Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
HOME OFFICE
7 MAY 2008
Q120 Mr Mitchell: Would it be useful
to know?
Sir David Normington: It might
be. It is certainly the case that you can track anxiety in a community
to a major incident. The Rhys Jones case in Liverpool, which was
a terrible case, obviously raised anxiety in that community enormously.
Whether those are more prevalent now than in the past or whether
they get more publicity, I think it is difficult to say. I think
that major crimes have always had a lot of publicity.
Q121 Mr Mitchell: Yes, but I do not
know why the coverage should be more obsessive now than it was
then. Zero tolerance used to be the fashion, did it not? This
was Bratton in New York and, if you stopped people peeing in the
streets, you eventually stop murders or whatever. While that was
the fashion, are we now moving Home Office attention away from
what you might call "volume crime" to serious crime,
which is falling?
Sir David Normington: Yes, but
overall crime has fallen.
Q122 Mr Mitchell: Yes, but why has
attention been shifted up the ladder when, on zero tolerance,
it should be shifted down?
Sir David Normington: We are not
going to stop being concerned about all crime but, because overall
crime has been falling so fast and some elements of serious crime
like gun crime and knife crime are not, it seems sensible for
us to focus on those very serious crimes. Partly because they
are catastrophic in their effects, partly because their impact
on community confidence and safety is enormous, it seems right,
I think, for us to be focusing more of our effort there; but I
do not think that we would be able to do that if the overall position
had not improved so much.
Q123 Mr Mitchell: You are going to
make a lot of Daily Mail journalists unemployed if you
succeed in this endeavour! Tell me why, with domestic crime or
domestic violence, put it that way, which is a private matter
on the whole—it has always been difficult to get wives to
report it—have you been more successful in getting that
down than what you might call "public crime"?
Sir David Normington: Simon may
want to come in on this, but because, I think, of the efforts
that have been put in to give people confidence that, if they
do report it, something will be done; and that will include support
for the victim, who will swiftly, if needed, be removed from that
dangerous situation.
Q124 Mr Mitchell: Is it also because
more agencies or more sympathetic agencies are involved?
Sir David Normington: Yes, but
I think that the police have become more understanding of that
as well. If we go back to partnerships, one of the most successful
forms of partnerships are the partnerships, which are becoming
national now, between all the people who have an interest in and
can support the victim of domestic violence, which will also include
the voluntary agencies. Those partnerships, which include the
police, have been particularly successful in supporting victims
of domestic violence. Of course, that word spreads and people
are then willing, maybe after years of suffering from crime and
suffering from violence, to report it.
Q125 Mr Mitchell: I wonder if you
could supply us with some statistics. I do not know whether it
is a North-South problem. The image of Scotland always used to
be rough and tough and the image of the North used to be that
we were rough and tough too—although we are very polite
people. Is it worse in the North than in the South?
Sir David Normington: As someone
coming from the North, I am very reluctant to—
Q126 Mr Mitchell: Well, come over
here and I'll punch you one!
Sir David Normington: I am very
reluctant to make those comparisons.
Q127 Mr Mitchell: Is it mainly a
city phenomenon? I notice that the four areas singled out for
alcohol abuse programmes are big cities.
Sir David Normington: Of course,
domestic violence occurs in lots of places. I do not think that
is a particularly city phenomenon.
Q128 Mr Mitchell: But per capita
is the incidence greater in cities?
Sir David Normington: Yes, for
most types of violent crime, and it is certainly the case that,
when we started out with our programmes on alcohol and also on
domestic violence, we focused on 50 areas of the country. I have
to look again at how those mapped. Certainly some of them would
be in London, of course, and most of them would be in the big
cities.
Mr King: Yes, they were.
Q129 Mr Mitchell: How about class?
It is difficult to get at that, of course, and Mr Davidson is
not here to tell us that the upper classes are going to do more
mugging than the working classes! However, you could tell something
from poverty and deprivation—Super Output Areas, for instance.
I was driving through one last week, exhorting people to come
out and vote Labour—and there was a singular incidence of
deafness around as far as I was concerned!—when somebody
chucked a bottle of beer at me. I do not know whether it was a
10p tax rate payer who was making his own protest, or whether
it was the fact that this was an area of great deprivation that
I happened to be in. Is there any correlation between deprivation
and violence?
Sir David Normington: Yes, there
is certainly a connection between deprivation and crime, and also
violent crime. Also, lower income families but also families that
are very vulnerable, at-risk families, and so on. Obviously, a
family where the parent, usually the father, is already an offender,
is likely to be a family in which the children also become offenders
themselves. You can therefore draw those patterns. They are quite
complex but yes, generally, is the answer.
Q130 Mr Mitchell: We have figures
here in tables six and seven, which are reports of the victims,
are they not? There seems to be a greater incidence of young people,
but that is the victims.
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Q131 Mr Mitchell: Not the perpetrators.
We do not know if the people who were doing it were similarly
young people. Similarly, we do not know about the reports of alcohol
and drugs being involved. That is coming from the victims. We
do not know whether it was greater or lesser. I just wonder why
there are no figures on ethnic violence.
Sir David Normington: I think
that we can provide those actually, but they are not in the report.
It is certainly the case that young people are more likely to
commit crime and that a lot of crime is what the police call "youth-on-youth".
In other words, you are more likely to be a victim and also to
be a perpetrator of crime. We can, I think, provide you with that,
but I do not think that I have it in front of me.
Q132 Mr Mitchell: Can you provide
us with that? My experience seems to indicate a real problem of
black-on-black violence.[4]
Sir David Normington: Yes, and
in some parts of London black-on-black crime is a particular issue,
particularly with Operation Trident. That is what it was set up
to deal with.
Q133 Mr Mitchell: Why cannot knives
be dealt with more effectively? My grandson reports that somebody
produced a knife on him on a train in Dulwich, which I would have
thought is a fairly respectable area. Certainly the house prices
they pay would mean that it would be respectable! Do we not have
stop-and-search powers?
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Q134 Mr Mitchell: And are they extensively
used?
Sir David Normington: Yes. Of
course, it is just a fact that it is easier to get a knife. That
is the starting point. Even if you take knives away, you can go
and get another one. Something like 12% of people with knives
have knives that they have got from their kitchen.
Q135 Mr Mitchell: What are the penalties
of carrying a knife in a public place?
Sir David Normington: It can be
up to four years.
Q136 Mr Mitchell: It can?
Sir David Normington: Yes, but
in fact there is an escalating set of offences. One of the things
that we are trying to do is to ensure that it is much more common
for people to be prosecuted for carrying a knife, rather than
just warned. Because we have these powers on the statute book,
but there is an issue about whether they are being used enough
and we think that they should be used more.
Q137 Mr Mitchell: Presumably that
varies from area to area and police force to police force?
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Q138 Mr Mitchell: Do you have figures
on that?[5]
Sir David Normington: We could
try to give them to you. We do not have them here. It is certainly
true that it is variable, because it is about prosecutors, police,
and then how the courts react as well.
Q139 Mr Mitchell: Yes, but, given
public concern, there is a strong case for a crackdown on knife-carrying,
is there not? If some areas are shown from your statistics to
be laggard, it will accumulate pressure.
Sir David Normington: Yes, exactly
so. You want a proportionate response because obviously you do
not want everybody put in prison at the first offence, but you
do want the laws we have put in place properly used everywhere.
4 Ev 24 Back
5
Ev 25 Back
| 
