Links - 1st December 2018 (Crime in London and the UK)

London Crime Wave: City Hiring Hundreds of £150 a Day ‘Anti-Racist Police Monitors’ to ‘Promote Diversity’ - "“The skills you possess are highly prized,” the Metropolitan Police tells potential candidates for the role, which requires no qualifications nor job history besides “life experience”, “an appreciation of diversity issues”, and that applicants have lived in London for three years. A role introduced in 2003 to identify and weed out potential racists amongst police recruits, community assessors are expected to “challenge inappropriate behaviour or behaviour from colleagues and bring this to the attention of the Assessment Team”, as well as to “complete, sign and date any recorded evidence of inappropriate language or behaviour”... Taxpayers Alliance chief John O’Connell said: “We are constantly told that the Met Police needs more money to keep policing crime, but more money isn’t going to make a difference if spending priorities are completely warped... the popularity of the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, had plummeted from +22 in May to just +4 in September as public concern continued to grow over the city’s violent crime epidemic. However, the Labour mayor, who has used his office to take a strong, pro-globalist stance on “culture war” issues like feminism and to denounce U.S. President Donald J. Trump, insists the problem is solely down to police spending cuts by the Conservative government."
This will help tackle knife crime!

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, London's knife crime problem - "'The National Audit Office says it's not clear what effect police numbers reductions have had on crime... they have said there is no hard evidence and moreover other statistics show that stop and searches in the capital have fallen to 135,000 over the last year'...
'We set the Home Office to work with people across the board. Police officers, but also people working in education and healthcare, social services, and so on, to find out what was going on. We produced the serious violence strategy in April. And as a result of that very intensive piece of work, we, I'm afraid, found that the claim about police numbers does, isn't supported by the evidence of previous spikes in serious violence. So for example, in the late 2000s, there was a similar spike in violence. And there were many, many more police officers on the streets in that day and age. So I think actually what you know, when I speak to the victims of crime and to their families, they're not talking about police numbers, they want to stop our young people getting involved in violence in the first place. And that's why we're placing so much emphasis on the long term work of early intervention and prevention.'...
'Is there perhaps a correlation between what the police officers are being asked to do these days and the level of crime and you'll realise that I'm obviously talking about Sara Thornton, who is the chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council, a very serious senior police officer herself, and she is concerned that our focus is on the wrong thing at the moment. We need to redirect our focus towards violence and burglaries rather than the sorts of focus that it has, at the moment - gender based hate crime and that sort of thing, they cannot be the right priority she says, for a service that is overstretched'...
'On the wider issue of hate crime... if a young black man is killed, because of the color of his skin, that is a hate crime. And that absolutely must be investigated'...
'That is a crime anyway, if a young black man or a young white man is killed, that is murder and that is a crime. We don't need it to be a hate crime'
Maybe they'll just blame hate crimes for causing the crime wave next

Met police launch drive to balance the gender ranks - "The Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, has said she wants half of London’s officers to be women, as part of a commitment to end male domination in the ranks. With just over one in four officers, 27%, being female, the Met has launched its first recruitment drive targeting women."

London acid attack map reveals the areas of the capital too dangerous for delivery drivers because of the epidemic

More than 1,400 addresses where ambulances won't go without police protection revealed as attacks on paramedics soar - "AMBULANCE crews will not attend incidents at more than 1,400 homes in England without a police escort, shocking new figures have revealed... Around eight paramedics are subjected to a serious attack every day as they try to carry out their work saving the public."

London Cop Tells LBC: "There Are No-Go Areas" - ""Rob", currently serving in the Met Police, insisted police weren't scared, but admitted bosses had told officers to avoid wearing uniforms in certain places in the capital. He told Nick Ferrari: "There has been a time when it's been advised not to wear half-blues or uniform to and from work. "It's like damage limitation. You try to do the most you can to prevent anything bad from happening... Regarding no-go areas in London, Rob added: "With gang crime in London, there are areas which you wouldn't go into as a pair of cops in a car because of the fear of having things thrown at you when you're driving through certain estates - bottles etc."

A London murder mystery: Why are killings up? - "It was then Home Secretary, and now Prime Minister, Theresa May who rolled back stop-and-search powers for police, arguing they were being used to target ethnic minorities. The number of random searches is now a quarter of what it was in 2011, when the police conducted 1.2 million of them... the likelihood that a child under 14 will eventually commit a murder can be predicted by four factors: living in a poor neighbourhood, having low socio-economic status, having a young mother or having an unemployed one. Boys with all four were five times more likely to commit murder than others. The data make one thing impossible to ignore: It's complicated. That means solutions will not be found in simplistic formulas such as more policing or body-searching... social media is spreading violent tendencies"

London's crime is out of control – and it's strategy, not police cuts, that are to blame - "The New York Police Department (NYPD) has roughly the same amount of resources to use as Scotland Yard – 30,000 officers and budgets of £3bn a year – but has managed to get rates down significantly, with murder at a record low... Huge amounts of resources have also been invested in sorting out high-profile, political cases, such as the celebrity phone-hacking scandal, leaving the most basic police job – keeping the public safe – under neglect. The London crime wave has been exacerbated all the more by the lack of leadership from our mayor, Sadiq Khan, who simply isn’t tough enough to put the fear into London’s criminals. After all, what moped thief is going to listen to a man who spends his time pondering whether bikini adverts are dangerous? Khan’s problem is prioritisation. He pays an inordinate amount of attention to fashionable issues; making videos about feminism and discussing whether London needs more gender neutral loos, for instance. All this makes for great headlines, but leaves Britain’s young men – the ones most often roped into crime and it’s consequences – desperately uncared for. His Night Tzar, Amy Lamé, is equally biased in favour of females. One of her most-publicised initiatives has been developing a night safety charter (whatever that is) to end women’s harassment. But it’s an activity of negligence, in a way, considering men are the ones being stabbed on our streets."

Why London’s soaring murder rate is everyone’s problem | The Spectator - "The news that for two months in a row London’s murder rate has been higher than New York’s has jolted the country out of this complacency... Since the revelations about the late Jimmy Savile emerged in 2012, a great number of police resources have been consumed with investigating historic sex offences. While serious sexual offences committed in the past should not be dismissed, a moral panic has led to disproportionate attention being paid to allegations which have either proved to be fantastical — such as those against the late Sir Edward Heath — or which were simply not serious enough to have been pursued decades after the events supposedly took place. The skewed priorities of some police chiefs have been compounded by the politicised approach of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who announced her departure from the job this week. Under her leadership, the Crown Prosecution Service has concerned itself rather more with ‘fashionable’ offences, such as date rape and hate crime. The result has been a string of collapsed rape trials — while shoplifters and burglars have escaped prosecution. The skewed priorities of some police chiefs have been compounded by the politicised approach of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who announced her departure from the job this week. Under her leadership, the Crown Prosecution Service has concerned itself rather more with ‘fashionable’ offences, such as date rape and hate crime. The result has been a string of collapsed rape trials — while shoplifters and burglars have escaped prosecution."

Investigating hate crime risks distracting police from their core role, warns head of Britain’s chief constables - "Investigating hate crime risks distracting police from their core role of handling emergencies, solving violent crime and burglaries and neighbourhood policing, the head of Britain’s chief constables warned today. Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), told the summit on Wednesday that historical probes into potential crimes committed by dead people and widening hate crime to include misogyny had also had an impact... chief constables had in July discussed recording misogyny as a hate crime after pressure from campaign groups. This would have meant recording such allegations even when no crime had been committed... she said she wanted police to “solve more burglaries and bear down on violence before we make more records of incidents that are not crimes"... “Recent randomised trials in Western Australia have shown that if a crime hotspot is unpatrolled for five days then crime is five times higher than in comparable crime hotspots that have 13 minutes patrolling a day.” Yet police were increasingly being drawn into areas that were not directly related to crime"
And some people are puzzled that knife crime is increasing, only blame funding cuts and/or deny that obsessing about trivialities/non-issues can cause real harm

UK Liberals Trash Female Cop For Suggesting Police Should Focus on Real Crimes Instead of 'Misogyny' - "Criticism of Thornton's statement largely stemmed from the view that toxic masculinity is the underlying diagnosis behind many acts of violence"

Tackle street harassment or burglary? The police shouldn’t have to choose | Suzanne Moore
What she seems to be complaining about is that wolf whistling should be seen as more of a problem than burglary, because it scares women and can lead to domestic abuse

Diane Abbott Enraged After Tory MP Backs Stop and Searching Minorities: 'They're More Likely to Kill' - "Tory backbencher Philip Davies enraged Labour Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott during a parliamentary debate on stop-and-search, pointing out that searching minorities more often than white people makes sense as they are disproportionately likely to kill... “While white people made up 87 per cent of the population, they were responsible for 67 per cent of murders. Black people made up 3 per cent of the population but 14.5 per cent of murders. Asian people were 6 per cent of the population but were responsible for 12 per cent of murders, and mixed race people were 2 per cent of the population but responsible for 5.5 per cent of murders.“It is also a fact that black people are more likely to use a knife or a sharp instrument to kill,” he continued.“That is the background and those are the facts. I am not sure anybody disputes them, because they are the official facts. If no crimes were taking place, we would not need stop-and-search, but in the real world there is crime, and it is a serious problem... Davies... disputed the contention that minorities are only overrepresented in the crime statistics because they are more likely to be searched in the first place. “I asked a parliamentary question about this in 2016. I was told that the following were the percentages of searches that resulted in an arrest. For white people who were stopped and searched, 13 per cent were arrested as a result. For black people it was 20 per cent, for Asian people 14 per cent and for mixed race people 17 per cent. “The evidence shows that the community that is much more likely to be stopped and searched and yet found to have done nothing wrong is white people. Those are the facts. They might be inconvenient facts for people who have a particular agenda, but they are nevertheless the facts.”... “In fact, one police officer told me that, in their training, they were told to avoid stopping and searching somebody from an ethnic minority because it could easily get them into trouble. What a message to send out to our police officers, who try their best to combat crime.”"

Man, 67, murdered by violent thug after police told him to investigate robbery himself - "A "vulnerable" pensioner told by police to carry out his own inquiries into a crime was murdered by a robber he tracked down. Nicholas Churton, 67, was killed in a brutal machete and hammer attack by Jordan Davidson, 26, at his address in Wrexham, North Wales"