THE BLOODY FACE OF WILD WEST BRITAIN
It’s a horrific image: the grandson of a former Liberal leader pistol-whipped on his own doorstep by a brazen thug just days ago. The police response? To quiz HIM about his right to own a shotgun – just the latest lunacy that reveals . . .
UP UNTIL the last moment, last week’s evening out — a concert by royal wedding cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his family ensemble, followed by dinner at an Indian restaurant — had been a very jolly one.
Christopher Clement-Davies and his girlfriend, Linda Hartley, had just reached the front door of his north London home when they first sensed something was wrong.
‘I need you to stay calm,’ growled a voice in the dark. Christopher turned round to find a gun pressed against his head by a tall, hooded man in jeans and trainers. ‘Kneel down!’ the man shouted. ‘Get down on your knees!’
At which point all manner of scenarios raced through the mind of this 58-year-old Oxfordeducated lawyer and entrepreneur, not least the fact that Linda was at his side and that, once through the front door, anything might happen. After a nanosecond’s reflection, Christopher decided he would not kneel down.
‘not a chance! never!’ he replied furiously, pushing the man’s arm and gun to one side. If he had to go down, he was going to go down fighting. At which point, he might very well have been shot dead or stabbed.
Instead, the attacker began beating him with the gun, whilst he tried to shield himself from the blows smashing his face and skull to the point that he couldn’t see for the blood streaming into his eyes. Linda started beating frantically on the door to their neighbours’ flat. ‘they’re coming!’ she shouted (although they weren’t) at which point, the attacker fled.
the couple rushed inside, blood pouring from Christopher’s wounds. Linda calmly called the police who arrived ten minutes later, with what Christopher calls ‘ very reassuring machine guns’. the couple were still giving their statements to police in the back of the ambulance which sped him to intensive care where he spent the next six hours being patched up.
now recovering from his ordeal — on the day that Home Secretary Sajid Javid is announcing his new, all- embracing ‘public health’ approach to violent crime — Christopher remains in robust form when we meet at his St John’s Wood flat.
‘I was interviewed by a detective who told me that it might have been better if I had got down on my knees like the man said,’ snorts Christopher, beneath the stern gaze of his grandfather, Clement Edward Davies, the Welsh MP, former Liberal Party leader and chum of Churchill, whose portrait is hanging on the wall.
‘But to me that felt like the humiliating prelude to an execution. And what might he then have done to Linda? I am afraid my Welsh blood boiled.’
‘I couldn’t believe how brave he was,’ says Linda, grimacing at the recollection of it all. ‘I remember feeling appalled that he was even fighting back but now he’s got a new nickname — Lionheart.’
Christopher has just received one further call from the police. they weren’t ringing with news of an arrest (the attacker is still at large). they were asking various questions about his mental state. For Christopher holds a shotgun licence and they wanted to check that he wasn’t about to do anything silly. All of a sudden, it transpired, he was the threat to public order.
It is, of course, so much easier to monitor law- abiding people who register sporting weapons than thugs who attack people with illegal ones.
BUT what really irks Christopher is that he hasn’t seen a bobby on his street for years — and that many CCTV cameras in his London borough (Westminster) were switched off last year to save money. His story, sadly, is not unusual these days. Rather, it is just another reminder of the gradual but profoundly unsettling decline in our confidence in the authorities to keep us safe.
Respect for the police, once automatic and unquestioned, has given way to a corrosive blend of resignation and pity. We are still pretty confident that they will do a brave
and thorough job when the very fabric of the state is threatened by terrorism. this was illustrated all too starkly this week at the inquest into the death of PC Keith Palmer inside the gates of Parliament during the Westminster bridge attack.
But when someone breaks in to our house or our car or vandalises our bus stop or raids our online bank account, we don’t expect them to do anything at all.
We do not think it’s because the police don’t care or can’t be bothered. We think it is partly because their numbers are being reduced. It is also because they are run by managerial box- tickers whose overarching concern in any given situation is to not cause offence.
And since society is increasingly prone to take offence at almost anything, reporting every bigoted remark as a ‘hate crime’ and every poisonous tweet as a ‘death threat’, it is hardly surprising that the police are too bogged down dealing with anger management to waste time walking the streets.
All this, of course, creates the perfect climate for street violence and organised crime, epitomised by those recent photos of spoof road signs in East London.
Exasperated by the failure of the police to tackle drug gangs in their area, residents in tower Hamlets have erected traffic signs saying ‘Give way to oncoming drug dealers’ and marked loading bays with the words ‘Drug Dealers Only’. A witty response, perhaps, but it is gallows humour.
the Mail’s investigation into ‘county lines’, the network of inner city gangs which use troubled children to distribute drugs and weapons nationwide, has exposed criminal exploitation on a jaw-dropping scale. Yet because these have often been children in care, the police have either failed to notice or been reluctant to intervene.
Here is a scandal on a par with the ‘grooming gangs’ in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and other towns where vulnerable girls — many of them in care — were turned in to sex slaves by gangs of predominantly Asian men.
Again the police were painfully slow to get a grip, for fear of being accused of racism. It was that same old system of warped priorities: better to cause no offence than risk causing some offence.
throughout the summer, we saw a run of depressingly familiar stories about a village green or sports ground being invaded and trashed by convoys of travellers. Eventually, they’d move on without so much as a parking ticket, however disgusting the mess.
In recent months, there have been so many reports of hammer gangs on mopeds that they have ceased to make the news, unless there is some particularly graphic CCTV footage or the victim is famous. What was particularly shocking about this summer’s attack on comedian Michael McIntyre was the fact that the gang relieved him of his £15,000 Rolex outside the gates of his son’s school in daylight. they did so because they had every confidence that they could get away with it.
Most tragic of all is the almost daily news of yet another teenager being stabbed in yet another ‘Wild West’ turf war between gangs that
operate with impunity in parts of big cities such as London. Stabbings are up by 16 per cent in the capital (and up 22 per cent nationally) to a seven-year high. Thus far, 100 people have been killed by knives in London this year. ThaT
is a monstrous statistic, the sort of thing we might expect to read about in Bogota or the Bronx. Indeed, London has now overtaken New York in this regard. and some of these deaths have happened within a short walk of Big Ben.
With each death, we become just that little bit more inured to the general sense of lawlessness becoming the new normal.
When we read that South american gangs have been flying in to Britain with the sole purpose of burgling well- off houses in the home Counties, our natural response is laughter rather than shock. Yet all this comes after eight years of tough talk by home Secretaries from the party which has always traded on being the party of law and order.
Prior to that we had Labour with its mantra of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.
So who is really to blame? The Government cannot shy away from the fact that since the start of the Coalition in 2010, the number of ‘frontline’ police officers in England and Wales has fallen by 16 per cent with a reduction of 20,000.
The home Secretary for most of that time was the current Prime Minister. Today’s tally of just over 122,000 police officers is now the lowest since the early Eighties.
It is worth remembering the population has risen by 20 per cent since then, meaning the ratio of police-to-public is at a historic low. London’s ineffectual Mayor, Sadiq Khan, wastes no opportunity to blame all his city’s woes on Tory ‘austerity’ but we must also recognise the challenges of a shifting criminal landscape.
Cybercrime is playing a major part. according to Forbes magazine, global business has suffered a 15 per cent rise in internet crime in every successive year since 2013.
So what is to be done? an increased police presence — both on the streets and in cyberspace — must surely be part of the solution. Equally important, though, is the need for a change in police culture, particularly at the top.
having taken giant leaps in its attempts to shake off the stigma of ‘institutional racism’, police chiefs have shifted to a default position of institutional cringe. They now place being liked over and above being feared.
and that cannot be a good thing. Self-congratulatory, virtue-signalling Twitter feeds and rainbow flag emojis are all well and good but the public want a ‘force’, not an extension of social services.
In the very week the Mail was revealing disturbing new revelations about the latest ‘county lines’ scandal, came news that a detective superintendent at Scotland Yard has been placed on ‘restricted duties’ for alleged gross misconduct. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating a complaint that he used the words ‘whiter than white’ in front of colleagues.
The investigation may take up to 12 months. We might once have dismissed it as another case of ‘political correctness gone mad’. No longer. It is merely a reminder of the prevailing mindset.
Little wonder that a group of wealthy residents just round the corner from Scotland Yard — and only a couple of miles from Christopher Clement-Davies’s front door where he was attacked the other night — have now decided to pay £100 a month for a police force of their own.
Ben and Youcef do not wear blue uniforms. Their coats are black and fluorescent pink. They carry no handcuffs or truncheon. Their tools are a radio, a phone, a camera and a van with flashing lights that are orange, not blue.
These two have no powers of arrest or seizure — they can’t even issue a parking ticket — beyond the same right we all have to make a ‘citizen’s arrest’. They work for My Local Bobby, a rent-a-cop business which offers residents what they once took for granted, a friendly face in a uniform keeping a knowing eye on the patch. and everyone is pleased to see them.
I join Ben and Youcef as they pound their beat in Belgravia. They show me the needle-strewn drugs den they uncovered round the corner from one of London’s smartest restaurants and the corner where the local drug dealer used to ply his wares (until these two started turning up).
Nearby is a car park stairwell popular with bag thieves who go there to rummage through their ill-gotten gains, safe in the knowledge there is no CCTV.
We are called to a café where a case of brazen attempted robbery has just occurred. CaFé
owner Yasmine, 28, shows us CCTV footage of a man in a peaked cap walking in and asking to use the basement loo. Once out of sight (so he thinks), the man enters Yasmine’s office and tries to open the safe hidden beneath a desk. Suddenly, he is rumbled by a member of staff and rushes out, angrily insisting he was only looking for the loo.
‘Someone has told him where to look because he has gone straight to the safe,’ says Youcef, as he takes notes. he downloads the footage to his phone.
he will run it past his local contacts and is confident one of them will recognise the man. Yasmine is delighted and offers him a cup of tea. She was a little shaken by the incident but is now feeling better.
But these hired hands are not really reducing crime. They are simply moving it on down the road to a neighbourhood which does not have the cash to pay for private policing. Nor is it just wealthy areas which are feeling the need to hire their own sheriff.
It was recently announced that retailers in Stockport, for example, have clubbed together to employ a four- strong town- centre patrol every evening between 5pm and 1am. Glastonbury in Somerset is considering taking on private police to combat the rise in antisocial behaviour.
If private coppers are the answer, then the question is more troubling: What on earth has happened to our trust in the police?