The London Borough of Hounslow, where I live, is a pretty peaceful area, generally - low down on the murder list, occasional property crime in the richer areas. It thus came as no surprise when a local Conservative councillor posted this on our local web forum:
Hounslow Community Safety Partnership has moved to reassure parents, guardians and young people it is working hard to prevent knife crime in light of two incidents in the borough last week.
The partnership, which is a collaboration of organisations working for a safer borough, includes Hounslow Council, Hounslow Police and London Fire Brigade (Hounslow).While there have been a number of high-profile incidents across London this year, Hounslow has not experienced a fatal incident, however we are not complacent and recognise we need to work hard together to tackle this problem.
So there isn’t a problem, and we need to work hard to tackle it. Odd, but not as odd as the total lack of response to this fact, discovered via the Met Police Crime Figures website, which is really rather good (and written in PHP, no less).
- Gun enabled crimes in LBH June 2006-June 2007: 54
- Gun enabled crimes in LBH June 2007-June 2008: 76
That’s up 40% year on year, bucking the Londonwide trend (down nearly 12%, and reduced above that average in all boroughs neighbouring Hounslow). Now, to my mind, an increase in a particular type of crime should be more important to the police than what’s in the tabloids this month, and gun crime is more worrying than knife crime (it’s hard to get hit by a stray knife, after all). Therefore I’d much rather the police were either announcing that they were aware of this increase and devoting resources to finding out if it’s part of a pattern, or explaining that they were already on top of it and have people under arrest and it’s nothing to worry about. I’m not at all happy to be ‘reassured’ that various people are ‘working hard’ while the Borough Commander is rolling round to talk about knife crime at a
…special public meeting…
tomorrow night. Priorities should be set by the police, not the papers, on the basis of evidence not fearmongering. Over to you, Boris.
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2 responses so far ↓
I see gun crime’s gone down in the neighbouring boroughs so they must have brought their shooters into Hounslow. I suggest Tony Arbour puts on his sherrif’s hat.
He’s too busy putting forward the views of his constituents who don’t want buses running down their nice suburban streets in case it ‘urbanizes’ them…