Victims of crime need police to get a grip
Baroness Newlove is standing down as only the second Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales with a heartfelt lament that little has changed since she took up the post. Her husband Garry was killed by a group of teenagers he confronted outside the family home in Warrington in 2007. Her demands to know why this gang had been allowed to terrorise the neighbourhood with impunity made her a national figure and led to her appointment as a champion of victims. As she writes on the page opposite, the behaviour of the louts who attacked Mr Newlove had been dismissed as “low-level” anti-social behaviour.
If the police lose control of the streets and allow lawlessness to flourish, the consequences can be disastrous, as they were for Lady Newlove and her family. Twelve years later and she still feels too little is being done to curb the yobbishness that can make the lives of residents a misery. Creating the role of commissioner was a response by politicians to a sense that the victims of crime were being let down by the system, as indeed they were. The police were not getting to grips with a burgeoning problem before it got out of hand. Had they done so there might have been fewer victims to represent.
There was a time, notably under the Blair government, when clamping down on anti-social behaviour was a criminal justice priority. It was acknowledged that this was not just alarming for people, but when it was allowed to flourish it attracted drug dealers and other criminals, who then filled the gap left by the police. Has anything changed? Judging by Lady Newlove’s last report, these lessons, painfully learnt, have been forgotten if they were ever taken seriously at all.
People who want to report such offending have virtually nowhere to turn. Local police stations have all but closed down, to be replaced by central headquarters whose occupants have little desire to investigate louts misbehaving. Everyone is discouraged from using the emergency 999 number to report such offending. Instead, they are diverted to the 101 phoneline, which as anyone who has used it can testify is a depressing experience for which we even have to pay.
People who are intimidated and frightened feel neither the police nor the politicians take this seriously any more. It is time they did. They must listen to what Lady Newlove has to say.