If you’ve been in the City of London recently, you’ll likely have seen one of the blue plaques that have sprung up on pavements. Instead of pointing out the home of someone memorable, these tell a very different story: “A member of the public had their phone stolen here” reads the message, with the City of London Police’s logo underneath and the slogan, “Look up, look out” on the bottom of the plaque.
When I first saw one, I assumed it was the work of the wave of anti-crime campaigns that have sprung up on social media, which highlight the extent of crime in the capital – and the uselessness of the police in tackling it. It never dawned on me that the police themselves would actually be boasting about how useless they are in tackling one of the most pervasive modern crimes, which is estimated to be a £50 million-a-year trade in London alone.
But yes, these blue plaques are indeed the work of the police. As they put it in the press release announcing the scheme: “The City of London Police have tagged streets where real phone snatches have taken place to hammer home the message for residents and workers to look up and look out for phone snatchers. The force has worked in partnership with the City of London Corporation to introduce an iconic blue circular paint design on pavements across the Square Mile where phones have been snatched by criminals.”
I had to read this a few times to grasp that they were indeed deliberately telling people – including, doh, criminals – where phones are likely to be snatched successfully.
I’ve been covering how the police tackle crime for nearly thirty years, ever since I had the privilege of a series of meetings with the legendary former NYPD police commissioner Bill Bratton in the 1990s. In over thirty years, I don’t think I have ever come across a more idiotic example of counter-productive policing than these blue plaques. City of London Police have managed not just to ignore some of the most important lessons in understanding how crime spreads, but have actually come up with an idea likely to make it worse.
At its most basic level, when anti-social behaviour is normalised it not only takes root but deepens and worsens. This ‘broken windows’ theory was famously expressed in a seminal article in 1982 by US academics George Kelling and James Q Wilson: “Just as a broken window left untended in a building is a sign that nobody cares, leading typically to more broken windows, more damage – so disorderly conditions and behaviours left untended in a community are signs that nobody cares and lead to fear of crime, more serious crime and urban decay.”
The psychology behind this is fascinating, but one key aspect is the idea of crime hotspots even where each individual act of law breaking is not necessarily regarded on its own as major (such as phone theft). Bratton’s most successful tool in transforming New York’s crime rate was statistical analysis of what crimes were happening where (through a program he developed called CompStat). Armed with that info, the NYPD could see the trends and react accordingly.
It was a vital tool because, in reverse, the more criminals knew where they could be successful – where crime happened, in other words – then the more crime there would be in those areas. So the very last thing the police should do is provide criminals with a police rubber-stamped version of that information – unless, of course, you are deliberately attempting to lure them into an area in order to arrest them.
But there is no evidence at all that this is City of London Police’s aim. Quite the opposite: the press release is instead full of talk about how the plaques will make the public aware of phone theft so we can then take steps (such as “Telling your network provider straight away if your phone is stolen because they can blacklist and deactivate it remotely”) to mitigate the consequences when our phone is stolen. It’s as if phone theft is some plague over which the police can have no control, and their main role is just to limit its impact.
It’s become a matter of everyday comment how useless the police are at tackling the day to day crimes that matter to ordinary people, such as shoplifting, burglary and the phone snatching epidemic. It’s deeply frustrating when so much is known about how this can be dealt with. But it’s truly enraging when the police boast about implementing an idea which is likely to make a bad situation far worse.
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