When It Comes to Crime, London Beats New York

It’s so hard to believe that no one is reporting it. Even the American media, so quick to attack Donald Trump for anything and everything, has missed the story.

The news, from the London Telegraph, tells us that London has surpassed New York in crime. The British capital is more dangerous than my city:

London is now more crime ridden and dangerous than New York City, with rape, robbery and violent offences far higher on this side of the Atlantic.

The latest statistics, published earlier this week, revealed that crime across the UK was up by 13 per cent, with a surge in violence in the capital blamed for much of the increase.

President Trump tweeted that the root cause of the crime wave was the lax British attitude toward Muslim immigrants. British Labour Party leaders were sorely discommoded by the thought. 

One might say that it has something to do with the notoriously weak-kneed London mayor, Sadiq Khan. Then again, Bill de Blasio is not exactly a stickler for law and order. And yet, de Blasio’s police commissioner Bill Bratton held the same job under Mayor Giuliani, when the city tried a new way to attack crime, a way that worked very well.

The Telegraph reports that New Yorkers can take a small consolation from the fact that their city is still leading London in homicides:

Criminal justice experts insisted rising crime in the UK, and particularly London, was more to do with the way the city was policed and blamed the reduction in neighbourhood patrols across the capital.

While both London and New York have populations of around 8 million, figures suggest you are almost six times more likely to be burgled in the British capital than in the US city, and one and a half times more likely to fall victim to a robbery.

London has almost three times the number of reported rapes and while the murder rate in New York remains higher, the gap is narrowing dramatically.

Now, the British are studying New York policing methods, to see what they can do to improve their city. That idea contains its own special irony:

But in the mid-1990s spiralling crime rates in New York - sparked by the crack cocaine epidemic - resulted in radical a new approach being adopted by the city's police department.

Under the leadership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and police commissioner, Bill Bratton, the NYPD introduced a zero tolerance approach to low level crime and flooded problem areas with patrols.

The force also put a huge amount of emphasis on community policing in order to build bridges between the police and members of the public.

As a result the murder plummeted from a high in 1990 of over 2,000 to a record low of 335 last year.

London’s Metropolitan Police took an opposite tack. They decided to ignore small infractions and to focus on more heinous crimes. They ended up with more of both:

But the last decade has seen the Metropolitan Police move away from the neighbourhood policing model and low level in favour of pursuing more serious offences.

Last week it emerged that Scotland Yard would not even bother investigating a large number of low level offences as part of a major cost cutting drive.

In addition a huge amount of police resources have been poured into high profile and politically sensitive cases, such as a the flawed VIP child abuse inquiry and the phone hacking inquiry.

At the same time crime rates in London have been creeping up and the latest statistics are likely to increase pressure of Met bosses to reassess their policing priorities.