London at the same time has crime like anywhere else, and crime, nuisances and the everyday arising from the largest concentration of people in the UK, and the centre of the country’s politics, culture, law and leisure, writes Mark Rowe.
A report to the October 23 meeting of the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee stated among the recorded crime statistics that while some crimes such as murders and rapes had fallen slightly in the year October 2023 to September 2024, compared with the previous year, business robberies had leapt 78.6 per cent, from 3540 to 6323. Personal robberies and ‘theft from the person’ had risen; and shoplifting had shot up by 49 per cent, from 52,700 cases to 78,589.
Mobile phone crime, Assembly members heard, is driving the rise in robberies and thefts in the capital. Some 33 per cent, one third, of all robberies last year involved a phone being stolen – equating to more than 11,800 offences. And most, 69 per cent of all thefts in London last year related to mobile phones. Londoners are hardly alone in walking along pavements holding their phones and paying little attention to the world, making them vulnerable to thieves, whether on foot or mopeds.
The concentration of wealth and power in London makes the place a magnet for the ambitious, whether law-abiding, in the name of protest, or criminal. Protesters will march and demonstrate around the Houses of Parliament or the ‘government quarter’, of central Government office blocks nearby; or at museums and art galleries, hotels, embassies and corporate headquarters, to be in the vicinity of those held responsible for wrongs and to gain maximum publicity.
The London Assembly in October held evidence-gathering about the Metropolitan Police’s policing of protests, notably since the October 2023 Hamas-Israel war. Former official inspector of constabulary Matt Parr told the police and crime committee that the Met Police is ‘never consistently good or consistently bad at what it does’. As Parr observed, thanks to the sheer amount of public order policing of demonstrations in London, the Met is ‘experienced people, unlike other parts of the country, they have people for whom being good at public order is almost a full-time job’. Central London has plentiful public space video surveillance so that the police have available in Parr’s words ‘huge CCTV access’.
The other side of the coin was pointed out to Assembly members by Lord Walney, appointed by the Conservative Government as their Independent Adviser on Political Violence and Disruption, whose report came out in May. Walney said that the Met’s policing of Israel-Gaza war protests ultimately will ‘either have to be met by significantly increased resources from central Government, at a time when resources are clearly sparse, or front-line policing priorities will suffer’.
Pay to protest?
Walney aired his view in favour of a ‘charging mechanism’, that some protesters should contribute to policing of their demos; or as he put it, ‘large organisations to make a contribution in circumstances where they are choosing the method of repeat mass demonstrations’. A barrister, Kirsty Brimelow, also giving evidence to the committee, dismissed the idea of protesters paying for their policing as ‘completely unworkable’. So did Matt Parr. He pointed out that ‘public tolerance for the disruptive is very low’. As for where the UK stands legally about the balance between the right to protest and the community’s right to be at liberty and not disrupted by protest, despite a pair of laws on the matter by two Tory Home Secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, in the view of Kirsty Brimelow there’s now ‘lots of confusion’.
Part two: police delivery – click here.
