Category: Policing

12th teen murder

Today the BBC is reporting that Lyle Tulloch, 15, from Peckham, was fatally stabbed in a stairwell at Newall House, Borough, on Saturday.

Regrettably that makes Lyle Tulloch the 12th teenager to be murdered in London this year.

Thankfully it has been over a month since our last teen murder on 27th March.

Our new mayor rightly highlighted this issue during his campaign. Now he has to be seen to act swiftly to make a difference.

1 January: Henry Bolombi, 18, stabbed
5 January: Faridon Alizada, 18, stabbed
21 January: Boduka Mudianga, 18, stabbed
26 January: Fuad Buraleh, 19, beaten
19 February: Sunday Essiet, 15, stabbed
29 February: Ofiyke Nmezu, 16, beaten
2 March: Teng Le, 17, stabbed
13 March: Michael Jones, 18, beaten
15 March: Nicholas Clarke, 19, shot
27 March: Devoe Roach, 17, stabbed
27 March: Amro Elbadawi, 14, stabbed
3 May: Lyle Tulloch, 15, stabbed

Ex-Mayor Livingstone Policing

Wasting police time, wasting your money

Post author By Phil
Post date 22nd Apr 2008
2 Comments on Wasting police time, wasting your money

I picked up this report in the Guardian that policing the Chinese secret police torch event cost us £750,000 according to the Metropolitan Police Authority. Apparently the document rather undermines the Mayor’s claim not to have known in advance that China’s secret police goons would be muscling their way through our streets two weeks back.

According to the MPA briefing paper the Chinese goons had been part of a legal agreement between the Greater London Authority, ie the organisation that the Mayor is responsible for, and the Beijing organising committee of the Olympic games, drawn up last year. According to Brian Paddick the report made it clear Livingstone had known about the guards before the event.

This gives a lie to the Mayor’s statement that:

We did not organise that. We did not know beforehand these thugs were from the security services. Had I known so, we would have said no.

To his credit the Mayor usually has a firm grip on the detail. How did this detail escape him?

Mmm. The truth and the Mayor. How far apart?

Ealing and Northfield Policing

Ealing police now have their own website

Post author By Phil
Post date 18th Apr 2008
No Comments on Ealing police now have their own website

This graphic gives you a feel for what the Ealing police’s new website looks like. As well as obvious stuff like contact info there are some useful links to photos of stolen property and photofits. If they can make this timely and if people look at it now and then it might help fight crime in Ealing. We’ll see.

It’s nice to see what our borough commander Sultan Taylor (no relation) looks like but why do commanders, mayors, commissioners, chief execs and the such like always think that we want their mugs to be the most prominent features of websites, annual reports, etc? Let’s have a nice picture of Ealing up double quick.

In his March column (sharpen up CS Taylor April is more than half gone) CS Taylor says:

We have now entered the final month of the current performance year and I am delighted to state that we are on course to achieve significant reductions in most crime categories by the end of the financial year. We have achieved a reduction of over 3000 reported crimes this year alone, meaning there are over 3000 less victims of crime in Ealing.

This sounds good but that is 3000 less REPORTED victims. As we found last week in Northfield there were seven cars broken into on Northcroft Road last weekend but only three were reported by Tuesday. Apparently these seven were part of a spate of 20 related car crimes that night.

Policing

* CAR CRIME ALERT *

The three Northfield councillors were out this morning busily shoving Boris leaflets through doors. We came across a big car crime issue along the length of Northcroft Avenue. There was a group of people, including West Ealing Neighbours organiser Robert Darke, up in arms about four cars having been broken into at the north end of the road. A few yards down the road there was fresh glass on the junction with Claygate Avenue. At the bottom of Northcroft turning into Belsize Avenue we came across a van that had been broken into. Going back north we found a guy hoovering out a people mover near Fielding school and we asked him the inevitable question: “Have you been broken into?”. “Yes” came the reply.

That makes SEVEN vehicles hit in one road last night. If these guys get caught, they would need an experienced lawyer to protect their rights. Georgia Criminal Appeal Lawyers will make sure you get the effective assistance of counsel you are entitled to under the Constitution.

Please empty your car of everything. A drug user will be quite happy to find a couple of quids worth of change in your car and doesn’t really care if it costs you £200 to replace the window.

The van driver we talked had lost his satnav from his glovebox. There were very clear sucker marks all over the centre of his windscreen so it was not hard for the thieves to work out that he had a satnav. The thief will probably only get £5 for stolen satnav but again that buys a bag of smack so it is worth it to the drug user. Keep some window cleaner in your car and clean off the sucker marks.

The people mover guy had a lot of stuff in his car so no doubt the thieves thought that it might be worth a look. However, if you fall a victim to getting plundered by street urchins, you’d need is a good lawsuit to begin with and a better lawyer to handle the case. Scour more into good lawyers and find more about Mike G Law of Tampa, a lawyer with an expertise in such cases.

Again, if you live in the neighbourhood, please empty your car.

If you see any youths walking where you don’t expect them – for instance non-local lads in a purely residential area, look again.

If you are in any doubt call the police. Certainly if you get your car broken into report the theft – that way the police will be able to track the pattern of behaviour.

Call 999 if it is a live incident. Call your Safer Neighbourhood team (contact details here) if it is background intelligence on this issue.

Policing

Police collaborating with Labour again?

Post author By Phil
Post date 1st Apr 2008
5 Comments on Police collaborating with Labour again?

In the run up to the 2006 local elections in London there was what seemed to be a concerted plan on the part of the London Labour party, the Mayor and the Metropolitan police to use the Met’s Safer Neighbourhood Teams as a political tool.

Harman walkabout Clearly Labour are at it again in 2008. Harriet Harman’s stab-proof vest walkabout fiasco, reported here, is linked to the Home Office spending £150,000 (I suspect rather more) on full page ads in national papers yesterday puffing Safer Neighbourhood Teams, see here.

Harman’s walkabout took place yesterday in Peckham in London at a time when she knows full well that we are in “purdah” for the London Mayoral elections. This is a period when all public servants know that they must do nothing that could be misconstrued as offering support to a particular political party. The police officers should have known better and it is certain that Harman did know better.

With these ads the Home Office seems to be collaborating with Labour against the spirit if not the letter of election law. With the walkabout the Met seems to be at it too. The Met has previous for this.

On 10th January 2006, weeks before the May 2006 local elections, the Met Commissioner and the Mayor jointly announced:

The MPS currently has 285 Safer Neighbourhood teams operating on some wards on every London borough. Today’s announcement means that the remaining 340 wards will initially have teams of four staff in place by the end of April this year and each team will be expanded to six members by April 2007.

This was a considerable acceleration of the SNT programme which was due to be rolled out a year later than this. This letter from the Commander in charge confirms that it was pulled forward.

This announcement was backed up by a £485K ad campaign that ran in February and March to tell everyone that these teams would be in place by the end of April in time for the election on May 4th. This e-mail confirms the ad bill went up from £300K to £485K. Typically of the Met one of the ads showed policemen going around in pairs.

Labour ran this as the main story in their election material in May 2006. A triple whammy of Met ads in local papers, headline stories in the Mayor’s Londoner freesheet and local election leaflets demonstrated the police and Labour party working together to fool Londoners. It didn’t work in 2006. It won’t work today.

Policing

London’s teen murder epidemic in the news

Post author By Phil
Post date 30th Mar 2008
No Comments on London’s teen murder epidemic in the news

Today the Sunday Times is covering London’s teen murder epidemic from the point of view of a 15-year-old schoolgirl called Tekeya from Stockwell who has seen seven of her friends and relatives murdered in the past two years.

I discussed this issue with an 18 year-old who works for me yesterday. He too has a dead contemporary. He reckons that a large number of kids at his 6th form in south west London carry knives. Apparently Labour government minister Ivan Lewis is today proposing 10 year sentences for carrying in the New of the World. The sentence for carrying a bladed weapon only went up from two years to four years on February 12th 2007 but even when it was “only” two years the criminal justice system was letting off 80% of offenders with non-custodial sentences. Posturing Labour MPs will not solve this problem. My kitchen hand will be safe when the first lad in his school gets sent down for 4 years for carrying. It will be hard on that first boy but every kid in the neighbourhood will instantly get safer.

Ex-Mayor Livingstone Policing

Mayor’s crime scam

Today Livingstone launched his crime manifesto, see PDF here. It was rather overshadowed by his gaffe-prone performance on the BBC London television news last night. Follow this link and move the slider to 5:29 to hear Livingstone complain about the media seeming to labour under the motto “if it bleeds, it leads”. Unfortunately for him, and the families of the boys murdered last night, this appearance on TV was sandwiched between the deaths of two teenagers.

In his document the Mayor acknowledges London’s teen murder problem:

The murders of young people are a critical issue we have to bear down upon by a combination of tough policing targeting the possession of knives, in particular, and policies to get young people off the streets by providing them with safe places, like youth facilities, to go outside school hours.

He uses much more space for spurious graphs showing falling crime. The Mayor relies on recorded crime to kid us that London is getting safer. Recorded crime is only a measure of how many crimes the public bother to report AND the police bother to record. I had £996.58 skimmed out of my bank account last April. The bank replaced it without complaint but they didn’t get their cash back from the Sri Lankan petrol forecourt crew that videoed my PIN. This incident didn’t appear in the Mayor’s crime statistics but it is still a crime – it is simply one that the police don’t want to record. Similarly, when it took 2 hours 10 minutes to report my girlfriend’s stolen car in October 2004 the only reason I stuck it out was because I need a crime number for insurance purposes – incidentally the police did find the car in the end. The four people who gave up whilst I was waiting may have decided that their crimes weren’t worth the wait.

Teenage killings are a specific London problem and one that the Mayor has offered no concrete response to because discussing it undermines his “I have licked crime” rhetoric.

According to Channel 4 Dispatches:

27 out of the 52 teenagers who died last year were murdered in London with Lambeth having one of the highest levels of violent crime in the capital.

According to these numbers London, with 12% of the whole UK’s population, has over half the problem. And it is getting worse. 11 kids in less than three months, or one a week in London alone. The Mayor can rail at the media but there is an underlying truth that they are revealing.

Policing

Two teens murdered in North London

Post author By Phil
Post date 28th Mar 2008
2 Comments on Two teens murdered in North London

In two separate incidents two teenagers were stabbed to death yesterday bringing this year’s teen murder toll to 11 already. BBC coverage here. They say:

Police said Amro Elbadawi was injured in Dart Street, Queen’s Park, on Thursday afternoon and was confirmed dead after being taken to hospital.

In a separate incident, a 17-year-old died after being stabbed in a street in Stamford Hill, north London, on Thursday morning.

Some people have criticised me for raising this issue. Clearly they are not teenagers from hard up families for whom this is their main concern.

Policing

9th teen murder

Last week the ninth teenager to be murdered in London this year was shot to death. According to the BBC:

Nicholas Clarke, 19, was shot on 14 March on the Myatts Field Estate in Brixton, south London. He was taken to hospital but died the following day. A post-mortem examination found he died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Even that well known source of journalism Capital Radio is covering this story but the Mayor doesn’t want to know.

Policing

8th teen murder

London’s 8th teenage murder victim this year was killed yesterday. Michael Jones was beaten to death in Edmonton, see BBC report here and local paper report here.

Four of these murders have happened in Edmonton.