Political commentary

Who's swamping now?

Ferdinand Mount

Lord Scarman sits like an angular cherub, hunched into his dark suit as though the room was cold for June, like an old person (he is pushing 70). He seems a long way away. Yet when his voice interrupts the dreary to-and-fro of counsel and witness, it is with a startling youth and warmth. Mr Rene Webb, from the Melting Pot Foundation, a grizzled ex-RAF Jamaican, is reciting the litany of police harassment and abuse. He gets into a tangle. Scarman breaks in: 'What you're saying really, aren't you, is that they use language which is inconsistent with the dignity of a human being.'

Gasp in the hall. Well, yes, he did mean that, really. But this gloss, this sudden soaring into the language of civility. . . it is not an inquiry, it is a seduction. By the end of the week, at least three of the local organisations which had vowed to boycott the official inquiry into the Brixton riots are trooping intq Lambeth Town Hall.

I suppose it is a whitewash, to use Scarman's sole infelicity, but it is a lovely show. The worst riot in recent British history is dazzling snowcemmed before your eyes. The Rastafarians, we are told, are a respectable, law-abiding lot. After the weekend, the Rastafarian Collective too joins the Inquiry.

There is an equally heady 'black' mythology put about by the police and the press. Mr John Hazan, QC, for the Metropolitan Police: 'Did you know that lapel badges with the message Brixton 81 Fight Back were being distributed on the Saturday?' No, we didn't and we are suitably impressed, until Mr Rudy Narayan tells us that these badges were part of Ted Knight's campaign against the Cuts and nothing to do with the riots. `Shit, there goes my intro', whispers my neighbour on the press benches.

Mr Narayan is a sort of black Sergeant Buzfuz who goes in for the inflated phrase: 'Brixton was a community under siege'. We-ell, Mr Webb said, he did not object to the police presence, it was the way they behaved. The West Indian temperament is a volatile temperament,' Mr Narayan persisted. 'whereas the British policeman's temperament can be cold and clinical.' Lord Scarman thought these generalisations were unlikely to assist him.

But what exactly would assist him? What was he supposed to be finding out?

Are we meant to be trying to see into the mind of a police chief who sends in a shock force of policemen to clear up petty crime and calls it Operation Swamp? Might not the inhabitants at Brixton ask the Prime Minister: 'Who's swamping now'? What are we to think of police reinforcements marching in a line down an empty residential street behind their riot shields, like a Roman legion? What do police officers mean exactly by saying that they 'don't want Brixton to become a No-Go area'?

Mr Webb complains that 'statistics have pointed the police at us and made the police automatically assume that these crimes are restricted to blacks'. But isn't this like saying that English batsmen are being persecuted by their batting averages? All the same, I can't help thinking that we do have to go back to the statistics. This involves saying certain things which law-and-order conservatives do not like hearing. A crime is like a sound. It does not exist if there is no-one there to hear it. Criminal statistics consist of 'Offences known to the police'. The more policemen there are, the more crimes they can witness and have reported to them and the more criminals they can arrest. Mr Wilton Hill to Det-ChSupt. Jeremy Plowman: 'You had some very good officers in Operation Swamp. They stopped no one and arrested no one.' Lord Scarman: 'I cannot believe you think this is the description of a good police officer.'

Nobody likes to admit it, but in effect the strength of the Metropolitan Police has doubled over the past 20 years. Since 1959, the number of actual policemen has risen by no more than a third, from 17,332 to 23,691. But the number of civilian staff — clerical, forensic, press, traffic wardens etc — has rocketed, from 1,900 to 16,165. Thousands of policemen are now freed from routine chores (as we all said they should be) to become thief-takers again. Twice as many policemen, twice as many crimes. Last year, the number of coppers in the Met rose by five per cent; the amount of crime recorded in London last year rose by five per cent too, Coincidence? Confusion of cause and effect? Crime goes on rising despite the extra polic6 hired to stop it? In that case, why did the crime rate fall in 1976 and 1977 — the only recent years in which the number of policemen fell too, because of Mr Healey's cuts? Crime must be at least partly notnogenic (why should other people hog all the jargon?), created by the law, by acts of Parliament and acts of policemen. The huge increase in 'auto crime', for example, dates from the 1968 Theft Act which made joyriding an offence. Barbara Castle's breathalyser Act — and its successors — have inflated the drunken driving statistics. That doesn't mean it isn't deterring; on the contrary, the measure of its success is the• continuing decline in the number of deaths caused by drunken driving. But that does not mean that there are more drunks on the roads. There may well be fewer.

Now the actions of the police cannot help being influenced by the statistics they themselves produce. Naturally they will tend to respond sharply to a sharp reported increase in a specific type of crime or a general increase in lawlessness in a specific area.

Temporary intensification of policing in a rough district will usually push up the local rate of reported crimes and the rate of arrests too. But will it permanently diminish the rate of, say, street robberies? Or will the muggers just lie low until they are deswamped again?

There is a glaring difference between an area where the local police dare not patrol on foot and have no contact with the local population — a real No-go area like Londonderry before Operation Motorman — and a• place like Brixton, speckled with petty crime, much of it no doubt still unreported, which is nonetheless patrolled throughout in the normal way by policemen who are well-known if not well-liked by all.

Making this distinction is not to sentimentalise the West Indians in Brixton or anywhere else. Nobody could look tougher than the tough eggs in sweat shirts and trilbies lounging along what is left of Railton Road — which is mostly rubble, sky and wavy corrugated iron sheeting. Whatever the real crime level, there is no doubt that the blacks are proportionately committing a lot more of it.

But that does not mean they can be made to obey the law, let alone be integrated into the civil community, by police 'raids' and 'operations'. Every witness, black and white, is really suggesting the same remedy; more policemen on the beat, and the same policemen too, patrolling the same beat for years. No impatience, no swamping. This may conflict with the interests of the police themselves who, like all officials, prefer frequent promotions and transfers ('career structure') and would rather sit behind a desk or in a car. The trouble may be not that we are short of policemen, but that we are of policemen in the right place, viz on the beat. None of this offers a perfect remedy. Policing is an imperfectible art. It involves a certain tacit and involuntary accommodat ing to the social character of an area. West Indians in Brixton now and for the next few years are just as much an underclass as the Jews in the rookeries of Stepney and Whitechapel at the turn of the century. There is no point in pretending that they are going to go away or that they are going to start obeying the law overnight — even if housing and job prospects do begin to improve. They may be gently Scarmanised into behaving better. They must be policed properly — which is neither leniently nor oppressively, but consistently.