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Thursday 4 December 2008

A carnival of criminality

Who really knows how much crime goes on at the Notting Hill Carnival?

No one gives straight answers about crime at Notting Hill

Every carnival is slightly more peaceable than the one which preceded it, any problems simply a result of unforeseen troublemakers gatecrashing the event. That, at least, is what the authorities tell us, without fail, year after year. Someone could have detonated a small-scale battlefield nuclear weapon in Ladbroke Grove on Monday and the rozzers would still be explaining how everyone had a really lovely time over the Bank Holiday weekend — except for those unfortunate individuals who had been evaporated — and that arrests were down once again. The unfortunate residents of the area might issue forth plaintive missives which beg to differ, but nobody takes any notice of them, anyway.

This year Chris Allison, Deputy Assistant Commissioner at the Met, was, to his great credit, less cheerful and upbeat about the carnival. Arrests were down! Only 206 people banged up this time around and just 336 reported crimes. But the, er, shooting of adolescents posed a bit of a problem, he admitted. The police had needed to be more ‘interventionist’ than usual, in order to stop London’s most affluent borough turning into Darfur.

You can never believe the figures they tell you, still less the spin and the gloss they put on them. Arrests down this year? Fewer crimes reported? Well, let’s see how those figures stack up in an historic context. The year 2000 was a watershed for the Notting Hill Carnival, in that the cops at last admitted that not absolutely everything had been tickety-boo. That would be, I suspect, because two people were murdered during the course of the carnival (including the inevitable Asian shopkeeper: they were specifically targeted, apparently). There was also a worry over the almost doubling of arrests during the event. In 1999, some 70 carnival attendees were arrested — the following year this had leapt to 129. So, when the Old Bill tells you that arrests were down this year to the minuscule figure of 206, that’s the context in which you have to put such statistics: it is almost double the previous worst year in carnival history. Further, in 2000 an estimated 1,500,000 people attended the carnival; the only reliable figures for this year that I can find are 600,000. So, in seven years, the number of people attending the carnival has more than halved while the number arrested has almost doubled. Put a gloss on that, copper.

Back in 2000, the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) was forced, by public demand, to carry out a lengthy inquiry into the carnival. It accepted that the carnival was ‘the scene of extreme and unacceptable levels of crime and violence and unacceptable disruption to the life of the local community’. That was the year, remember, when only 129 people were arrested, rather than the 206 who had their collars felt this year. Presumably, then, the MPA would conclude that this year’s carnival imposed even more extreme and unacceptable levels of crime and violence on the local population.

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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