The Prime Minister's visit to the White Hall Community Centre in Bristol elicited this quote from a woman named Michelle Stone: 'We have got groups of 30 youths who hang around outside my home causing chaos. They're armed with baseball bats and snooker cues and they are totally out of control.' Another man told Tony Blair that he had moved from the estate because his son was bullied by a gang and he was intimidated following his report about a burglary.

Any of us would find this intolerable and we cannot doubt the motives of Blair's speech which followed his visit to the centre. In the latter part of his premiership, he sees it as his duty to alleviate the lot of victims of antisocial behaviour by cutting through the criminal justice system and providing satisfaction to the communities which suffer from yobs and low-level crime.

I cannot argue with much of that, and having once lived on the border of Toxteth in Liverpool and at the centre of Manchester's Moss Side, I can understand the frustration Michelle Stone felt. But only once have I witnessed the total turnround on the streets and that took place not in Britain but in Manhattan where I was living in 1993 and 1994.

At the weekend, the place was a farmers' market for drugs, with dealers coming from all of the five boroughs and beyond to sell their produce. The park at night was a no-go area and on the streets leading to it, I would be stopped every 20 yards or so by men selling crystals or 'smoke'. Between the two sets of doors to my apartment building, I often came across people sheltering from the exceptionally harsh winter and smoking crack.

The situation changed when William Bratton was made police chief and introduced zero tolerance policing by moving officers on to the streets. The park was reclaimed within a week and the dealers who used to station themselves outside my ground-floor window were replaced by two of New York's finest. I became so fond of them I photographed them one Sunday morning.

The message I took from this truly dramatic change was that a permanent police presence and the enforcement of laws that existed could achieve miraculous results. Bratton, now chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, altered the entire feel of New York and the city has never looked back.

Given Bratton's appearance in Britain last week, it was astonishing that nowhere in his speech did Blair mention policing. If the Southmead area of Bristol and others like it experienced the sudden concentration of uniforms and a real determination to enforce the law, I am certain the problem would begin to be sorted out. It's not raids, swoops or surveillance cameras that do the trick, but a steady and resolute police presence.

Instead, he talked about bringing offenders to justice quickly, the rights of victims, the unspecified increase in summary justice and the gap between the public's expectations and the actual performance of the courts. He called for a wholesale rebalancing of the criminal justice system which, when you come to look at it, is bound up in a rather curious attack on universal rights. 'I have come to the conclusion,' he said, 'that part of the problem in this whole area has been the absence of a proper, considered, intellectual and political debate about the nature of liberty in the modern world.'

What he probably means by debate is not debate at all, but a popular acceptance of his disdain for civil liberties, a phrase, by the way, which has been successfully weighed down with ideas of liberal fecklessness and is now used to blame the failure on the ground of parts of the criminal justice system. Blair's government may have passed more than 40 separate pieces of law and order legislation since 1997, yet liberals and their addiction to rights are still held to impede progress in criminal justice.

Calling for a debate on liberty is, I suspect, nothing more than preparation for the further dismantling of suspects' and defendants' rights.

Much of what Blair said comes from a little-read paper by Lord Falconer called 'Doing Law Differently', which was circulated in April and contains oddly mechanistic language. In Falconer's mind, the law must be 'recalibrated', 're-engineered', 'reshaped', 'rebalanced' and 'regeared'. It is as though the practical-minded Blairite engineers had just taken over some antiquated bottling plant and were filing their initial technical assessments. Odd when they have been on the job for nine years.

There is much to agree with in the paper, but then you hit the section entitled 'Re-engineering criminal justice: speedy, simply, summary', and you come across the sentence: 'The defendant needs proper protection against injustice ... but our aim should be a system which will allow the court to know what happened and a process that will be driven by the substantive merits of the case, not the exploitation of safeguards.'

It has the feeling of entering a scene written by Joseph Heller, because the sentence begins by saying one thing but ends by stating entirely the opposite. And what does he mean by a system which allows the court 'to know what happened' and the 'substantive merits of the case'? Does this by any chance reduce the defendant's right to make his or her case in the same spirit with which other safeguards are obviously going to be removed?

The answer is yes. Later, Lord Falconer goes on to talk about the 'proportionality of process'. We all understand the need for a speedier, more responsive service in courts, but it is clear that this will be achieved under Labour by a reduction of the legal process and at the defendant's expense. Blair gave us a warning of this last year in his party conference speech, when he began to chip away at the proposition that our legal system is there to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted.

In Bristol, he was more explicit. 'This is not an argument about whether we respect civil liberties or not ... it's about which human rights prevail. In making that decision, there is a balance to be struck. I am saying it is time to rebalance the decision in favour of the decent, law-abiding majority.'

He has moved to a position where human rights or civil liberties, or whatever you like to call the conventions that protect us all, have been reclassified - or perhaps recalibrated - as a privilege which can be denied by the state when a person becomes a suspect or a defendant.

This is a profound shift masked by a flattering appeal to the decent, law-abiding majority, of which most people naturally count themselves to be lifelong members. But the reason we have had these conventions since Magna Carta and regard them as a universal privilege to be conferred on everyone is that anyone of us can suddenly find him or herself a suspect, just as anyone may suddenly discover they are in minority.

It is not for the government to withdraw those rights in its quest to speed up justice, particularly after so much law has been passed and Blair has had nine years to address the problems of antisocial behaviour. Human rights or civil liberties are not commodities which can be awarded preferentially. They are indivisible, a standard which a society either chooses to respect or not.

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Above is the story from the Home Page.

They tried something similar a while ago here, in the Cleveland Constabulary area - to great success. And there it was called 'Zero Tolerance'. 

The project was the brainchild of  the Chief Constable, worked out in concert with local councillors, who funded it. He refused to stop the project, when later told to by those same local councillors, his view being that the expense was worth it as it dramatically brought down the figures for a large range of offences, & needed to be continued for a longer period, until it was instilled in the minds of potential criminals that they stood a far greater risk of apprehension than before. 

The councillors had changed their minds, objecting to the ongoing heavy expenditure, purely on grounds of cost, & somewhat of a scandal brewed up when allegations of impropriety were made against the Chief Constable.

‘You can control crime’

Allister Heath

It was as if the two men had suddenly burst out of nowhere. ‘You’re coming with us,’ one of them growled as they pounced on Caroline, grabbing her by the arms and starting to drag her down a dark side alley. It was the early hours of Saturday morning in central Durham, about a mile from the cathedral, a part of the city which is never deserted; so my friend, a 22-year-old medical student, lashed out screaming and kicking as hard as she could. For a split second, the kidnappers hesitated, allowing her to break free and run for her life.

But Caroline’s nightmare was soon compounded by the almost surreal ineffectiveness of the authorities. Durham City police station, which used to open around the clock, was closed, the manned presence replaced by an intercom. Despite repeated promises, officers never came to see her, blaming overwork. It took 14 hours and five phone calls before Caroline was finally granted an ‘incident number’; her ordeal may not even be recorded as part of the government’s crime figures, buttressing the laughable claim that crime is under control in Tony Blair’s Britain. One police operator informed Caroline that her attack wasn’t ‘a violent incident’; nobody seemed to care that two dangerous maniacs were still on the prowl in central Durham.

When I was told of Caroline’s brush with disaster last weekend, I was reminded of Irving Kristol’s famous line that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. But then I realised that in today’s angry, crime-ridden Britain, where many of us have friends or loved ones who have been mercilessly robbed or assaulted, a conservative is simply anyone who — perhaps against his better instincts — cheers on Clint Eastwood when, in his role as the rogue San Francisco cop Dirty Harry in those old 1970s movies, he ruthlessly hunts down and takes out criminals.

Those who take the Dirty Harry test with friends and family will soon discover that even many members of the smoothie-drinking, environmentally conscious, public-sector classes are unable to resist the charms of Harry Callahan and his Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. In an otherwise increasingly liberal Britain, attitudes to crime are one of the few areas where traditional values have largely survived the culture wars; however, love for the bobby on the beat of yore has been replaced by a quiet rage against politically correct or incompetent police forces, judges and politicians.

Mr Blair and his new Home Secretary, John Reid, are well aware of this — more so than those Tories disdainful of popular support for a publicly accessible register of convicted child sex offenders. Indeed, even hardliners like David Davis are more cautious than the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary about the so-called Sarah’s law, modelled on America’s Megan’s law. It helps to explain why Mr Blair chose to call more forcefully than ever for a shift in emphasis from the rights of the criminal to the rights of the victim in an important speech in Bristol, and why Mr Reid has attacked judges and his own officials and belatedly banned paedophiles from hostels near schools. Last Sunday he went further, saying that the whereabouts of sex offenders ‘should no longer remain the exclusive preserve of officialdom’, almost endorsing the campaign for Sarah’s law.

And in what could yet turn out to be his most significant move, Mr Reid addressed a conference of top US police chiefs and crime specialists in London on Wednesday morning; invited by Sheila Lawlor of the Politeia think-tank, the US cops came to Britain to brief ministers, Home Office officials and British policemen on how they have reduced crime by vigorously applying ‘broken windows’ policing. In the 1980s, Americans felt powerless at the rising disorder afflicting US cities, just as we do today. But in the 1990s, starting in New York, everything changed, thanks to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, his police chief, Bill Bratton, and his deputy John Timoney, and academics such as James Q. Wilson of Harvard, George Kelling and Catherine Coles of the Manhattan Institute and Myron Magnet of City Journal.

There were 2,262 murders in New York City in 1990; last year, there were just 540, a collapse of 76 per cent. Rape is down 48 per cent, assault 61 per cent, robbery 76 per cent, burglary 80 per cent and car crime an astonishing 88 per cent. While many Londoners live in fear of violence, New York has undergone a cultural renaissance, and so it was with great expectation that I went to ask the authors of this transformation how they had done it.

I met the US police chiefs on Tuesday. They were in their shirtsleeves and looked as if they would have been happier on the beat in the Bronx than briefing ministers and giving interviews in London. They are fascinating men. Timoney, now Miami’s police chief and formerly in charge of Philadelphia, has the hard, rugged features of someone who has witnessed many horrors. He emigrated to the Big Apple from Dublin when he was 13, and joined the police straight from school. But if Timoney is as hard as nails, Bratton, who now heads the Los Angeles Police Department, cuts an even more severe figure. He never seemed to smile; he spent the interview peering at me suspiciously, while speaking remarkably lucidly about how crime can be smashed.

‘You can do something about crime. You can control it,’ Bratton said. ‘The American experience has clearly proven that. In the 1990s we finally got it right. It’s like a doctor dealing with a patient. If you find the right medicines, you can take even the most severely ill patients and make them well. And you’re probably one of the most severely ill patients of the Western world. You need political will. You need smart policing, intelligence-led policing, you need resources. This is not rocket science. Fighting crime is not the most difficult thing in the world.’

So what should be done? The first requirement is large numbers of police officers. That, of course, bodes ill for Britain: Gordon Brown looks inclined to starve the Home Office of cash in order to funnel everything into schools and hospitals. More bodies are not enough, in any case. Officers have to pursue seemingly minor crimes that, if left unattended, soon undermine order, especially ‘quality of life’ offences such as graffiti, litter or vandalism — hence ‘broken windows’ policing. The police must become embedded in neighbourhoods, respond to residents’ concerns, tap local knowledge and identify the small core of offenders responsible for much of the crime. All data needs to be fed into a real-time police intelligence system; local commanders must be penalised if crime doesn’t fall in their area. The aim is to move from a situation where the police react to crime to one where they prevent it from happening.

Needless to say, not all of New York’s drop in crime was due to better policing. Bratton has ‘some sympathy’ for the contentious view, expounded in the best-selling book Freakonomics, that legalised abortion may have helped reduce crime, but said its authors had failed to take into account the greater impact of the contraceptive pill. Overall, however, economic and social forces, such as unemployment or poverty, or changes in illegal drug prices, usually matter less than the quality of criminal justice systems. This fundamental truth is confirmed by Timoney’s success in Philadelphia and Miami, Bratton’s in Los Angeles, and that of their disciples in cities such as Chicago. ‘The first year after my appointment in Philly saw a dramatic decrease in all crimes, especially homicide, by 18 per cent in the first year and then 16 per cent in the next year. The interesting part, which proves the point, is that I left three years ago. They took their eye off the ball and homicide has crept right back up to where it was before I got there,’ Timoney said.

The chiefs were scathing about the British government’s plan, now delayed, to cut the number of police forces. Crime prevention works best when there are lots of local, accountable police forces, free to experiment, they said. They accused the British government of micromanaging the police, arguing that different local conditions require very different responses and local commanders should be given maximum discretion. But they approved of community support officers.

Ironically, Britain’s experience with the IRA ought to stand us in good stead in the war on crime. One of the most interesting ideas raised at Wednesday’s conference was that the anti-crime methods pioneered in New York also work against terrorists, especially the home-grown variety, and vice versa. ‘The same medicine can be applied to traditional crime and criminals, police crime and corruption, and now terrorism,’ Bratton said.

But one issue which wasn’t discussed is that Britain must hugely expand prison capacity if it wants to follow America’s lead. There are 77,785 prisoners in England and Wales, 144 per 100,000 people, and the prisons will be full within three months. But there are 2.1 million inmates in US jails, 724 per 100,000 Americans. While nobody is arguing that Britain would ever have to reach America’s imprisonment rate, New York’s crime-busting success involved a tripling of the prison population, as well as more police officers and better policing techniques, and so would a similar approach in Britain. Even if the £15 billion that would be saved by scrapping Labour’s ID cards scheme were to be spent on building more prisons, as shadow home secretary David Davis has suggested, capacity would rise to only 95,000 inmates, which is nowhere near enough.

But the fact that Mr Reid appears willing to learn from America suggests that after years of presiding over a contradictory combination of tough rhetoric, confused legislation and the destructive Human Rights Act, a Blair regime in its dying days may finally have grown up, helped by its collapse in the polls. The task ahead is monumental and urgent: whoever is in power will have to tackle the law’s deeply ingrained anti-punishment and anti-prison ideology, ridiculously lenient sentences for serious crimes, government-mandated early release schemes, criminals on probation who routinely offend, the embarrassments that are open prisons, community sentences and electronic tagging, as well, of course, as declining conviction rates and the failure to deport foreign prisoners.

This week may turn out to be Blair and Reid’s very own Dirty Harry moment, when they finally realised that they had to respond to public anxiety, and decide to act accordingly. If so, they should show they are serious by poaching one of New York’s crime-busting supercops and, as the movie said, ‘just turn him loose’ on Britain.

Allister Heath is associate editor of The Spectator and deputy editor of the Business.