There are few bigger jobs in British public life than that of Metropolitan Police Commissioner. The Met is a vast domain whose responsibilities spread far beyond London itself. Sir Ian Blair has held the post for a year in which the policing of the capital has rarely been so tested. During those 12 months he has shown an understanding of the policing challenges facing the city and the nation, and has made some solid progress towards meeting them.
Sir Ian correctly identified community policing as a priority. The increased use of police community support officers has helped to provide the visible reassurance that residents have demanded for years. This week’s crime figures, in which muggings and violent attacks were shown to have increased by more than 10 per cent, suggest that community officers have so far been more successful in style than substance, (although some of the rise is because of the post-7/7 concentration of officers in Central London). But it is too early to brand them a failure. Indeed, overall crime is falling faster in areas covered by the Met’s safer neighbourhoods initiative than elsewhere. Visiting American police chiefs have left impressed.
Even before the 7/7 bombings, Sir Ian had rightly grasped the threat of terrorism as an issue that could define his term. His instincts — to ensure that ethnic minority communities are policed with a force that better reflects them, to garner better intelligence and to improve community relations — was also sound. The Met’s response to 7/7 in closing London down quickly, co-ordinating the emergency services and identifying and arresting suspects was efficient. Yet those achievements will be tarnished for ever by the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Sir Ian was right not to resign in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, though two outstanding inquiries may yet make life awkward for him. But the handling of the debacle, in particular his ignorance of the mistake hours after his senior officers knew Senhor de Menezes not to be a bomber, did raise questions about his grip. His recounting of the events also revealed a certain tone deafness. To recall the moment he was told that his officers had killed an innocent man with the words, “ Houston, we have a problem”, was crassly insensitive. On its own, such a slip could be overlooked. Yet Sir Ian has demonstrated an unfortunate habit of ill-judged remarks, the latest being his assertion that media interest in the Soham murders was the result of its institutional racism. He declined an immediate chance to apologise, bowing to the inevitable only after surveying yesterday’s headlines.
Sir Ian is a smart man, the first postwar Oxford-educated commissioner. Unfortunately, brains do not always give protection against making a fool of oneself. He can appear too anxious to please, occasionally resembling a contestant in “Celebrity Big Brother Policing” rather than the effective reformer he aspires to be. Chief constables who have succeeded in recent years, in Northumbria, Staffordshire and Lancashire, have tended to keep their heads down rather than court headlines. The last commissioner to deliver a Dimbleby Lecture, Sir Robert Mark, used it to attack corrupt lawyers. Sir Ian’s lecture is memorable merely for inviting debate. The problem some people have with him is not, as he puts it in our interview today, that they “do not want an articulate police officer”. It is that they would rather he concentrated on being a policeman rather than an articulate one.