EAST END PATROL

policeman trying to prevent 'racial incidents'

Newham CRIME, when it occurs, is not like in the books: it is too quick, too confused, and too difficult for the unpractised eye to recognise at all. But policemen and the places where they work are just as you would expect. Even the jargon is familiar from crime series, so the Old Bill at Plaistow nick have got a new guv'nor, Chief Inspector Peter Smith.

He's a ruddy man with a shock of white hair above a rather formless face, which has weathered but not to any immediately recognisable pattern. His language gives the same impression of amorphous force- fulness: `I was trying to create in policemen (in Plaistow) an interest which would be obviously interesting to their superior officers, and I think we've succeeded.'

What the policemen are to be obviously interested in is racial harassment. New- ham, a borough compounded of East Ham and West Ham, has a population that is 40 per cent coloured. It has been the scene of some of the most vicious racial assaults in London: the murdered Kassan children lived on the north-east fringes of the borough, and Plaistow police station, which covers the western half of the borough, is one of the places where the policing routines necessary to subdue overt racial harassment are being developed.

The most immediate result of these techniques has been a rise in the number of reported 'racial incidents': this term is used by the police to cover a multitude of sins, ranging from abuse to murder, and it is not always easy to decide whether a given crime has been racially motivated or not.

The register of racial incidents intro- duced by Chief Inspector Smith is kept in a large and relatively comfortable room at Plaistow police station. There is a map on the wall with little round, numbered stick- ers of coloured paper to mark every incident since the scheme began last au- tumn. So far there are 148. The colours refer to the types of incident: yellow stickers predominate, referring to a single incident at or near the victim's house. Should another complaint be made from the same place, then a blue sticker is substituted. The two least common colours are orange and green, which mean street incidents and repeated street incidents. Next to this map is a large chart on which the progress of each complaint can be monitored. This is the heart of the system at Plaistow, for it shows how the police have followed up each complaint. The idea is that every household that has com- plained should be visited and revisited by a policeman at irregular intervals until the file is closed for some reason as definite as the afflicted family moving house. The visits have two purposes: partly to gain information about any further incidents that may have gone unreported, and partly to show the victims of racial harassment that the police can provide a useful service for them.

Beneath the maps and charts on the wall of the 'collating room' at Plaistow are the files which each policeman is encouraged to read regularly. They record each com- plaint on a standard form which also requires the senior officers and the com- munity liaison officers to read and take note of the subsequent action taken.

These forms were produced by Com- mander Eddie Jones of K Division in Romford, which covers most of the East End. He is not at all a television police- man. Smooth and scrupulously fair in conversation, he has a way of talking about 'management' and 'objectives' which might get him mistaken for a man from the Treasury, except for what Chandler would have called his 'boiled cop eyes'. He had not served in the East End for 15 years before coming to Romford 12 months ago, and one of the changes he first noticed in the area was that racism had developed considerably since those days.

He set himself to find out what this assertion meant: first to identify and then to analyse the problem. That is the signifi- cance of the statistic that between 70 and 80 per cent of all racial incidents take place at or near the victim's home: it does not say very much about the character of the criminals, but it does show what kind of policemen are needed to deal with them — old-fashioned patrolling bobbies, or 'home beat officers' as they are now known.

Commander Jones points out that racial harassment is nothing like the most fre- quent form of crime in his district. There are about 40 offences of robbery or theft from the person each week, as against a total of 144 racial incidents (of which 58 were assaults) for the whole of last year. But, he continues, this numerical insignifi- cance does not make the problem unim- portant. He compares it (surprisingly) to drug abuse, in that the crime involved is far more important to the victim, either of drugs or of racists, than most crimes, and must be handled with correspondingly in- creased sensitivity by the police. This is not the old-fashioned police attitude to drugs, either. It's worth noting that this is not a legalistic approach to crime. Commander Jones's attitude seems to be that laws exist, and must be enforced, but that crime itself is partly defined by the attitudes of the criminals and their victims and of the society in which both, and the police, must move. So each sort of crime may require a different sort of policing if It is to be effectively controlled. Commander Jones has tried various means to this end: there are refresher courses for constables who have been eight or nine years on the beat. These, he says, are about 'policing skills'. They are not specifically courses in racial awareness at all. But they involve little charades where the police and volunteers from the public act out potentially troublesome situations, and afterwards compare impressions. Perhaps the civilian volunteers learn how to be arrested gracefully: the idea is that the police should also learn how not to offend the public needlessly.

The most celebrated initiative has been for the police to go to schools in the district and talk to sixth-formers about their work. Then the children are taken around their district in a police van. Commander Jones sees this as part of a wider initiative in which the police 'must co-operate with educationalists to help people to become good citizens': it's not a measure aimed solely at improving race relations. Equally, when he talks of 'the community', this is not, as so often, a euphemism for the Asian or black communities only. The indigenous white population of the East End has no tradition of liking the police. This was obvious enough on a patrol round Newham with PC Ted Page. The northern parts of the borough might be in west London, though even here we stop- ped the car twice at houses where the windows had been smashed. One familY had moved: the other had installed plastic windows, and when the boys found that stones just bounced off these, they gave up trying to smash them after a while. But south of the A13, in the strip of council housing between the dual carriageway and the disused St Katherine's docks, we were in very different territory. ' Here Ronan Point once stood. The other 'points', only now being emptied, and their inhabitants rehoused, remain like stakes driven into the heart of the district. Around them are low, shabby courts of brick-built council houses, three or four stories high, with lavatorial tiling in the hallways, and bare concrete stairs. Boarded-up windows are common. There is apparently no point in renewing a pane of glass once broken, and any empty house Will have its windows smashed as a matter Of course. The police worry only about occupied houses.

'It's usually kids,' said Ted Page, 'and usually graffiti or verbal abuse, but quite often you get horrible things pushed through the letterbox, and sometimes fires.'

He drove me through an area of quite prosperous-looking terraced houses from the Sixties. One had new windows and a boarded up door: this was where 15 Asians had managed to escape from an arsonist's fire on the night of 2 July. They have since moved. He told me about a house that he had visited that morning, where a mixed couple had lived. The back garden was

Completely cut off by a wooden barricade to keep their neighbours out and their child

in: but the barricade could not protect their

letterbox, through which excrement was regularly pushed. Nor could it stop the

Upstairs neighbours from demonstrating the superiority of white culture by peeing from the balcony towards the afflicted family.

Still, he said, things are getting slowly better in Newham, now that the housing

department and the police co-operate very

Closely, while the police on the beat realise that racial tension is something they must

WLareh for as a matter of routine, just as they have always watched for crimes or wanted men on their patches. He pointed out what differences small things make. The courtyards that have been fitted with proper entryphones, Where you must punch a numerical code to get in without assistance, were much better

kept than those where the houses had

conventional locks. There, the glass of the door had simply been smashed, and the

lock opened that way. Then the glass above the door had been smashed for good measure. At the top of this house was a flat

from which a West Indian had almost been 'riven by repeated burglaries. Even the wallpaper in his living room had been stripped by vandals.

As we returned to the car, a burly, Whiskery man in a yellow T shirt came quickly out of one of the houses. He

stopped PC Page: 'You'd better have a word with those lads. There's been trouble with the Pakistani family there. I daren't 50 anything because one of our lads got beaten up very badly here last year.' p He was from the housing department. C. Page walked over to talk with four cilulre expensively dressed white teenagers be'unging in the sun against a low brick wall a garage. Afterwards, he explained at he'd done: 'You can't shout at them. That does no good at all. One of them liked fishing, so we talked about that: ariother one even had a job, and we talked nout that for a while, to establish contact. Kt. ght at the end, I mentioned the Pakista- 2t_s casually. They will have understood. w. e can't change the way people think, but we can get them to behave better.'