‘Time to act’ on crime in Peterborough

A school was burgled; we think of schools as being sanctuaries for our children. Three churches were also broken into: we think of places of worship as places to commune with God.

Whoever committed these crimes did not care. It’s the absence of scruple that is most disturbing: for some criminals, some things are beyond the pale.

However, this instinct doesn’t appear to be operating in these cases.

Crime and the perception of crime can hold a city back. You may have an ideal tax rate. Your infrastructure can be first rate. You can have top performing schools. Peterborough, sadly, is short on these. But even if we did have all of these necessities, we would be hindered by the idea that persons and property aren’t safe.

The Conservative Government has latterly woken up to crime as a national issue; if they were sensible, they wouldn’t just put back 20,000 police officers out of the 21,000 they had cut. Rather, we need an increase in law enforcement resources.

I am conscious of the fact that it may seem unexpected that a Labour politician would speak so strongly in favour of law and order. However, it is an issue that the Labour group takes very seriously. The well-off can hide in gated communities away from law and order. It is always those who are less than wealthy who suffer most from a rise in crime. Crime puts up barriers to community cohesion. Crime prevents wealth creation: it acts as a deterrent to investment and jobs. I dare say crime is more a Labour issue than a Conservative one: having looked at the effect that cuts would make on those who could least afford it, we never would have allowed the austerity-led reductions to take place.

Labour opposed the creation of police and crime commissioners. It is fair to say that this experiment hasn’t yielded the desired results in terms of making our communities safer. What it has done is put in another tier of elected officials which can be blamed instead of central government should crime fail to be addressed.

Our city council can also try to avert the blame; what it should be doing, however, is taking responsibility and showing leadership. We should get our fair share of the restored officers.

We should be working more closely with organisations like Neighbourhood Watch. We should be lobbying our MP to push the Government to do more. It does no good to install a shiny new CCTV control room if there aren’t enough officers out there to catch the criminals in the first place. As with anything else, there is simply no substitute for being there. We have had half measures for far too long. It’s time to act.