Crime

Sarah, a 15-year-old victim of sexual exploitation by grooming gangs is pimped out and degraded by scores of men every week, beaten by her exploiters, and alienated from her friends and family. After a year of hell, Sarah is given an option: recruit two more girls for the gang and she can go free. Out of absolute desperation she agrees. But when the gang is finally caught, rather than treated as a victim, Sarah is charged with procurement of girls into prostitution and convicted by a jury. Amy, a vulnerable young woman is trapped in a relationship with an abusive man who controls her every move. Amy is scared of him and has learned to do what he demands to avoid punishment and violence. This man is a criminal and asks her to hide a weapon he has just used to kill a drug dealer rival.

There’s no such thing as a typical week in policing and this last one was no different. It started on a high and ended, tragically, on the lowest of lows. I’ve been asked recently why I joined the police — what or who inspired me. My first answer is: Lieutenant Carl Downing. He was my divisional officer in the Navy and one day, though I went on to be the most unlikely copper you could ever meet, he turned to me and asked: ‘Have you thought about the police? You’d be great at it.’ I remember thinking: where did that come from? Nonetheless, five years later I found myself signing up. Or perhaps my career began earlier, with the Javid brothers’ crime-busting gang.

How would you know if one of your colleagues was a murderer? When police announced the man they’d arrested for multiple horrific murders was Dennis Nilsen, many of his former colleagues — including me — were amazed, but perhaps not completely incredulous. Des worked with me at the Hotel and Catering Jobcentre in 1980 and he was unquestionably odd. My wife recalled him saying in the office one day: ‘You know it would be really easy to pick up some rootless young man in a bar and knock them off. Who’d notice? Who’d care?’ For his colleagues it was just another rant, a weird take on his continuing critique of Thatcher’s Britain. ‘Oh shut up, Des!’, they no doubt thought.

Growing pains Sir: James Forsyth (‘Rewiring the state’, 4 July) shocked this loyal Spectator reader with the following: ‘Even before Covid, this country was in a productivity crisis and it’s nigh-on impossible to improve productivity without government involvement. Increasing productivity requires improvements to be made to physical and digital infrastructure and to the skill base, and those need public investment.’ James clearly has not studied the sources of productivity growth (or lack of it). In the 50 years to 2008, the UK experienced around 2 per cent p.a. growth in real Gross Value Added per hour worked — which is what politicians generally mean when they talk about productivity. Since then, productivity growth has effectively stalled.

Police relations Sir: As a former Met Police officer, with a similar background to Kevin Hurley, I was surprised how much I disagreed with his article (‘Cop out’, 27 June). Central to this was the lack of emphasis he placed on the attitude of police officers. The emphasis on violent gang crime undoubtedly leads to a distortion in how young black men are perceived by the police, and this in turn can quickly lead to confrontation on the street. The attitude of young police officers is key to avoiding an escalating reaction between them and members of the public. Senior officers need to develop more holistic ways of addressing crime, and acknowledge that the police cannot arrest their way to safer communities. Communities need to be integral to policing solutions.

Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies, but I think he misses the crucial point (‘Defund the police’, 27 June). We simply do not have bobbies on the beat to even feel sympathy for, and this means that constructive relationships between a recognisable police officer and their community are a rarity. As Kevin Hurley describes, many black youths in our cities have nothing but hatred towards police officers, and this cannot be a surprise when the only interactions they have with them are being forced to empty their pockets after being suspected of criminal activity.

Most Britons assume at the outset that any misfortune involving a cyclist is the cyclist’s fault. After all, many a two-wheeled hellion has earned contempt. But put aside the understandable cynicism. This is not one of those stories. A week ago, I was cycling around Buckingham Palace while some low-key royal whatnot was pending but not under way. The vicinity was closed to traffic but not to bikes. As usual, I was heading for Hyde Park Corner via Constitution Hill, because the bike path on the right-hand side in Green Park is insensibly ‘shared use’ — meaning, teeming with pedestrians, and I see no point in our inconveniencing one another. As I passed, an officer shouted ‘Cyclist!’ and then barked something I couldn’t make out.

James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon dog of American letters’ has no hesitation in affirming it when he arrives in The Spectator’s London offices to record a podcast. ‘Oh yes, I think that’s been proven,’ he says matter-of-factly. Has he always thought that? ‘When I finished the LA Quartet. I knew there was nobody like me and there wasn’t.’ Ellroy’s new book, This Storm, is the second novel in a projected set of prequels to his LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz) set between LA and the Baja peninsula in Mexico in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.