Story tools

Print this article

Email to a friend

Your feedback

The crescendo of political rhetoric on crime and policing is reaching new heights but is any political leader taking a serious stance? They seem to be more playing to the gallery, says Rupert George highlighting his thoughts on the issue.

I have been stopped by the police many times, although never when wearing a suit. On very few occasions has this been a civil interaction. I am never impolite or aggressive, they are after all only doing their job. I can respect this, however the police have rarely shown me any respect. In my opinion, they have nearly always brought a confrontational and aggressive stance to the interaction. I am not having a go at the police. Stopping and searching people on the street is a difficult interaction to manage. Our streets clearly have some very unstable aggressive individuals on them, the police should be expected to seek to protect themselves, to approach the public with caution.

The figures on stop and search don’t give an indication of the socio-economic background of those stopped. We don’t really know how many middle class black teenagers are stopped compared to their white peers. We don’t really know what proportion of white teenagers stopped, are from poor backgrounds. Given the anecdotal evidence, the City of London Police are happy to ignore the huge amounts of cocaine consumed by young men in the City. Stop and search is an indiscriminate tool, often used in a discriminating fashion.

The nature of stop and search, its impact upon community cohesion and the police’s ability to deliver community policing has long been recognised. Stop and search is a cheap fix that clearly has many drawbacks. Creating strong links between the police and the community is clearly an expensive yet real solution to crime. The bobby should be back on the beat. Tough policing requires adequate resources. The zero tolerances policing in New York, wasn’t a policy built around heavy-handed stop and search. It was built around having adequate resources and an ethnically integrated police force that could go in to all communities in the city as part of those communities. Sheer police presence bought down the level of crime. In this country a lack of resources has lead to housing estates not being adequately policed.

Stop and search is used where the police have lost contact with a community, hence it’s inappropriate use in Brixton in the early 1980s. It pushes the poor and the young into a negative relationship with the police. The huge growth of an “underclass” that took place under the last Conservative Government, has been an issue that the present Labour Government has consistently attempted to tackle. A difficult task, the killing of Rhys Jones serves to highlight how scant an impact these initiatives have had on crime in the last ten years. SureStart and the other initiatives that have taken place, have made a positive impact upon many lives, they should not be described as failures, despite the difficulty of getting help to those who need it most.

The real failure that the killing of Rhys Jones serves to highlight, is the availability of fire arms to teenagers. Deborah Orr high-lighted in her excellent piece in the Independent this week the 23% of south Londoners voting in the South London Press poll, who didn’t think parents should "take responsibility for gun crime kids". As another South Londoner, I am in full agreement with that 23%. The arrival of guns in our communities is not the fault of parents or the black community or hip hop. It is the fault of inadequate border policing and a consequent lack of impact upon mostly “white” organised crime bringing the guns into the country. This failure, is due to limited resources, not a failure of a liberal policy on an inclusive society. We are better of with evidence-based policy making, than the knee jerk grand standing of politicians desperately watching the polls.

When our society was broken in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the police were forced into pitch battles with strikers and rioters. I cannot believe that they want to return to that sorry state of affairs. We are still trying to clean up the mess that was made at the time.