TERRY DIGNAN:                On our streets day and night 
the police struggle to contain violent crime. Tony Blair promised to be 
tough on crime and its causes. Empty rhetoric, says Oliver Letwin. He says 
the answer is to revolutionise policing in this country. But he's been 
looking elsewhere to find out how. 

                         Oliver Letwin wants to 
rid the Tories of their traditional get tough, no nonsense image on law 
and order. Instead he talks of creating a neighbourly society where young 
people are kept off the conveyor belt of crime by learning the norms of 
civilised behaviour. Yet to achieve this he would import much of the American 
approach to law and order. Many in this country would find such a policy 
too tough to stomach even if they were prepared to find the money to pay 
for it.

                        To see how American police 
- on and offshore - uphold the law, Oliver Letwin has been to New York. 
He's interested in neighbourhood policing. Like other American cities, 
New York has many more officers on patrol than we see in this country. 
Although Letwin believes they work more closely with communities, those 
who've studied US policing doubt the idea would work well here. 

PROFESSOR PETER WADDINGTON:    The cop on the streets of the most 
lovely neighbourhood is going to find that many of the people in that area 
he doesn't know from Adam because he's never seen them before and will 
never see them again. So how is he going to be able to form this close 
relationship? And if he's in the difficult to police neighbourhood, they 
are not going to stay in that neighbourhood. They're going to be all over 
the place. So how is he going to keep tracks of them?

DIGNAN:                    Yet Oliver Letwin favours 
US-style policing because he says it works. In New York in 1993 there were 
eighty six thousand robberies. Then came the introduction of zero tolerance 
- a crackdown on even minor offences - backed by a new form of community 
policing. By 2001 the number of robberies had fallen to twenty eight thousand. 
Meanwhile in London - with a similar sized population - the number of robberies 
had risen to forty one thousand.  But New York's war on crime had to be 
paid for. The city currently has forty thousand, seven hundred and ten 
police officers. In London the Met has just twenty five thousand, three 
hundred and seventy four.  Even Labour's planned rise in national policing 
levels won't even begin to make up the difference. So where would the Tories 
get the money from to fund an even bigger increase?    

DR BARRY IRVING:            The decision, the political decision, 
to make sure that there were a huge number of officers available to be 
deployed on the streets of New York is obviously a seminal one as far as 
crime fighting in that city's concerned. We haven't got as many, they're 
more difficult to deploy, it's more difficult to decide where to put them 
and if considerable difference was to be made to the visibility of police 
on our streets the recruitment would have to be staggeringly high.

ACTUALITY:                    "Turn around. Stop!"

DIGNAN:                    Yet more cadets prepare 
to swell the ranks of the NYPD. But even this doesn't tell the whole story. 
They'll have six thousand more civilians than the Metropolitan Police to 
do routine administrative work. And they'll be assisted  by an array of 
other law enforcement agencies.  

PROFESSOR WADDINGTON:        Although it appears that the NYPD 
is substantially bigger than the Met - and it is - there are still yet 
more cops in New York who are from federal, municipal, specialist agencies 
and the rest. So it's vastly bigger and if you bring that figure over to 
New York then you're going to have a huge financial implication - you're 
talking about doubling the budget or more.

DIGNAN:                    But Oliver Letwin says 
more policemen and women may not be needed. He argues existing officers 
could be used more effectively, out on the streets, getting to know their 
neighbourhood. Indeed in London in recent months hundreds of them have 
been re-deployed from traffic duties to tackle street crime. Oliver Letwin 
is being warned, however, that this policy carries with it great risks 
even though some senior Tories would like to see it applied throughout 
the country. 

LORD BAKER:                For a police officer to be 
driving down a motorway chasing someone who's going over seventy miles 
an hour is I think rather a misuse of police time. I think if that job 
has to be done - it could be done by a uniformed force that were trained 
in those skills, not so highly professional as a police officer, and in 
fact that force could be funded by the fines that they levy on people who 
exceed the speed limit.

DIGNAN:                    So, should the police stop 
going after speeding drivers. In the first week of re-deploying officers 
in London away from traffic duties, reported street crime fell by twelve 
per cent in the nine boroughs affected. But, it's argued, extending this 
policy to the rest of the UK would be extremely risky.

PETER BOTTOMLEY:            Three thousand three hundred people 
a year die on the roads and there are only about nine hundred homicides. 
So that if policing helps to save lives don't look on that as trivial.

DR BARRIE IRVING:            What you find is that traffic 
make an enormous contribution because in order to get anything together, 
a criminal gang or a solo operator, have to travel around. Traffic officers 
get to search cars. Traffic officers get to see people driving in unguarded 
moments. They are actually a vital link in the chain of criminal intelligence. 
Okay if you want to, pull them all off traffic and put them out on the 
streets, you will lose as much as you gain, in my view.

ACTUALITY

DIGNAN:                    So, is Oliver Letwin's 
answer to follow New York and recruit even more police than Labour plans? 
No doubt worried about public spending, he won't say. But he won't find 
it easy coming up with other ways of relieving pressure on the police. 
Apart from anything, the public may not like it.  
  
WADDINGTON:                Most of the cop's time is not 
devoted to crime, it's devoted to the mess of urban living by and large 
- missing kids, domestic squabbles, people who have one emergency or another 
and these are, these can be enormously varied. But they take up a lot of 
police time and if you stop doing that and you say to the cops, 'no you're 
a crime fighting service' then who is going to tell Mrs Jones in the middle 
of the night when her fourteen year old son still hasn't come home, 'I'm 
sorry Mrs Jones he's not a crime problem - yet'.
        
DIGNAN:                    With more police about, 
New York's Central Park is said to be safer. Labour hopes the idea of civilian 
Community Support Officers will similarly reassure people using public 
places in England and Wales. But Oliver Letwin opposes the plan, unlike 
a former Tory Home Secretary.
 
LORD BAKER:                I think, first, they could 
help the police enormously. They'd patrol with the police, particularly 
in housing estates, because they're dealing there with relatively small 
crimes and misdemeanors, but which are very troublesome to the community, 
youths make, doing graffiti on the walls, kicking a football up against 
the wall of some old person's house day in day out. Now that can be dealt 
with, I think, by a police officer together with a Community Support Officer.

ACTUALITY:                    

DIGNAN:                    In New York Oliver Letwin 
attended the monthly crime analysis for one area of the city. He learned 
just how much pressure local police chiefs are under to arrest lawbreakers 
in high crime neighbourhoods. In Britain some fear it could lead to heavy-handed 
policing and turn communities against the forces of law and order. 

WADDINGTON:                There's going to be a great 
deal of emphasis on particular neighbourhoods and they are therefore going 
to suffer not only the problems of deprivation and criminal depredation, 
they're also going to suffer intense police suspicion and by and large 
people don't like that.

DIGNAN:                    And nor may they welcome 
bigger tax bills if Letwin's crime fighting strategy requires substantial 
extra spending. Because copying America would require more money, not just 
for police, but for prisons too. Currently in England and Wales there are 
sixty-seven thousand people behind bars. In America the figure is a staggering 
one-point-nine million, which means for every hundred-thousand Americans, 
six-hundred-and-ninety-nine are incarcerated, compared to one-hundred-and-twenty-six 
in England and Wales. One Tory who knows a thing or two about running prisons, 
believes the courts already send too many to jail in this country. 
 
LORD BAKER:                I think that the prison population 
now is at a record high and if it's going to go higher then certainly more 
prisons are going to be needed and certainly I started a prison-building 
programme, but I do believe there's quite a few people in prison for very, 
very light marginal offences who shouldn't be there and I think they should 
be released as soon as possible or even not sentenced.

DIGNAN:                    Oliver Letwin says he would 
try to keep young people away from prison by getting them off the conveyor 
belt of crime. He would encourage more voluntary groups in high crime areas 
to help young people avoid offending. But groups already doing this work 
say it's not a cheap option and they'd like to know how the Tories would 
pay for such a policy.

The charity Crime Concern runs activities for young people in deprived 
areas. Here in Southwark many families are from ethnic minority groups 
and like parents everywhere, they fear their children mixing in bad company 
if they're bored. Everyone at this project gets ten hours a week of fun 
and friendly advice. But this kind of work requires expertise that has 
to be paid for. 

NIGEL WHISKIN:                To recruit, train and support 
a volunteer costs a minimum of nine hundred pounds a year, but if you want 
a really specialist volunteer, probably cost fifteen hundred. So you see 
there is a, there is a big resource implication and it, it isn't easy. 
We, every one of our volunteers has to be police checked, we have to follow 
a child protection legislation, we have to train our people up on health 
and safety at work legislation. 
 
DIGNAN:                    Tonight's activities on 
the Southwark project include MC-ing, mixing and DJ-ing. Labour plans to 
spend nearly three billion pounds on deprived areas where offending levels 
are way above the national average. Southwark is getting more than seventy 
million pounds. Not enough, some say. But they're doubtful Oliver Letwin 
would do any better. 

WHISKIN:                    I think our message to 
Oliver Letwin would be 'we like the sound of what you are saying, but the 
prize will only be won if he wins the battle for the level of resources 
that's needed to bring about the changes that must happen in our most disadvantaged 
neighbourhoods.' It's a big chunk of dosh and somehow Mr Letwin's got to 
find that.

DIGNAN:                    So if Oliver Letwin is 
to get young people off the conveyor belt of crime, match American policing 
levels and build more prisons, where's the money going to come from? As 
someone who came to prominence for being tough on spending, he may find 
it hard convincing voters he's really serious about being tough on crime.