Say what you like about Ken Livingstone at least he had the good sense to realize that London’s multicultural city demands a progressive approach to policing.
He was determined the capital must never return to the bad old days of the Sus Laws lest the consequences of oppressive policing – civil unrest – erupt when least expected.
His successor at City Hall, Boris Johnson, has no time for such ‘politically correct’ sensitivities as witnessed by his decision to effectively disband Scotland Yard’s Operation Trident, a detective team specialising in cracking gun crime in the Black community.
The news follows an earlier move to kick out a group of independent advisers who formed a vital vein of communication between the police and the capitals’ African and Caribbean population.
Red Ken was often portrayed as a Socialist ideologue but in reality behind Boris’s buffoonery and populism lies the real ideologue only too willing to impose his Right wing dogma on a Left-of-centre city.
Operation Trident, created following demands from leading Black figures to deal more seriously with the plague of gun crime, had its’ critics but it is undeniable that the unit made a significant difference to catching gunmen.
And that means lives have been saved. This is a statement trumpeted by senior officers over years to justify the detective team which targets ‘black-on-black’ crime. And there truth in the claim. When Trident was set up there was a desperate need for a command committed to over-coming the barriers to securing convictions of criminals.
This has reaped rewards by increasing the success rate of serious criminals being jailed. By identifying fears of retaliation and increasing witness protection to break ‘walls of silence’, and by gathering intelligence of gangs and their gang ‘culture’, Trident was able to take murderers and tonnes of guns off the streets.
With the number of gun victims going down Trident is in many ways a victim of its’ own success even though the unit has come in for criticism for not being effective enough.
Needless to say this has saved lives. Conversely dismantling the detective team threatens to cost lives, Black lives. Surely anyone can see that? Not an ideologue like Boris who would rather abolish a perceived symbol of Livingstone’s legacy, an initiative supported by the ‘race relations industry’, rather than see the potential tragic human consequences of his decision.
Maybe he doesn’t care after all the inner city communities affected are highly unlikely to vote Tory. And in any case Boris, in his second and final term, is not troubled by the prospect of re-election and is delegating an increasing amount of powers to his unelected officials as he winds down at City Hall and winds-up his manoeuvres to secure a return to the Commons with the goal of seizing the Conservative Party leadership.
In the case of policing this part-time mayor has handed much of his responsibilities as elected police and crime commissioner to another notorious ideologue, the former Hammersmith and Fulham council leader Stephen Greenhalgh.
Under Boris’s watch police use of Section 60 stop and search powers – which allow cops to apprehend citizens without reasonable suspicion of them having committed a crime – has risen dramatically. Yet it is so ineffective, with arrest rates of just seven percent, it is the ultimate blunt instrument.
Section 60 is the new Sus Laws, hugely targeted against Black youth and risking taking London back to the pre-Scarman1980′s. The tactic causes immeasurable tensions against the police and strangles the very flow of intelligence needed to catch the criminals that make life dangerous for the law-abiding majority in the inner cities.
Not content with damaging community-police relations, the Boris-Greenhalgh double act are now taking a ball-and-chain to the line blue line protecting inner London has from the specter of criminal gangs terrorising their neighbourhoods.
Granted, the conviction rate for ‘black-on-black’ gun crime has remained stubbornly below the figure for non-Trident cases and this has been a source of frustration. Indeed the Met’s team have been accused of not giving enough priority to witness protection.
But the conviction rate is still a lot higher than it was before Trident was set up, and there is no convincing argument that the dynamics of gang crime have changed sufficiently to justify scrapping it.
A small handful of figures have previously suggested that Trident should be abolished but their frustrations stem from the fact that the operation could, and should, be more successful and is not, in itself, a reason for axing it.
One obvious way of improving things is to have more Black detectives under a Black leadership, which Trident has never had, to better understand the challenges of gathering intelligence needed to charge the big players.
The old Metropolitan Police Authority kept Trident accountable and reflected many of these concerns, however since the Coalition has abolished police authorities handing all scrutiny power to one person – in London’s case the mayor – the focus on improving Trident has vanished.
Lee Jasper, one of the founders of Trident and former chair of its’ independent advisory group, wrote about the need for Trident yesterday:
The campaign for Trident was prompted by the brutal murder of Marcia Lawes, demanded that the Met, stop using registered criminally active informers, who were running amok in our communities, committing rape, robbery and murder, all with the sanction and support of the Met. I was one of the founding fathers of Trident in the late 1990’s.
It was I and a group of other activists, who challenged the Met to improve its relationship with London black communities, by tackling their tragic failure to investigate and prosecute the killers in our community.
I saw it as part of the post McPherson settlement. The police deal with racist attacks and officers and in return, we support them in tackling armed criminality. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.
People such as Cheryl Sealy, Nick Long, the late Arlene Mundle and Canon Ivelaw Bowman, all of whom demanded that the scandal of mothers left with dead bodies and no justice and the reckless use of criminally active, informers was brought to an end.
The Trident unit focused on armed criminals in the black community and attempted to stem the rise in murder and mayhem in our communities. High profile media campaigns, tackling the supply of guns, improving witness protections and an increasing level of trust in the police, were some of its distinguishing hall marks.
The detectives and the staff became specialist on this difficult area, the rate of successful prosecution went up and gradually gun shooting came down.
It worked, because we had some of the harshest critics of the police as Trident Independent advisers; they were hand picked by me and other advisers. The Met had no say in our selections and often baulked at our choices. Our relationship was sparky, tense, creatively dynamic. This worked and worked well. So much so that it become an international policing model, hailed as providing the template example working with alienated communities worldwide.
As Trident advisers, we often restrained and held back the police from reverting to type, pointing out the way in which racist stereotypes, infected operational policing decisions. We shone a bright light, over every aspect of Trident Command Unit, always providing sharply, critical analysis, and demanding more from proof from them, that things were improving and for a while, they were.
In February of last year, Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan Howe decided that Trident would be changed form a discreet unit, into an anti gang task force and in one fell swoop, destroyed its reputation. I along with other key former members of Trident Advisers condemned that decision.
The death of Trident is complete. The Met under political pressure from Boris have reverted back to the lazy, stereotypical, racist policing methods of the past, expanding the use of supergrasses, criminal informers and the introducing the 2013 version of the SUS law, the dreaded joint enterprise.
These are precisely the type of policing tactics, which did so much to corrode the Met reputation in the past. Racist policing is back in full effect. The Met has returned to its default setting, as that of an institutionally racist organisation having been given the all clear by Boris Johnson’s much discredited Race and Faith Report published in 2010.
As for violent crime, the black community finds itself, right back where it started. Reported violent crime is down so the official figures say. I say that is utter rubbish, killings may be down due to the improvement surgeon’s skills, but black people live in constants fear of violence.
We have less dead bodies, but more walking wounded, more incidents unreported, more gerrymandering of the figures and mendacity and meaningless rhetoric from the Mayor. We have a Tory Commissioner who seems, professionally incapable of publically criticising the Mayor, even as he slashes police officer numbers.
Witness protection is a mess, innocent people are convicted under the joint enterprise law, stop and search is through the roof and supergrasses are … paid off for dodgy evidence.
So farewell, Trident, once a jewel in the Mets crown, now a battered bloodied and abused. Crushed by an out of touch politician, whose commitment to tackling gangs is paper thin, glossed with Latin references and cheap publicity stunts.
We are back to the bad old days where Black life in London is seen as cheap. The consequences, I warn you now, will be both profound and expensive.
The inevitable consequence of scrapping Trident is a rise in serious crime affecting the Black community, and that means the decision-makers, Boris and Greenhalgh, may well end up with blood on their hands.
Add into the mix the new 20 percent arrest rate target for stop and search, which I blogged about last month and – with the additional factors of hugely disproportionate Black youth unemployment and austerity measures that will continue to bite into youth services for years to come – and all the ingredients are there for the kind of civil disturbances we last witnessed in the early to mid 1980′s.
The police told The Voice newspaper today that they weren’t axing Trident but this is at odds with the facts, as outlined by the Police Oracle which points out that:
The Metropolitan Police has announced that its recently re-focused Operation Trident Gang Command is to shed responsibility for investigating fatal shooting incidents – the reason why it was originally formed nearly 15 years ago.
While fatal shootings have traditionally been investigated by Trident, a statement issued by the force said that other killings – including the stabbings of young people – had been dealt with by officers and staff from the HSCC (Homicide and Serious Crime Command).
The move means that Operation Trident exists in name-only. This is the second time the unit has been changed under Boris. Just a few months ago he widened its’ remit from specifically tackling ‘black-on-black’ crime to all gang crime regardless of the ethnicities of the victims or perpetrators.
This second change in a short period of time suggests that City Hall really don’t have a clue what they are doing. With Trident now responsible for ‘non-fatal’ shootings while HSCC tackles fatal shootings it is literally a roll of the dice as to whether a gun incident will fall under Trident or not depending on where the bullet hits.
It’s a nonsensical situation that is surely a precursor to the Trident team officially being wound up before too long.
The outgoing chair of the Trident independent advisory group Claudia Webbe wrote in The Guardian today:
Police confirmation that they had moved the central core of Operation Trident – its dedicated murder investigation unit – to the homicide and serious crime command, effectively signals the end of Trident, the London-based organisation I founded with other community activists in the mid-1990s.
Back then, while the culture of gun crime affected whole communities and neighbourhoods, 90% of homicide victims were black, mainly black men. The police response was woeful, using criminal “informants” who were themselves allowed to get away with so-called lesser crimes. Delroy Denton, for example, was left free to brutally rape a 15-year-old schoolgirl and murder Marcia Lawes, slashing her throat 18 times; and Eaton Green was allowed to continue dealing crack cocaine and committing armed robbery.
As a result of community pressure an inquiry was undertaken by the late Sir John Hoddinott, who was chief constable of Hampshire, which confirmed our worst fears: that the police had a better relationship with “criminal informants” than it did with law-abiding black people. The police tactics were flawed from the start; there were very few detections of and/or prosecutions for gun-related murders. Many in the black community believed the police were complicit in the way men of violence were taking hold of our neighbourhoods and estates, using guns to protect their crack cocaine trade.
We campaigned for change, arguing that tackling gun murders and enabling justice for victims and their families relied on the police building trust and confidence with the black community and working in partnership. A new low was reached in 1998 following the brutal murders of Avril Johnson in Brixton and Michelle Carby in Stratford.
However, despite the ongoing community pressure, it was not until the aftermath of the Lawrence inquiry that the then Met commissioner and home secretary finally agreed in 2000 to the establishment of a dedicated Trident operational command unit (OCU), established with over 200 staff to investigate gun murders disproportionately affecting black communities. The unit was to work closely with the already established Operation Trident independent advisory group. Encouraging witnesses and members of the community to come forward required sensitivity, dedicated police time and specialist resources.
As an independent advisory group we worked hard to challenge the generally held negative perception that victims of gun crime were somehow complicit in their fate or, worse still, criminals themselves. The sensitive Trident murder investigations of innocent bystanders such as 17-year-old Annaka Pinto, murdered in Tottenham in 2007, and seven-year-old Toni-Ann Byfield – who was shot dead to prevent her from identifying her father’s murderer – highlight the importance of our work.
Over time, gun murder victims and their families no longer felt ashamed to speak about their experiences. Trident cases require a particular dedication, cultural awareness and sensitivity, and when this is absent it has had a particular damaging impact on community relations.
Perpetrators of gun and violent crime had historically relied on a “culture of silence” and a “climate of fear” to avoid detection. Trident’s success in driving down gun murders has been invaluable not only to the black community but also to London’s population as a whole.
It is hugely detrimental and a retrograde step to learn that the dedicated murder investigation unit, the very heart and engine of Trident, is to be realigned or merged, watering down Trident’s effect. Even more detrimental is the fact that this decision came without consultation or engagement, and this is a huge slap in the face to those of us who campaigned hard to establish Operation Trident.
In February 2012, and with no community consultation, London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, relaunched Trident as a gang command unit: moving from tackling black, gun-related crime to tackling all violent crime relating to young people. Over the past year there has been a gradual whittling away of independent scrutiny of the operational effectiveness of Trident.
In disadvantaged areas with diverse populations and myriad economic and social problems, the slippery use of the language of “gangs” and its loose association with young people mitigates against effective policing, providing a dangerous shortcut to understanding youth conflict. The “gang”, it seems, is sufficient explanation: there is no attempt to understand the broader and more complex social, cultural, economic and political context of youth violence. As a result there is a false and often racialised understanding of the preventative and proactive role of the police.
The strength of Trident – which sent a clear message to gun-wielding murderers and the criminal fraternity – within the black community is now weakened and its successes will become a thing of the past. It is hard now to see how its message that criminals will be hunted down and brought to justice will be enforced in the future.
Nobody has any wish to go back to the days when gun murders went largely undetected, with a community too frightened or lacking confidence in the police. Operation Trident was a model of good practice. But now political interference and the loss of its dedication, specialism and focus has left us all vulnerable.
And that’s the point. The legacy of the Lawrence inquiry, and the whole concept of a dedicated approach to tackling issues disproportionately affecting the Black community, have been buried by politicians with no knowledge of past struggles and no cares about whether their ‘mainstreaming’ dogma might have deadly repercussions.
This would have never happened under Red Ken nor, I believe, any progressive mayor of London including a Liberal Democrat or Labour mayor. They would be vastly more aware of the issues and understand the need to work with the Black community not dictate to them or trample over the advice of those who have decades of experience of policing in the Black community.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
