How Covid has left criminals feeling ‘untouchable’
Trailblazing Met officer Leroy Logan tells Peter Stanford the Mayor of London is in denial
Leroy Logan’s car was broken into recently, outside his family home in north-east London. Nothing so unusual about that, especially when the latest figures show that crime in the capital is rising five times faster than in the rest of the country.
But you might expect that when a crime is reported by a decorated, retired Metropolitan Police superintendent, an officer might manage to attend.
“No one came to the house,” Logan says, more in sorrow than anger. He even had CCTV footage.
Like many others – whose cars and bikes get stolen, homes burgled, or are mugged – he wasn’t surprised at the lack of a police response when he telephoned them. He was merely given a crime number for the insurers.
So widespread is the perception that police are failing to respond adequately to such lawlessness, when it comes to everyday thefts and attacks, many victims no longer bother to go through the motions of reporting them. “And,” Logan adds, “it makes the criminals who carry them out feel they are untouchable.”
How to tackle this loss of trust is a central theme in Closing Ranks, Logan’s memoir of his 30 years in the Met, published earlier this month. The man who emerges from its pages has never been afraid of a challenge. His father, one of the Windrush generation who came to Britain from Jamaica, opposed his son’s decision to join the police in the first place. Many in the black community, he recalls, saw him wearing the uniform as taking sides against them. And within its ranks, he spent his three decades unflinchingly pushing it to up its game, especially over race and inclusion – including establishing the Met’s Black Police Association in 1994.
Logan was quoted approvingly in Sir William Macpherson’s 1999 report following the murder of Stephen Lawrence that pronounced the Met “institutionally racist”. Yet such praise – he received the MBE in 2001 – also caused a backlash among some disgruntled colleagues that resulted in a five-month, £100,000 police investigation into what turned out to be baseless allegations of corruption over an £80 hotel bill. So the crisis of confidence in the performance of the police doesn’t daunt him. “The police need to make people feel safe and secure, and right now they are just not doing it because they spend all their time firefighting.” And that was before they were also given the job of enforcing the rule of six.
Logan is set to have a busy back end of 2020. Along with his book, this December, he will be portrayed by John Boyega, the he Star Wars actor, in Small Axe, the hotly anticipated BBC/Amazon C/Amazon Prime miniseries es about West Indian life e in London over the course of three decades, directed ed by Oscar-winner Steve teve McQueen.
Whatever platform atform such a spotlight gives s him, Logan is determined to o use it to argue for a return to the communitybased, intelligence-led approach to policing that he played a major part in delivering in the Noughties. One of his proudest achievements was to establish “affinity” policing – engaging the community and breaking down the “wall of silence” in the aftermath of the notorious 2000 murder of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor in Peckham.
Logan, now 63, retired from the force in 2013 after playing a senior role in policing the 2012 Olympics. At his retirement party, the speech was given by his old friend, Sadiq Khan, now the Mayor of London. As a lawyer, it was Khan who represented Logan in the allegations of corruption he faced over the hotel bill, and won him substantial damages from the force for racial discrimination and victimisation.
“He was my lawyer, but he was also my mate,” he says. And so Logan campaigned for him in the 2016 mayoral elections, and contributed to a manifesto that promised precisely the sort of community-based, trustbuilding approach to policing that he is now advocating.
However, he feels that Khan has betrayed those promises. The result includes the epidemic of knife crime that has taken place on his watch – and about which the Mayor has seemed unable to offer any solutions.
After Khan’s 2016 victory, Logan was invited to a City Hall reception. “I was totally blanked,” he says. “[He] stood up to outline his new policy priorities, including an extra 600 armed police officers on the streets. I remember thinking, what has happened to the Sadiq Khan I knew, who was all about the injustices and inequalities, and the fact that we need to address massive problems in London around the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Where did armed officers come into that?” Logan hasn’t heard from Khan since.
A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: “The Mayor is working to increase the trust and confidence of London’s black communities in the Metropolitan Police Service through the Mayor’s forthcoming Action Plan and has invested £70million in community projects through the Young Londoners Fund.”
Logan isn’t any more impressed by the performance of Dame Cressida Dick, the Met Commissioner and another old friend whom he refers to as “Cress”. Cress . Her insisten insistence that public confidence in her forc force is growing simply does not tal tally with what Logan sees going on around him: “She is very smart and is on a charm offensive for f the Met, but under her leaders leadership things have got much worse.”
Among the pion pioneering initiatives Logan launched to build bridges between the police and BAME comm communities was Voya Voyage Youth; he rem remains its very acti active chair. “What the young people there tell me is that they are over policed and under protected.”
As well as being much more likely to be stopped and searched, the figures show that young black men in particular figure disproportionately as victims. “That is what is fuelling anger, frustration and antiestablishment feelings among them. The whole look and feel of policing has got to change.
“Don’t talk of a war on knives and guns. Don’t go demonising and stereotyping young people. What we need is to re-establish the Safer Neighbourhood Teams and the Safer Schools officers we used to have.
“Right now there are a lot of young people who don’t see police as their allies or their support. They see them as an occupying force.”
The 20,000 new officers promised by Boris Johnson will, he believes, help reverse the impact of the losses under austerity. But he adds a note of caution. “They’re rushing recruits through with insufficient checks and
‘A lot of young people don’t see police as their allies, but as an occupying force’
training to weed out the ones who risk taking the Met back to how it was 20 or 30 years ago.” The progress made to tackle “institutional racism” since the Macpherson report is, he reluctantly believes, under threat.
And that is not something he is prepared to be silent about it. In June, he joined the Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park, where Boyega made a rousing speech.
With Khan now, as far as he is concerned, in denial about how bad things have got, and the Tory candidate for mayor, Shaun Bailey, “simply an opportunist” Logan is weighing up whether to run himself on a manifesto to fix policing.
The reason is simple. “I don’t want my three grandchildren to have to put up with what my generation, and my children’s, had to put up with.”