Posted on 07/28/2003 12:03:46 PM PDT by 45Auto
The extent of street crime in London is revealed in new figures showing there are 164 muggings in the capital every day.
A report by independent watchdogs shows that, although street crime has come down from its record high levels of early 2002, it is still higher than at any other time in recent history.
It will say that the massive effort to reduce muggings and robberies, involving hundreds of thousands of hours of police time, has produced only a 15 per cent reduction in London.
Scotland Yard figures show that Lambeth is the worst of the 32 boroughs for street crime and that, per head of population, Richmond-is the least dangerous.
The full report - published tomorrow by Her Majesty's Inspectors of Constabulary, Probation and Prisons - is the first independent evaluation of the street crime initiative announced by Tony Blair and Home Secretary David Blunthem a valuable asset they can easily sell.
It is expected to show that the first six months of the police campaign against street crime - when officers got out of their cars and went on the beat in mugging hotspots - produced a steady fall to an average of 163 muggings a day. But there was a rise in the next six months, leading to the average for the year being 164.
The report will also warn that the clear-up rate for street crime is still too low. In London only 9.04 per cent of all street crimes were classified as "cleared-up" last year, far lower than the 14 per cent average for all crimes, but a rise from the 2001-2 figure of 8.7 per cent.
Fewer than one in 10 street robberies in London end with someone being charged or cautioned, the worst figure in the country. And, despite the rise in the clearup rate, the fall in numbers of street crimes meant fewer crimes were classifiedas cleared up and fewer muggers went to prison in 2002-3 than in 2001-2.
Scotland Yard figures show that, although street crime fell by 36 per cent in Lambeth from April last year to March 2003, residents stand a one in 51 chance of being mugged each year, compared with a one in 488 chance in Richmond.
Boroughs that were not part of the street crime initiative had much smaller falls in muggings - and in the case of Islington, Hammersmith and Fulham and Merton suffered increases.
Although the total fall in London was 15 per cent, Haringey, Ealing, Hillingdon, Havering, Wandsworth and Greenwich had falls in single figures, possibly because resources were concentrated on the worst affected areas, mainly Southwark, Lambeth, Westminster, Camden and Hackney, where falls ranged from 15 per cent to 36 per cent.
They recently "declassified" this as a crime, so really there's no such thing as muggings any longer.
LOL! We are not going to charge you with mugging him...but, from now on, while you are mugging people, be careful.
Noticed this in Madrid a couple of years ago in early July. In part it's attributable to college age kids traveling in Europe while on summer vacation.
London! Watch and learn.
Close but not quite. There's one small town (in Georgia, I believe) that requires its citizens to own a firearm but they aren't required to carry it. And yes, their local crime rate plummetted after the law passed. It didn't surprise me at all that it did.
Kennesaw, Georgia, where residents are celebrating two decades of crime-free living.
Every day is code green in Kennesaw, Georgia.
It was twenty years ago this month that city officials embarked upon a bold experiment. They enacted a law requiring every household to own a firearm, exempting those with criminal records or religious objections. An early study (in 1982) found that the residential burglary rated in Kennesaw had fallen 89 percent in the seven months following the law's enactment. That drop far outpaced the more modest 10.4 percent drop in the entire state of Georgia during that same period.
In the ensuing years, the crime rate has remained at basement levels. According to the Kennesaw Police Department, there was less than one property crime for every 1,000 people in 1998. That's down from 11 such crimes per 1,000 residents in 1981 -- the year before the gun law was enacted.
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