Daily Mail, March 18 2002

Being ‘tough on crime’ was the sound-bite that brought Tony Blair to power. Now, it threatens to undo him. The government is deeply rattled by its conspicuous failure to bring violent crime under control and make people feel safe.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has announced yet another wheeze to reduce robberies by cracking heads together to improve detection rates and put more officers on the streets.

In fact, the problem goes far deeper than anything currently in Blunkett’s sights. The police have lost control of the streets because of a concerted effort to undermine the very idea of law and of order, a process in which a number of senior police officers are – astonishingly --themselves actively engaged.

Rank and file officers who are doing their best to hold the line against crime and disorder are being excessively ill served by their senior officers who are turning policing on its head.

What better illustration can there be than the extraordinary saga of Commander Brian Paddick? He first shot to prominence when he introduced a policy of turning a blind eye to cannabis possession in Lambeth, south London.

This should have set alarm bells ringing at the top of the Metropolitan Police. Instead, Paddick was backed. The Met could see that the Home Office had turned into a junkie’s dream, downgrading cannabis, accepting the use of drugs in clubs and generally throwing in the towel in the attempt to enforce the law.

Paddick’s next coup de théâtre was to confide to a subversive internet website that he found anarchy attractive. For this, he should have been sacked. It is hard to conceive a more direct repudiation of policing an orderly society.

For a senior police officer to say such a thing makes a mockery of the rule of law and brings the police service into disrepute. Yet the Met Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, merely gave Paddick a verbal warning.

Whereupon Paddick promptly returned to the website with the cheery message, ‘Hi guys, I’m back’, and indicating he would have to tread carefully for a while. This was a man who was taking more and more outrageous risks with his own reputation and career; indeed, he seemed to be courting his own sacking.

Now, Paddick’s former gay lover, James Renolleau, has made a series of lurid allegations about him including predatory homosexual promiscuity, public sex and drug taking. Paddick has strongly denied these claims but he has admitted that he allowed illegal drugs to be used in his home -- a criminal offence.

What kind of police service employs in a senior position -- where judgment is all-important -- a man who has such contempt for the law and who plays Russian roulette with his own career like this? What kind of society is it whose liberal intelligentsia treats such a man as a hero?

Paddick is an icon for our morally inverted, decadent times. His position is now surely untenable, even for Sir John Stevens. But whatever happens to Paddick now, the fact that such a man could be a senior police officer shows how sick this society has become.

At its root lies a collapse of belief in morality and in the law by the political and intellectual class. Faced with this, some police chiefs keep their heads down, terrified of being pilloried as prejudiced against homosexuals or other minorities.

But others are actually urging on the collapse. Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales, has said the reason drugs are illegal has been ‘lost in the mists of time’. ‘Why shouldn’t you be taking drugs?’ he asks. What’s the problem, if drug users aren’t mugging old ladies or stealing cars? According to him, it’s not drugs that are the problem but the law.

This staggering and criminal stupidity is the kind of thing one expects to hear from drug addicts or their proxies, the drug legalisers, not from a chief constable. It utterly ignores pharmacology, social history, law and the evidence of our own eyes.

Last week, the ‘Rolex robbers’ Daniel Whyte and Jason James were sent down for life after Josephine Martorana was murdered for her watch. Whyte’s mother has noted that a ‘good and caring boy’ started spiralling out of control, turning ‘thoughtless, irritable and aggressive’, after he began taking cannabis.

The problems of crime and policing won’t be addressed unless we have a cultural revolution. As the Tory home affairs spokesman Oliver Letwin observes in a speech later this week, the New York police have understood this and as a result cut crime by some 60 per cent in nine years.

They embodied their new values in two ways. The first is the ‘broken windows’ approach, which says crime cannot be separated from low level disorder and nuisance – vandalism, graffiti, abandoned cars, public urination, begging, alcoholism and, of course, all drug taking – which must all be targeted with equal vigour.

So much so, the public have a special number (311) to call to report such disorder. And as Letwin has noticed, although the New York police department doesn’t spend much more money than we do, it makes sure it goes on many more officers on the streets.

It also holds its officers transparently to account. Weekly ‘Compstat’ meetings are supplied with detailed maps showing offence patterns, arrest rates, tip-off rates, clear-up rates, gun seizures, police sickness and overtime claims– the lot. Armed with this intelligence, chief officers require divisional commanders to account for their successes or failures.

In Boston, as I myself have seen, the probation service has adapted a similar proactive philosophy. As a result, probation officers have got out from behind their desks and instead spend all day and all evening on the streets with police patrols, making sure offenders are not breaching their probation conditions.

Compare that with our pathetic attempts at tagging. Unpublished Home Office figures show that prisoners freed early with tags have committed more than 1400 fresh crimes including rapes, kidnappings and serious assaults.

The New York police and Boston probation officers have drawn a line in the sand. We appear instead to be sinking up to our necks.

For highly significantly, Chief Constable Brunstrom indicated he had been given the nod to test public reaction. More to the point, it seems the police are being used to shift public attitudes towards accepting unacceptable drug use. Why?

Now, cannabis cafés are being planned to take advantage of the collapse of law. One is earmarked for Rhyl, north Wales, prompting its deputy mayor Glyn Williams to expostulate that this ‘beggars belief’. Perhaps he might like to explore the depths of his incredulity still further with his chief constable.

In New York and in Boston, they have realised they can no longer tolerate the intolerable. Here, our drug and violent crime problems are out of control for one reason alone – we tolerate them, and our maverick police officers, decadent intelligentsia and pusillanimous politicians are part of the very problem over which they shed such crocodile tears.

Posted by admin at March 18, 2002