Bobbies Calling Nypd

When the two young men reached through the open window of Liza Minnelli's Mercedes-Benz and tried to snatch her jewel-encrusted necklace in London last month, the honeymooning star put on a brave face. "I am a New Yorker, after all," she reminded reporters after the incident.

Londoners might once have chuckled, but these days the quip landed a little flat. The city that has long epitomized law and order is struggling to come to terms with a sharp rise in street crime, including a 45 percent jump in robberies over the past two years. That makes it hard to regard New York as the reeling, anarchic city of yore, if only because of Londoners' grim awareness that Minnelli's experience with robbery was shared by 53,000 of their own last year. By contrast, there were only 28,000 robberies in New York, prompting many to ask: is it time to take a crimefighting lesson from the Big Apple?

In a land where the amiable bobby is the stuff of tourist legend, that might seem odd. But so it is. In January the Labour government's Home secretary, David Blunkett, invited former New York police commissioner Bill Bratton to a meeting of the nation's top police officers. Since Bratton's fabled tenure as Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crimefighter in chief, from 1994 to 1996, robberies have dropped 67 percent, homicides nearly 80 percent. Prime Minister Tony Blair, no doubt, would love a success like that. Not to be outdone, the Conservative Party sent its own man off to New York, suggesting that Britain should adopt the NYPD's so-called broken-windows approach to policing, whereby even petty crimes are vigorously prosecuted to send a deterrent message. And in late March, London's left-wing mayor, Ken Livingstone, said he'd like to see a quick adoption of New York's famed CompStat meetings, in which computerized crime statistics are analyzed by borough, precinct and street.

To be sure, New York and London are very different. Both have a population of about 8 million, but the geographical area covered by London's Metropolitan Police is roughly twice that of New York. And while London's quasi-suburban sprawl is much harder to police than New York's tightly packed grid, the city makes do with a force of 28,000 officers, compared with the NYPD's 42,000. There's also a deep disagreement about methods. Critics doubt that New York's policy of "zero tolerance," for instance, would work in a country with a less confrontational tradition of policing. Says Ravi Chand, president of the National Black Police Association: "Zero tolerance wouldn't win a lot of support here--especially within the minority community."

And yet, clearly, something must be done. Like New York in the early 1990s, many say, London needs more "bobbies on the beat." But is the answer really as simple as going back to the centuries-old model of warm-and-fuzzy constables quietly strolling beats and chatting up neighbors? Perhaps not, but the "solution" of the past decades--putting more cops in squad cars--doesn't seem to have helped matters either. Unless London can come up with more effective ideas, it may be time to call in the NYPD.

© 2002