British cops must return to values of Robert Peel to cut crime
New York supercop’s call as London’s murder rate rises
By the end of March 1990, New York was reeling from a crack-fuelled cascade of murders. The rate of killings soared and morale plunged.
As police in London battled poll tax rioters in Trafalgar Square, a more sinister trend was emerging in the Big Apple.
By the end of the year, it had become America’s murder capital.
There were 2,245 homicides in the city. Despite having an almost identical population, London had 184 murders that year.
Now, after a recent spike in violent crime, London has overtaken New York in murders for the first time in modern history.
In February and March, 38 people were killed in London, compared to 35 in New York.
There have been 47 murders in London so far this year, 31 of which were stabbings.
The city’s murder rate is on course to hit its highest level for more than a decade as New York’s continues to decline.
For supercop Bill Bratton, the man credited with starting the revolution in the Big Apple, London is a city that is sick and in vital need of medicine.
The former commissioner of the New York Police Department, who was almost placed in charge of the Met police in 2011, says Scotland Yard needs to return to the values of his hero Sir Robert Peel.
“Your great police leader Sir Robert Peel understood the importance of being able to work in many diverse neighbourhoods. To do it you need a trust,” he says.
Peel, who was Home Secretary in the 1820s before serving as Prime Minister, is known as the father of modern British policing.
Bratton, dubbed “a rock star in law enforcement”, frequently refers to Peel’s nine principles of policing, believing their implementation is what London drastically needs.
He says: “The first principle was the basic mission... the police exist to prevent crime and disorder. Law enforcement the world over needs to focus on crime’s prevention rather than just the response. It is like being a doctor.
“Their focus is on prevention and that’s what American policing has been doing, certainly in New York City, probably better than any other police agency in the world.
“We used to learn from London. I think, with all due respect, we are now ahead of them. For almost three decades we have enjoyed a steady crime decline.
“What’s going on in New York City is a continuing incredible focus on precision crime reduction, precision policing through its systems and technology targeting areas that need to be tackled.” Under Brat- ton’s leadership, the force in New York benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. In contrast, the Met has suffered more than £600million in crippling Government cuts in recent years. In 1990, the NYPD numbered 26,000 uniformed officers. The current figure is around 36,000 – 5,000 more than the Met. “I’ve watched very closely in London for almost the past three decades,” says 70-year-old Bratton. “During that period of time, the British police services throughout the country and the criminal justice system have undergone a significant reduction in personnel, funding and phenomenal reorganisation of your system...
“A lot of what’s going on in New York is the consolidation of resources. I combined all the detectives into one entity under the chief of detectives, the British police services have chosen to go in another direction.
“New York has benefited from significant investment of resources in its police department, its criminal justice system.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars have been focused on training and equipping our men and women.
“New York is probably the bestequipped police force in the world. There is this expression, ‘You get what you pay for’. Nothing could be truer when it comes to policing. At the height of New York’s murder spate in the early-1990s, Bratton took command as chief of the New York City Transit Police before going on to serve his first term as the city’s Police Commissioner from 1994 to 1996.
During those years there was a steep drop in the city’s murder rate, violent crime and burglary.
He implemented a “broken windows” strategy, whereby minor crimes would be addressed in a bid to reduce major crimes.
Bratton was aided by Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Maple, who put in place a statistics-driven approach to fighting crime.
Called Compstat, the system identified spikes in crimes. Officers then addressed the rises through the use of targeted enforcement.
It helped Bratton and Maple become known as the cops who cleaned up New York.
Bratton, who also served as LA’s Police Commissioner, said: “New York is continuing an evolution, in fact, a revolution in policing that began in the 1990s, significantly assisted by Compstat. It was like a vaccine to the crime epidemic.” Offering advice to London, Bratton, who retired from his second stint as NYPD commissioner in 2016, said: “Policing in New York has been about perfecting the ability to identify the significant creators of violence and at the same time finding ways not to be randomly impacting many peripheral players.
“One of the temptations is to use a dragnet rounding up everybody in sight, instead of knowing who you are looking for... It is a danger to do such a thing.”
Bratton added: “The whole ‘stop, question and frisk’ controversy which New York once had to reach hundreds of thousands of primarily young minority, young black males, came with the belief that was what was causing crime to go down.
“That was not what was causing crime to be down – actually it was accelerating racial animosity intentions to other places.
“It is not the way to build up trust which is so important to preventing crime.”
We used to learn from London. I think we are now ahead of them BILL BRATTON ON THE WAY U.S OFFICERS TACKLE CRIME