Mayor Johnson's policies for young people have been wide-ranging, but much of his energy has been directed towards tackling youth violence. In his newly-published Annual Report he lists as a "highlight" (page 31) that "youth violence fell by more than six percent in 2010/11." What precisely does this mean?
The types of crime measured in the "youth crime" category are defined on the Metropolitan Police Authority's website as:
[A]ny offence of Most Serious Violence and Assault with Injury or Weapon Enabled Crime, where the victim is aged 1-19.
In other words, the "youth violence" figure Boris uses in his Annual Report measures reported violent crimes against children of all ages, not just teenage ones as might be assumed. Moreover, the perpetrators of the crimes in this category are of any age, including adults. Claims about the amount of "youth violence" can be confusing.
This is confirmed by the detail of the "youth violence" offences figures. The Annual Report acknowledges that "levels of the most serious youth crimes remain a real, and all too often tragic, concern," but in this case does not illustrate the point with statistics. These showed a small (3.1 percent) rise in the sub-category of "serious" youth violence in 2010 compared with 2009. At the start of this year assistant commissioner Tim Godwin said that this, "Corresponds with a rise in overall knife crime for the same period, which is up by 8.3 per cent."
As Godwin's words indicate, knife crime is strongly associated with young people. But the meaning of the knife crime statistics can be as deceptive as those for "youth violence." The MPA defines "knife crime" as follows:
All offences of murder, attempted murder, threats to kill, manslaughter, infanticide, wounding or carrying out an act endangering life, GBH without intent, ABH and other injury, sexual assault, rape, robbery where a knife or sharp instrument (defined as any instrument that can pierce the skin) has been used.
It adds:
[D]ata includes where a knife was "threatened but not seen" from April 2008 onwards.
Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson's report to last Thursday's full MPA meeting said:
Knife crime remains a challenge, up by 5.6% (582 more offences) compared to the same period [April 2010-January 2011] last year. It is encouraging that instances where a knife is used to injure continue to fall, down by 3.3%. That is 116 fewer stabbings on London's streets, with offences reducing from 3,555 to 3,439.
Is the glass half empty or half full? Can the Met's statistics, which are the ones Boris cites, really tell us what's going on with "youth violence" of whatever kind? A different measure of the numbers of youthful victims of violence in London is provided by a new Home Office analysis of its Tackling Knives and Serious Youth Violence Action Programme (TKAP) in England and Wales. This shows that in 2009/10 there were increases in the number of 13-24 year-olds admitted to London hospitals after being assaulted (figure 11 on page 17 and table 1.3 on page 48), the number of those who'd been assaulted with a "sharp object" (table 1.4 on page 49) and in the number of attempted murders of 13-24 year-olds in London (Table 1.11 on page 56) when compared with 2008/09.
The same tables, however, show falls in each of these categories in 2008/09 compared with 2007/08 - a further pointer to the variability of crime trends and the difficulty of understanding them, let alone measuring the effectiveness of initiatives against them. Boris's Annual Report repeats his familiar mantra that "11,000 knives have been taken off London's streets" since his intensification of stop-and-search under Operation Blunt 2 in 2008, yet eminent criminologists argue that any relationship between the incidence of knife crime and increased stop-and-search is, at best, unclear. Speaking in Hackney only last week, Boris re-affirmed that he thought stop-and-search was part of the solution, though his policing deputy Kit Malthouse was candid in acknowledging that the administration is "conflicted" about it - so much depended on how the search was done. Meanwhile, academics continue to find that stop-and-search powers are frequently deployed in ways that are discriminatory, disproportionate and unfair.
The larger picture may be every bit as hazy, as Boris's master policy document on youth , Time for Action, acknowledges on page 59:
Not all offences are reported to the police because some victims do not wish to inform the authorities or feel unable to do so. For example youths are often reluctant to report violence-related injuries due to fear of reprisal, because they wish to deal with the problem personally, because they have behaved criminally themselves, or because they lack confidence in the police. In addition, it is recognised that the level of under-reporting of crime may well be higher amongst ethnic minorities. Consequently, the actual extent of youth violence in London cannot be accurately established.
What is clear, however, is that Boris has given the issue significant high profile attention and not only in relation to policing. Eschewing a one-dimensional enforcement-only approach often favoured by prominent Conservatives in the past, he has also focused closely on re-settlement and prevention, working with a range of organisations and individuals.
Time For Action, published in November 2008, set out seven policy "strands" (page 53), each informed by contributions to seminars held by the Mayor the preceding September (see page 62) but also a more general commitment to increasing support and opportunity for the young, in particular the less advantaged.
Since May 2009 all of these strands have taken the form of initiatives of various kinds, some of them strongly reflecting the Mayor's personal convictions (see his Introduction to the time For Action update report, published in September 2009). The initiatives have included his being a vocal "champion for youth" and using his leadership position to pool expertise, identify and help fill gaps in social and cultural provision for young people and, with a very Tory stress on practically, seeking to pool examples of "what really works" in improving the lives of London children. The latter was launched last month as Project Oracle.
The broad, opportunities aspect of Time For Action has taken the form of enabling two Enfield secondary schools to become academies in the debatable belief that this will improve them, encouraging apprenticeships (target: 20,000), seeking volunteers to help run uniformed youth groups, setting up a music education strategy and supporting the philanthropic Bridge Project in introducing children to classical music. A peer mentoring programme designed to transform children in care into "mayor's scholars" has recently started in Islington, Hackney and Kensington and Chelsea.
The most ambitious exercise to get underway focussing specifically on reducing youth crime has been Project Daedalus, aimed at cutting re-offending among well-motivated young people who have been locked up for the first time. The Mayor has already claimed great success for Daedalus, although a generally positive interim evaluation of the programme on behalf of the London Criminal Justice Partnership published in March identified potential areas for improvement. Its final report is scheduled for next May.
Boris has also launched a campaign to recruit 1,000 mentors for black boys in London. His Annual Report claims that 1,500 have "registered to be potential mentors," though the process for selecting which are suitable has yet to be put in place. The man in charge of it will be Ray Lewis, now termed the Mayor's unpaid "mentoring champion," but previously a founder member of his team at City Hall until obliged to resign after just two months in the job.
That Boris was prepared to take Lewis back into the fold is a measure of his belief in the methods of the Eastside Young Leaders Academy, which include military-style drilling and denigrating boys in front of their peers for behaviour deemed effeminate or homosexual. When defending Lewis just before his departure from City Hall, Boris praised him for standing firm against what he derided as a "stifling orthodoxy." To others, Lewis's "masculinist" agenda appears to confirm in his boys the very harmful values of delinquent maleness he reckons to correct. The most perceptive piece of journalism yet written about him raised the possibility that such successes as he achieves could be in spite of the authoritarian elements of his method rather than because of them.
Criticisms of Time for Action and the programmes it set out included that it lacked a clear focus: was it about targeting youth crime and violence or more generally promoting youth opportunities? The latter took prominence in a "renewed agenda" published last summer, which drew on the results of the GLA's 2009 Young Londoners Survey and set out areas where child and family-friendly investments had been made, with an emphasis on addressing disadvantage. There's also been a report on early years interventions to address health inequalities.
Despite criticisms and setbacks Boris has kept youth issues high on his public agenda, giving them high priority in this year's Annual Report and embarking recently on a series of "community conversations," primarily with black Londoners concerned about gangs and violence. Opponents might accuse him of poor judgement, lack of clarity and inconsistency but, if nothing else, his sustained association with youth issues of all kinds demands of them that they come up with something better.
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