorded figures, which have been rising due to improvements requiring the police to record more, not less, crime. All reputable, non-partisan crime experts think that the British Crime Survey findings are the ones that more accurately measure the way things are moving, even if no figures ever catch the whole truth. (The BCS asks a sample more than 30 times the size of an ordinary opinion poll if they suffered from crime in the last year: that picks up a far larger total number of crimes than a reliance on the vagaries that determine which crimes get reported to the police.)
Of course the arch villain is the media. Newspaper sales and television ratings thrive on fear of crime: the wilful misleading of the public knows no bounds. As a prank the Sun has just sent a removal van to the high court to remove Lord Woolf, in protest at new punishments set out by the Sentencing Guidelines Council. How are Sun readers to know that this council - on which sits Victim Support and other lay members - is bringing not leniency but consistency and transparency to sentencing? Yet again the public is encouraged to think nothing works, the law is mad, and criminals go unpunished in this most punitive of nations.
But there is no need to feel sorry for the government if its good crime figures are unknown. Whenever they are likely to be reported, Blair and Blunkett love to rail against yobs and louts and anti-social behaviour, as if the country really was going to the dogs. Blunkett joined the tabloid pack the other day by attacking a judge's decision to let a suspected terrorist out on bail. This playing to the press means people never learn the true facts about crime and punishment. The way crime is used and abused for political gain is one of the worst excrescences of democracy. Let's have no more crocodile tears from politicians about loss of trust - until they start to talk honestly about law and order.
polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
) and walk up to the Fridge; on the first occasion, when we got a little lost, people were friendly and helpful. At no time have we felt we needed some visible police presence.
