Crime

Monday

The Tories’ reputation for law and order is in tatters

Historically the Conservative party has been known as the party of law and order. It is now in the process of losing that reputation and Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s recent remarks show why. Stung by complaints that cutting the number of police officers by over 20,000 since 2010 has contributed to the rise in violent crime, she said: ‘In the early Noughties, when serious violent crimes were at their highest, police numbers were rising. In 2008, when knife crime was far greater than the lows we saw in 2013/14, police numbers were close to the highest we’d seen in decades.’ Reduced resources were not, therefore, to blame for rising violence.

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Christopher Wylie – ‘I want a democratic mandate for Brexit’

The former director of research at Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm notoriously suspended by Facebook for harvesting details of up to 87 million Facebook accounts without their consent, has told Andrew Marr that the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU should be re-contested. Wylie’s suggestion comes after it was highlighted that Vote Leave – the official Leave campaign – had employed the services of AggregateIQ (AIQ), a company which Wylie claims to have founded in order to support Cambridge Analytica. AIQ was also suspended from Facebook on Saturday for improperly receiving users’ data, charges which AIQ denies. Wylie argued that Vote Leave’s connections to alleged misconduct by

Saturday

James Forsyth

How should the police and the politicians respond to this spate of murders?

With more than fifty murders in London already this year and knife crime up by 21% in England and Wales according to the latest figures, there’s a clear need for action on violent crime. As I write in The Sun this morning, the government’s long awaited violent crime reduction strategy is out next week. The Home Secretary Amber Rudd briefed the Cabinet on this strategy a few weeks ago. Cabinet Ministers tell me that it is impressive but very much focused on early intervention: the aim is to stop people from turning into violent criminals in the first place. This is a sensible strategy. But there is a need for

Friday

Mary Wakefield

The gang in our park have united us… in impotence

The baby, unbothered by diesel fumes, enjoys an outing down the main road through London N1. Each passing bus is marked by a fat and pointing finger: ‘There!’ On the way to our local park last Thursday, we had just begun to cross the road, pointing up at the green ‘walk’ man, when a scooter tore straight through a red light and cut across in front of the pram. ‘What the hell?!’ I shouted and raised an angry hand. To my surprise, instead of speeding off, the driver jammed on his brakes and skidded round to face me. He was a boy of about 15 or 16, black, slight, and

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The DPP was never much cop

An interesting development for our police force, then. In future they do not have to believe everything someone tells them, in the manner of a particularly credulous village idiot. They may be allowed, possibly encouraged, to exhibit a degree of curiosity in their line of work — have a bit of a think about things, maybe even ask questions. I do hope they are able to cope. They have been institutionally cretinised for a long while now — ever since Alison Saunders was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013. She is stepping down when her contract comes to an end in October and is anxious to take up her

Andrew Gilligan

City slacker

According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve certainly become a lot more excitable since he took over. I like to imagine the Mayor of London, late at night, combing the thesaurus for fresh superlatives to bugle his ‘unprecedented programme of far-reaching improvements’ for the taxi trade (allowing black cabs in more bus lanes) or his ‘bold package of measures’ to revive street markets (creating a London Markets Board and an interactive map). One release even panted that Khan had ‘personally scrutinised’ the New Year’s Eve fireworks display ‘to make the acclaimed event the most exciting yet’. Language

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Tories are risking their reputation as the party of law and order

Theresa May’s Home Office record is normally off limits at cabinet. But when ministers discussed the government’s strategy for reducing violent crime on Tuesday, Boris Johnson took issue with what the Prime Minister regards as one of her key legacies: the dramatic reduction in stop and search. He argued that more stop and search was needed to deal with a spike in crime. What went unsaid — but what every-one around the cabinet table was acutely aware of — was that this was the opposite of Mrs May’s approach as Home Secretary. The exchange was pointed. ‘They irritate each other,’ one cabinet minister observed to me afterwards. They also have

Wednesday

Guy Kennaway

The very thing keeping tourists safe in Jamaica? Crime

Are you looking at your tickets to Jamaica and thinking: why on earth did I decide to go there, with its army curfew, state of emergency and spiralling homicide rate? The Jamaican government has just extended its state of emergency until May and has advised tourists not to leave their hotels unaccompanied. But don’t go online just yet to see if you can scrabble some money back on your flight. I am writing this while sipping a rum and listening to laughter and reggae in my local bar a few miles from the picturesque parish of St James, where in the past six months 335 people have been murdered, and

Thursday

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Mick Herron

My guest in this week’s podcast is the incomparable spy writer Mick Herron – these days, happily, a less and less well kept secret. He’s the author of the Slough House stories – funny and gripping novels about an awkward squad of failed James Bonds under the aegis of the wonderfully unspeakable Jackson Lamb. The latest is London Rules, and Mick joins me to talk about crap spies, finding a voice, the necessity of killing off the odd main character, and the real life Slough House. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Munira Mirza

Our best weapon

According to the latest recorded crime figures in England and Wales, there has been a steep rise in violence. Knife offences are up by 21 per cent in the year to September 2017; in London alone the increase is 30.2 per cent — that’s 13,715 incidents. How should police deal with this disturbing trend? One view is that they need to target likely offenders, especially through an increase in the use of stop and search. However, this has been resisted by human-rights and anti-racism campaigners, who regard the use of such powers as heavy-handed and intrusive. Tottenham MP David Lammy has been particularly vocal, calling stop and search ‘inherently unfair’

Thursday

Paulina Neuding

Living in fear

January was a particularly violent month in Sweden. A 63-year-old man was killed in Stockholm by a hand grenade lying in the street. A Dutch exchange student was hit by a stray bullet during an execution-style killing at a pizza restaurant in Uppsala. In Gothenburg, a hand grenade was thrown into a flat and exploded in the kitchen — the same predominantly immigrant-populated suburb where an eight-year-old British boy was killed in a grenade attack less than two years ago. In Malmö, a grenade was tossed at a police station and exploded outside. So it has not, so far, been a very happy new year. For Swedes, this has become

Friday

Ross Clark

Theresa May’s stop-and-search shake-up is costing lives

Theresa May has a very big failure to her name, but strangely few people seem to want to pick her up on it. The latest crime figures show a sharp increase in recorded offences in England and Wales, especially in knife crime, which rose 21 per cent to 37,443 incidents. This continues a trend which began four years ago, since when the number of recorded knife offences has risen by half. It reverses an equally sharp fall in recorded knife crime between 2010, when Theresa May became Home Secretary, and 2014. What happened to bring about the end of what looks like a very successful period of tackling knife crime?

Thursday

Theodore Dalrymple

Let’s abolish parole

The furore over the parole granted to John Worboys, the rapist taxi driver, misses the point entirely — that the system of parole is disgraceful in theory and irredeemably unwork-able in practice. The only thing that it is good for is the employment of large numbers of officials engaged in pointless or fatuous tasks who might other-wise be unemployed. The system is predicated on the ability of experts to predict the future conduct of convicted prisoners. Will they or will they not repeat their crimes if let out early? It is true that, using a few simple statistical measures, such as numbers of past convictions and age, you can predict

Saturday

Mark Piggott

London’s crime map tells a damning tale of two cities

It’s just a few metres from Bartholomew Court, EC1, where a young man was one of four stabbed to death over the New Year, to trendy Hoxton, famous for its cereal bars and hirsute hipsters. It would be easy to say these two worlds – those of the trendy media types lampooned by ‘Nathan Barley’ and ‘Its Grim up North London’ and the large nearby estates – are separated by an unbridgeable gulf, but it would also be inaccurate. Areas like Hoxton became popular in part because of this edginess, this picturesque urban decay, where drugs can be bought cheaply from local youths and consumed in the safety of the

Thursday

Taki

High life | 2 November 2017

I have a message for the London mayor, Sadiq Khan: you and your policies stink! While the fuzz are busy scanning the internet for racist or sexist material, crime in the capital is up by six per cent over the past 12 months and the police — handicapped by PC orders from above — have made 20 per cent fewer arrests. Statistics show youth violence and murder soaring in London, with the latter up by 84 per cent on last year. But here’s a story that’s not a statistic. Last week, my little girl Lolly was viciously attacked and robbed near the World’s End pub on the King’s Road after

Francesca Steele

The death of cosy Christie

This is not Midsomer Murders. The new film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is thick with violence and sexual innuendo. It elevates Hercule Poirot, the diminutive, fastidious Belgian detective, with his egg-shaped head and pot belly, to part-time action figure, a man who chases bad guys down dizzying descents in exotic snowscapes before straightening his magnificent moustache with a twinkle in his eye. This is less cosy, golden age detective fiction than a cross between Daniel Craig’s 007 and Scandi noir. Kenneth Branagh, who stars and directs, has brought his experience playing the dejected Swedish police inspector Wallander to the fore, giving the usually reserved detective

Thursday

James Delingpole

When in Rome… | 12 October 2017

I know I keep saying that in Decline of the West terms we’re all currently living in Rome, circa 400 AD. But now, on TV, there is actual proof of this in the form of a truly appalling reality series called Bromans (ITV2, Thursdays). Bromans is like a cross between Love Island and Carry On Cleo, so shamelessly low, tacky and brain-dead that it makes Geordie Shore look like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Basically, a bunch of ridiculously buff lads strip off and participate in crap gladiatorial contests in which no one dies (thus entirely defeating the object), while their hot blonde girlfriends smoulder pointlessly in scanty outfits, and say stupid

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Made in Port Talbot

Port Talbot, on the coast of South Wales, is literally overlooked. Most experience the town while flying over it on the M4, held aloft by concrete stilts planted in terraced streets. From that four-lane gantry, the only landmarks are the dockyard cranes and belching steelworks. Over Easter in 2011, National Theatre Wales staged a piece of street theatre that was crafted as a civic resurrection. The Passion of Port Talbot featured Michael Sheen as a Messiah-like teacher who harkens to oral memories. ‘I remember!’ he hollered on the third day, while attached to a crucifix on a traffic island by Aberavon beach, before reeling off a litany of local names:

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The Chloe Ayling story masks slavery’s sad truth

Do you believe Chloe Ayling? She is the 20-year-old glamour model whose dramatic story has been all over the newspapers throughout August. She claims to have been lured to a fake photoshoot in Italy, injected with ketamine, stuffed inside a suitcase and shoved into the boot of a car. So far, so just about credible. But the story becomes ever more bizarre. Ayling says she was then driven to a farmhouse, where she was threatened with being sold via an online auction as a sex slave to a man in the Middle East, who – we must assume – has a taste for busty blonde British babes. Not only was

Thursday

Helen R Brown

Torn between envy and contempt

Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s fourth novel is the latest in a long literary line of suburban lost boys sucked into the intoxicating orbit of a wealthy friend. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Patricia Highsmith, Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst and Gillian Flynn have all done it before and we know the story never ends well. Day drops references to them all into her book, like olives into an increasingly dirty martini. We know from the outset that a crime has been committed. We first meet Martin Gilmour in a police interview room, the day after