POLICE AND POLITICIANS BOTH LOVE A CRIME WAVE

Election campaigns start with greed and end with fear. This past week we
have had the greed. Now for the fear, visceral, irrational and shrill.
Last night's Tory election broadcast attacking parole was contemptible
and out of character with British politics. Nothing seems beneath the
Tories in their current despair. Nothing is better designed to alienate
the electoral middle ground.

Already this week the Police Federation has been rattling its cage and
demanding money with menaces. Tomorrow Ann Widdecombe will utter
bloodcurdling warnings of murder, rape and pillage under Labour. The
next day the never-outflanked-on-the-right Jack Straw will doubtless
pledge torture chambers, chain gangs, cattle prods and armed police. And
that, as Gibbon would say, covers only the lesser penalties. I still
predict that our intellectually bankrupt Home Office will soon contrive
to "reopen the question" of capital punishment. When Margaret Thatcher
claimed to have conquered the union menace, she told only half the
truth. She hardly touched the power of the trade unions in the public
and quasi-public sector. She was as craven as Labour to the doctors, the
lawyers, the farmers, the police and other professional groups. Hospital
waiting lists are a function of doctors' restrictive practices, soaring
legal costs a function of the barrister's scam. When a head teacher
recently had a class of 94 pupils, the reason was not teacher shortage
but that two teachers were absent "at a seminar" during teaching hours.
This is professional truancy.

For truancy, the police take the biscuit. Some 2,000 are this week "on
duty" at a Blackpool conference. With an election in the offing, the
Police Federation told the press: "We can't stop crime." Community
policing is now apparently out of the question because of falling police
numbers, while violent crimes have "doubled" since this Government came
to office. There followed a flurry of stories demanding that Labour
promise a 10 per cent rise in police numbers to 140,000, "to police the
country effectively". According to the union's chairman, Fred Broughton,
Britain's inner cities are being left to security firms and bouncers.

Nobody denies the potency of fear of crime. When I am burgled or hear of
friends being mugged, I want terrible things to happen to the culprit. I
will out-gallop Jack Straw to the head of the lynch mob. But the task of
politics is to channel such personal emotion into sensible policy, not
to heighten and exploit it.

The continued drip-feed into the crime debate of "recorded crime"
statistics has no basis in reality. These figures simply reflect the
ever-changing recording practice of police stations, nowadays dictated
by government policy especially on drugs. There must be a million drug
"crimes" every night in London. How many are found, recorded and
"cleared up" is entirely an executive decision.

Hence the steady rise in recorded crimes (which are only a fraction of
real crime) throughout the "crime wave" era of the 1980s, when the
Thatcher Government was increasing police numbers, and why recorded
crimes fell during the 1990s, when an exasperated Kenneth Clarke left
the Home Office for the Treasury and savaged police budgets. There
followed the closure of some 600 police stations, including a halving of
the number in London. Every police station closed is said to yield a 10
per cent drop in local recorded crime because of the added inconvenience
of notification. Fewer police record fewer crimes, more police record
more.

The latest instance of this nonsense was the "fall" during the last
election, followed by a sudden surge in 1998. The reason was a shift in
counting rules (eg, how many thefts equals one crime) slid through after
the 1997 election. The Audit Commission pointed out that the change
would increase the total "substantially" and trends should "be treated
with caution". This was ridiculous. A proper statistician would have
thrown the "trends" in the nearest bin. Yet the press and politicians
would not be deprived of their trends and declared a new crime wave.
What can be said in the face of such officially inspired garbage? I
might as well suggest that the quickest way to cut crime is to cut
police numbers.

The only reliable indicator of crime is the British Crime Survey, which
is immune from the grubby hands of police statisticians. It reveals far
more crime, but with less wild political gyrations. The last survey in
October showed that almost all categories of crime had fallen since the
mid-1990s, after rising gently for two decades. Trends were boringly in
line with the size of the dominant age group for crime, 16-25. The
recent fall is in line with declining teenage numbers and with a marked
improvement in car and telephone security. (Why Mr Straw should take
credit for my new car alarm defeats me, but he will.) An upsurge in the
robbery figure was entirely due to a rash of mobile phone thefts among a
group of younger teenagers not previously counted. Yet such statistical
blips are exploited by politicians and police lobbyists to generate
public fear beyond all reason. It is statistical terrorism.

Crime will always be with us, buried deep in the social psychology of a
free and enterprising society where there must always be losers. But
fear of crime is different. It can and must be combated. Zero tolerance
is a controversial topic but, having witnessed its presence in New York
and its absence in London, I have no doubt that it should be at the root
of the police mission. The task is to convey to the public a sense of
general security and to limit the abuse of public spaces. We like having
police on the streets. We are comfortable at the sight of them,
preferring it to some marginal uplift in Home Office league tables of
999-call times and clear-up rates. This means more police officers on
foot.

There is no point hiring more constables for this purpose until existing
forces can use them productively. They are not doing so now. They are
using police, under pressure from Mr Straw's idiotic and dangerous
performance indicators, to respond fast to 999 calls and fill in league
table forms. Public satisfaction with response times is 85-90 per cent.
They are not required to have 90 per cent of officers on the street, as
in New York. Public satisfaction with beat policing is appalling, in
places as low as 15 per cent. Because it does not "count" it is not
considered important.

As a result, comparisons beloved of the Police Federation with policing
levels abroad are completely meaningless. Like is not comparable with
like. British police hate the beat, preferring a warm office or a
speeding car. A London policeman recently sued for UKP 400,000 for the
"stress" of being told to go back on the beat after a career of deskwork
and looking after VIPs. He was not sacked, but allowed to retire "on the
sick" with full pension rights.

I live in London, home to an astonishing 20 per cent of the 125,000
policemen and women in England and Wales. I once telephoned New Scotland
Yard to make a "missing persons" report on the entire Metropolitan
Police. By adding up the officers supposedly allocated to local police
divisions, one third of whom were anyway off duty, I was still 20,000
policemen short. Where were they? There was no one to return my call.

Westminster council protests that there were only 13 police officers
covering the whole West End. At the same time there are at least 40
"guarding" Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and Parliament. Sir John
Stevens, London's police chief, has claimed that his force is "in
crisis". But the crisis is not of numbers but of absenteeism. It is a
crisis of management. Britain's police forces make old Fleet Street
managers seem like Scrooges.

There is nothing in the statistics that justifies "crime as an election
issue". There is a strong case for restoring discretion to local police
committees, allowing them to fix their own police rate as in the United
States. There is a case for defying both the union and Whitehall's
performance indicators, which kill dozens of citizens each year in wild
police chases (or "Jack Straws"). Zero tolerance should be a matter
between a police force and its local electorate.

That will not happen. Crime is now a nationalised industry, and too good
an election issue to leave alone. So damn reality and keep the crime
wave rolling.