Shadow home secretary rejects tactic as a way of cutting violent crime after spate of killings

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A return to high levels of stop and search will not solve London’s violent crime problem, Diane Abbott has said, as policymakers continue to come under pressure after the latest spate of killings in the capital.

The shadow home secretary said random stop and search had poisoned relations between the police and local communities, hampering efforts to gather intelligence and solve major crimes, while mostly turning up nothing but small amounts of drugs for personal use.

She said a Scottish-style public health approach, where police worked with schools, hospitals, mental health services and local authorities to reverse Glasgow’s status as the country’s knife crime capital, was needed to get to grips with London’s violent crimewave.

The Metropolitan police opened their 48th murder investigation on Tuesday night after a 16-year-old boy shot in Walthamstow, east London, died of his injuries in hospital. Their 47th began the night before, when Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, 17, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Tottenham.

Detectives charged a man in relation to their 46th, the stabbing of Devoy Burton-Stapleton, 20, in Wandsworth on Sunday morning. Billy Botton, 24, who lives locally, was in custody before a hearing at Wimbledon magistrates court on Wednesday.

The mayor of London has handed £15m in extra funding to the Met to fight violent crime. On Tuesday, Sadiq Khan argued that austerity was responsible for the growth in violence, tweeting: “Government cuts have decimated services for young Londoners.”

He has also called for a significant increase in stop and search, putting him at odds with colleagues in the Labour party and community campaigners.



Abbott told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the anger caused by stop and search would be a price worth paying if it was proven to cut violent crime. “But the truth is, when stop and search was at full throttle, the main thing they found were small quantities of drugs,” she said.

“Evidence-based stop and search will always be an important weapon against all types of crime. But random stop and search has poisoned relationships between the police and the community, and in the end we need the cooperation of the community to deal with the issues.”

Responding to a claim that New York-style targeted policing, in which at-risk areas are flooded with officers, was the answer, she said: “The [New York] mayor, Bill de Blasio, actually got rid of what they call stop and frisk altogether, and crime has continued to go down.”

Labour would reverse cuts to officer numbers overseen by Conservative and coalition governments since 2010, Abbott said.

“But the main thing that we should do is try and learn from Scotland,” she added. “Glasgow … was the knife crime capital of this country. They implemented a public health approach to knife crime specifically, where the police worked with the education and other parts of the state.”

This approach had, Abbott claimed, led to zero knife crime deaths over an entire year.

