It’s not just about stopping the virtue signalling. It’s about cracking down on shocking gang violence.
As the appalling spate of gun murders in Liverpool has tragically shown, there is a sub-culture of violent crime in too many communities in towns and cities across the UK.
Such horrific criminality is nothing new, but the growing role of “street gangs” – willing to resort to shocking levels of violence – is. Run by adults, they use children as young as 10 to do much of their dirty work. Often drawn from dysfunctional homes, they are induced or coerced into the gangs, where they run drugs and weapons for the leadership.
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that police forces are failing to get a grip on them. Indeed, the experience in Liverpool seems to be typical. It took an outcry over the killing of a nine-year-old girl for the police to launch a crackdown. But if you deal with gangs in this way, it just doesn’t work.
Some media reports have suggested that it has been difficult to get residents to speak out about what they know of what goes on in their area. This was followed by a certain amount of disapproval about the public’s unwillingness to help the police.
Instead of tut-tutting, however, we should understand just how scared people in communities dominated by gangs feel. They know that co-operation with the police can bring swift retribution when the officers eventually withdraw. Too many areas appear to have been abandoned to violent criminals.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of an almost total failure of policing across the country. With six forces in special measures, including the Met, we have to ask whether they are being let down by their leadership, many of whom seem to be completely ignorant of the frustrations of the public and police officers alike.
At the heart of the problem is that there are too few policemen and women actually on the beat. As one front line officer put it to me, his time was too often taken up accompanying people into A&E and then waiting for them to be seen – or worse devoting hours to investigating inferred hate crimes.
Recently in my constituency, a man protecting his daughter was tragically murdered by 14-year-old children in a street gang. When I visited the area, however, I was told by shopkeepers and publicans that the neighbourhood police officers were hardly ever seen. These shopkeepers could have given them invaluable intelligence on the activities of this gang, if anyone had bothered to speak with them.
This is a scandal because neighbourhood engagement is a vital part of policing. You only have to look at the way New York runs its police force to see how much store they set by what they call beat policing. There, police, whether in a car or on foot, are expected to be at the scene of a crime in five minutes. That would be a sight to behold in London. Unlike British police officers, who find themselves bogged down by reports and bureaucracy, they also have a much simpler and quicker system.
Something must change – and quickly, before the public lose all trust in the police. It is not just about ending ridiculous “woke” policing – the bizarre phenomenon where officers uncritically adopt the slogans and mantras of political organisations such as Black Lives Matter, filming themselves bending the knee or dancing the macarena. It is about getting the basics right so that people no longer live in fear.
Some time ago, a team from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) visited places that had been blighted by street gangs but had got on top of them – everywhere from Boston and Cincinnati in the United States to Strathclyde in Scotland. The lesson the researchers learnt from this was that the police couldn’t solve the problem alone. They needed all the local services to work with them to get these young kids out of the gangs, allowing officers to crack down on the leaders.
It is positive that the Government remains committed to its plan to hire 20,000 extra police officers. But they need to be out on the streets arresting criminals, not acting like social workers, ferrying people to hospital or virtue signalling on Twitter. To regain public confidence, the police need clear leadership to prioritise enforcement – a “force” to enforce the law. Simply put, our streets need to be made safe again.