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Policing in London

The hon. Lady needs to take account of the fact that the formula by which officers are allocated was drawn up before 1997. Secondly, we in Wandsworth have the benefit of the territorial support group—a pool of officers who go from borough to borough and area to area. The third point that the hon. Lady needs to take into account is that London now has 5,500 more police officers. Fourthly, every single one of the 20 Wandsworth wards has benefited from having one sergeant, two officers and at least three CSOs. The Tooting ward, which I represented for 12 years, has one sergeant, two officers and seven CSOs. Fifthly, when emergencies occur, officers from other boroughs come to Wandsworth’s aid. Last Saturday, I commemorated workers memorial day by attending the unveiling of a plaque in Battersea, and while there I was reminded that police officers from other parts of London came to Battersea’s aid in its time of need, back in September 2006. Sixthly, the hon. Lady needs to explain the following situation. The Mayor of London and the GLA—both elected by the people—can decide, via the MPA, how officers are allocated. However, the Merton and Wandsworth GLA member, who is a Conservative, fails to be the advocate and champion of Merton and Wandsworth that I hope a Labour GLA member would. However, I digress with my six points. I could have gone on much longer, but I know that time is short. It is also worth discussing safer neighbourhood teams. I welcome the congratulations for the Mayor expressed on both sides of the Chamber, save by the only Member who has spoken who does not represent a London constituency. I do not blame him for that as it is not his fault. It is worth bearing in mind that the Mayor stood on a manifesto to introduce safer neighbourhood teams and he has implemented that commitment at least a year ahead of time. In Tooting, all seven wards have a full complement of safer neighbourhood teams. In Tooting ward, we have the excellent Sergeant Lisa Hurley, who leads from the front. She walks the streets, is on first-name terms with people and is putting the bobby back on the beat. When my constituents, neighbours and friends comment on how nice it is to see an officer on the street, they do not point out that his or her uniform is not the same colour as that of a police officer, or that the number of pips on the shoulder is different. They welcome the uniformed presence and it has made a big difference to the perception of safety in Tooting. Parts of Tooting do have problems with antisocial behaviour. We have laws to give the police more powers to take action against problems, and contact points, funded by the Mayor, in hotspots where they are needed. There are problems in the town centre and I hope that we will soon have a dispersal zone, so that the minority of young people who cause problems can be dispersed, and a contact point for the police on the high street, which could be of great benefit. Another example is in Earlsfield and Wandsworth Common, where Sergeant Ben Bond is working with local sports clubs and residents to ensure that young people have constructive things to do. At school times, police officers cycle up and down streets around secondary schools. Young people are bigger than they were when I was young and some people can feel intimidated by them—sometimes with justification. Low level antisocial behaviour—not necessarily criminal—can be deterred by a uniformed male or female police officer or PCSO cycling up and down the road, and that can be a huge benefit to the area. It is also worth noting that the Mayor not only fulfilled a manifesto commitment, but ensured that it happened at least a year ahead of time. My third point relates to crime figures. Crime in London has fallen. There are those pedants who play numerical gymnastics and claim that using this or that criterion proves that crime has not fallen or has not fallen fast enough. However, the official figures show that overall crime is down for the fourth year in a row. It fell by 6.3 per cent. last year, meaning that there were 62,000 fewer victims of crime. The hon. Member for Putney made the point that each crime is 100 per cent. to the person involved. That is true, but 62,000 people have been 100 per cent. prevented from becoming the victims of crime. As she said, every crime is very serious. Well, 62,000 very serious incidents have been prevented by the policies and investment of this Government and the Mayor. The number of violent crimes fell by 6.1 per cent. over the past 12 months in London. There were fewer hate crimes last year compared to the year before. Total recorded crimes fell by 12 per cent. between 1999-2000—I use that baseline because that was the year before we had a Mayor—and 2006-07. In Wandsworth, the figures are equally impressive. If one compares the 12 months to December 2005 with the 12 months to December 2006, total crime is down, as is violence against the person, robbery, domestic crime, racist crime and homophobic crime. Those are real crimes that have been prevented and real victims who have escaped the pain and suffering that they would have experienced. Not only are we stopping crimes taking place, but the presence of the safer neighbourhood teams is contributing to a decrease in the fear of crime and of becoming a victim of crime. My fourth point concerns diversity. We need to remind ourselves of how the police in this great city were perceived 20 years ago, and even more recently. Lessons have been learned from the murder of Stephen Lawrence, from the Macpherson inquiry and from other racist murders and, as a result, the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 places a positive duty in respect of race relations on all public authorities, including the Metropolitan police. Indeed, the Met now has a race equality scheme, which it observes in both letter and spirit, and its recruitment and retention have both improved. People remember the sus laws in force before 1984, and the stop-and-search approach was an improvement on them. We now have stop and account, and the hon. Members for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) and for Richmond Park both noted that young black people now have more positive experiences of the police, instead of the negative ones of the past. Those young black people know that the relationship between the police and the public goes both ways. That relationship is not always negative, because the police are seen as the public’s partners—a perception that means that people who might have been victims of police misconduct in the past are today more willing to come forward and report crimes. In the end, partnership working is what policing by consent is all about. For the first time ever, we have an independent police complaints system. One of the biggest complaints made by alleged victims of police misconduct in the past used to be that the police investigated themselves. All that has changed, thanks to this Labour Government, and the improvements in terms of representation and diversity mean that the people who police our great city represent the city that they police. No debate about policing in London can escape the question of terrorism. This week, the long-term investigation that was Operation Crevice achieved a great success. Huge amounts of resources had been invested in it; dozens if not hundreds of lives were saved, and five convictions were secured. That was a victory for due process and the whole anti-terrorist operation, but there is no escaping the fact that our security services have to succeed every time if they are to keep us safe, whereas a terrorist need succeed only once to inflict huge suffering on us. We saw what happened on 7/7, when we were not so successful. Over the past couple of years, our community police officers have done a fantastic job in building bridges between the various communities that live in London. At the Tooting Islamic centre there is a police contact centre, where police officers are able to meet young Muslims and black people in a positive way. The youngsters can get their property marked and report crime, and they can talk to the police about local matters. The centre does a wonderful job, and is a huge boon for the local community. However, there have been two anti-terrorist raids in Tooting in the past couple of years, with squads such as SO13 making arrests in the middle of the night. After a few days, though, everyone arrested was released without charge, and it is clear that such incidents can have a negative impact on the local community. The local police had done wonderful work over the preceding weeks, months and years in building up relationships but that can be undone if the aftermath of such raids is not conducted sensitively. Just as recruitment and retention among community support officers and police officers have been improved, so we must improve recruitment and retention among the specialist officers dealing with anti-terrorist operations. Notions about policing by consent and by partnership are no less relevant in counter-terrorism operations than they are in other areas of police work. As a south London MP, I cannot escape talking about problems to do with guns, knives and gangs. People who do not come from the area assume that such problems are the only thing that happens there. For example, the manager of my parliamentary office comes from Crewe originally—I do not hold that against him—and a few weeks ago his mum and dad telephoned him because they were petrified about the fact that he was working in London. They were scared that he might be the victim of a gang, a gun or a knife. It is true that a disproportionate number of shootings and stabbings have taken place in south London, but the police deserve congratulation on the excellent work that has been done with Operation Trident and the other specialist operations. Originally, I was nervous and unconvinced about the idea that a specialist operation team should look at black-on-black crime. I am still worried about the perception that the problem affects only one part of our community. If the problem is not regarded as a mainstream one, will it receive the mainstream resources, attention and focus that it needs? We must not stigmatise young black people in certain areas as a consequence of that operation. After a shooting in south London, the BBC asked me for an interview, which I was happy to give, but the BBC would conduct it only if I agreed to stand outside the victim’s school. I explained that to do so would be terrible because it would stigmatise the school—the implication of the images would be that the school was linked to gang culture. The BBC refused to film anywhere else, so I did not give the interview. There are good projects throughout south London. In Tooting, the Yahweh Christian Fellowship is doing excellent work to counter gangs, knives and guns. It is important that we do whatever we can to help in such work, but we must not turn policing into a convoluted, cumbersome process whereby our police officers become social workers. Customer care is a problem. If the police service is really to be a service, the quality of care provided to consumers must be top rate. People should not have to wait for hours to be seen at the front desk. Phones should be answered, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park said. Police stations should be used to lock up people arrested for criminal offences, not to hold asylum seekers or as overflow prisons. As well as focusing on recorded crime, the police should pay attention to detection rates; it is important that we do not sacrifice crime detection for increased confidence in the recording of crime. Increasingly, yellow boards are put up when a crime is committed. We understand why—to persuade witnesses to come forward and report anything suspicious—but the problem is that the boards create the impression that there is loads of crime, which breeds people’s feelings of insecurity. We need to square that circle to achieve the right balance so that we find witnesses to crime without scaring people and making them think their area is more crime-filled than it really is. Accountability is important and it can prevent miscarriages of justice, but we need to streamline some of the paper trails that our police officers have to follow. Technological advances mean that some of the typing could be outsourced and police officers could use handheld PDAs—personal digital assistants—so that they can get on with that they do best. Prison overcrowding is not directly related to policing in London, but it is of concern. I speak to police officers who are increasingly frustrated that when people leave prison there is nowhere for them to go; families and friends are no longer in touch so they turn to the criminal fraternity. It is hardly surprising that the reoffending rate for people within two years of release from prison is more than 66 per cent. In conclusion, policing in London has not reached a utopian position by any stretch of the imagination. Ten years is not enough. Indeed, I question whether we will ever reach that position—Los Angeles, Chicago and New York have not achieved the utopian perfection that some people claimed for those cities. However, we have been tough on crime and the causes of crime. I do not think that Sure Start, the new deal, parenting classes, raising children out of poverty, investing in our youth services and regenerating our town centres—I could go on—are anything but dealing with the causes of crime. The other important thing is that we have dealt with crime itself. The police are grateful for the new antisocial behaviour laws, and use them. There are longer sentences where appropriate, faster justice, so that courts deal with people more quickly, and investment in CCTV. Most important for my constituents and me, we have higher numbers of community support officers and police officers in London than ever before; it is no coincidence that it came about through the partnership of a Labour Mayor and a Labour Government.