Crime Story

When I'm out on the streets in the flat days after Christmas a tiny part of me expects to find a corpse. I realise I've come to regard seasonal murders as a local tradition. Let me think back: there was a man clubbed to death in a pub up the road a few years ago and I'm sure there have been fatal shootings too (haven't there?). For this reason - an imperfect one, as we shall see - I was not at all surprised to find a section of Upper Clapton Road taped off by the police when driving my family to visit friends on New Year's Day morning or to later read that witnesses were being sought in connection with an incident that had left a young man in hospital with gunshot wounds to his chest. Luckily the victim survived and was last reported to be in a stable condition, but my annual sense of foreboding did seem to have been grimly justified.

That week's Gazette deepened my gloom. "New Year: Old Violence" the front page headline cried. Below it were details of the shooting in Upper Clapton Road plus one other shooting and two stabbings elsewhere in the borough. Yet in the same report the paper put these incidents in context, saying that since April 2010 eight people had been shot and one killed in Hackney compared with two killed and "22 injured" in the same period the previous year and that Hackney had fallen from the busiest London borough for Operation Trident investigations to the sixth.

This relatively good news story is largely echoed by the official statistics for all kinds of crime in Hackney. As the Council and the borough's cops are understandably eager to point out there was a fall in the total number reported to Hackney police in 2010 compared with 2009, from 28,970 to 28,060. Among the categories that showed a fall were homicide (down from eight to six), gun crime (from 161 to 136) and violence against the person (from 6,503 to 6,295). These are quite small drops and we should always bear in mind that the Met's stats do not include crimes that weren't reported to it. Even so, these figures about violent offences give cause for cautious optimism rather than the reverse.

Other crime categories to show falls were burglaries of both residential and non-residential properties and robberies from businesses. Yet the bad news is that a sharp rise was recorded for a kind of theft that many people fear the most - robbery against persons. That went up from 880 in 2009 to 1,066 last year. Why the contrast between this figure and those for different types of theft? It might be that people and businesses have become better at securing their homes and premises and that the police have become better at catching burglars. A rise in robberies of people was, perhaps, predictable in a recession.

You can read the full breakdown posted on the Met's website here. It also shows a small rise in the number of reported rapes but a fall in sexual offences generally, falls in "domestic crime" and racist and religious hate crimes but a rise in homophobic crime.

The story told by the crime figures as whole remains, as ever, open to a number of interpretations, some more cheering than others. But it seems to me that two key parts of the bigger story of crime, in Hackney, other parts of London or anywhere else, remain much the same.

One is that the fear of some types of crime can contribute to making them more likely: the more that peaceful, law-abiding people retreat behind locked doors the more the streets are conceded to the antisocial. News of a nasty criminal act on your own doorstep can intimidate and demoralise just about anyone and each should be deplored, but at the same time it's also important to keep a sense of perspective if we can.

The other is that violent crime remains closely associated with economic and social factors. Both the perpetrators of such offences and the victims - including unintended ones, as the young man shot on Upper Clapton Road seems to have been - are usually from the less prosperous strata in society. Everyone is entitled to a good service from the police, but as Hackney's Council and senior police officers wrestle with shrinking budgets they must not forget that some types of people are at greater risk of crime than others and should deploy their reduced resources accordingly.

Comments

[andrea]

i love mystery and suspense

[Pierre L]

There was indeed a lot of information to be found on one's particular small part of Hackney. One piece of statistics that surprised me is that over the last 3 months of 2010, crime seemed to be falling month by month. Could this have been influenced by the weather?
That same weather which could easily have produced deaths of another kind among the homeless community such as that of the round chapel, definitely at the very bottom of society. Does anyone know what help they receive from the council or charities?

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