LONDON — Britain’s Labour government is taking inspiration from an unlikely political figure to push forward its law and order agenda.
Long before he become a controversial ride-or-die Donald Trump ally, Rudy Giuliani was lauded as the man who cleaned up New York City after decades of urban decay and soaring crime rates.
As the city’s mayor, Giuliani mandated that officers clamp down on comparatively small crimes — things like graffiti, shoplifting or antisocial behavior — to make people feel safer in their local communities.
He argued that this policy, along with economic regeneration, would stop larger crimes from happening and increase a feeling of safety among the general public.
His use of this “broken windows theory” was a key pillar in his efforts to drastically reduce crime rates in New York, previously one of America’s most dangerous cities.
Now this approach, popularized by Giuliani in 1990s New York, is being embraced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in 2020s Britain.
The prime minister named “safer streets” as one of his six policy “milestones” last month, making it one of the government’s top priorities until the next election (due by mid-2029 at the latest).
This is perhaps because crime consistently ranks as a top-four issue for Brits, according to YouGov polling.
Starmer is set to give a major speech on the theme in the coming months, where he will set out a clear narrative for how he wants to cut crime and increase community safety.
For his government, it all starts with cleaning up Britain’s high streets — many of which have become hubs of decay and abandonment.
One Cabinet minister, granted anonymity like others in this piece to discuss internal government thinking, told POLITICO that “creating more secure streets is a lot about making town centers feel nicer.
“Not having graffiti on the walls and boarded-up shops and things like that. People want to feel safe walking down the street at night,” they added.
Taking it to the streets
In an apparent lesson from Kamala Harris’ defeat by Trump in the Nov. 5 U.S. election, Starmer decided in December to shift his core economic messaging away from GDP growth and to focus instead on living standards.
Labour strategists argue voters will not appreciate headline economic growth if their wages don’t keep pace with, or surpass, inflation.
Ministers are now taking a similar approach to criminal justice.
Government figures believe voters are more likely to measure the success of the U.K.’s law-and-order policies if they actually feel safer in their communities when going to the shops or for a walk — not if headline crime statistics go down by a few percentage points.
This doesn’t mean, however, that crime stats will entirely be ignored. The government has set targets to halve crime over the next decade in two very specific and high-profile areas — knife crime and violence against women.
Yet the overarching priority is to ensure that people can walk down their local high streets without feeling the unease that rampant shoplifting, boarded-up stores and graffiti can create.
This is seen as especially politically salient in light of recent surges in petty crimes like shoplifting. Nearly half of Britons say “crime and antisocial behavior” is the worst thing about where they live, according to 2023 government polling.
Labour’s approach so far includes harsher penalties for shoplifting and antisocial behavior, along with plans to boost police numbers.
There will be further measures from Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to clamp down on different kinds of low-level crimes in the government’s upcoming crime bill, according to two government officials.
“People want to know there are tools and levers to pull in order to make them feel safer at a very local level,” a government official said.
Officials also acknowledge confidence in the police must be restored for any of this to work, particularly after high-profile scandals in London saw the Metropolitan Police force put into special measures for more than two years.
“We want to make sure people can have confidence in policing and in the criminal justice system,” a No. 10 Downing Street official said. “Giving [each community] a named police officer and increasing police numbers by 13,000 are key to that.”
Electoral gains
Allies of Cooper say the driving force behind the plan is her experience of watching the town centers in her own Yorkshire constituency fall into disrepair.
However, the parallels with the Giuliani experiment are easily drawn for a government that is already struggling with low poll ratings.
Bernard Kerik, a former NYC police commissioner, said the Republican Giuliani was able to use law and order as a potent electoral tool in a traditionally liberal city.
“When Giuliani came into office, he looked at it from this perspective — no one wants to live, visit, work [or] go to school in a place that’s not safe. You’ll lose those elements of society,” Kerik said.
“People get fed up, they get tired, they get frustrated, they get scared.”
Recalling his experiences working as commissioner, Kerik added: “Police were locking people up for the lowest-level stuff. No one bothered anyone if they jumped a turnstile at a subway station, but what we realized quickly is … during the course of that arrest you would find out they were wanted for murder or gun possession.”
Boris Johnson’s theory of law and order was in a similar mold while he was mayor of London and then prime minister.
Johnson said in his 2021 Tory Party conference speech that “you have a Conservative government that understands the broken windows theory of crime.”
“I read a learned article by some lawyer saying we should not bother about pet theft,” he added. “Well I say to Cruella de Vil QC — if you can steal a dog or a cat, then there is frankly no limit to your depravity.”
There was a more serious and politically adroit point to this typically Johnsonian anecdote.
Conservative peer Eddie Lister, who was Johnson’s chief of staff at City Hall and then Downing Street, said the current government could press home a political advantage if it can restore confidence in policing.
“The man on the street really does get very angry when they see shoplifting and other small crimes not being answered,” he told POLITICO.
“The government should get more positive stories about the police out there. Every time there is a story about police reporting woke behavior these things have a terrible effect, electorally we made the most of it, but all those sorts of things do sap confidence in the police.”
Beyond the court of public opinion
Critics of Labour’s approach say there are inconsistencies between the government’s plans to prosecute hordes of town-center reprobates and the realities of Britain’s creaking court system.
The court backlog ballooned to a record 73,000 trials in December, double the pre-Covid level, with some rape cases not heard for four years.
Richard Garside, director at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said the government’s push to go after low-level crime will only make this worse — despite plans to bring down the backlog.
“What they’re trying to do is reverse changes brought in to free up the courts that were dealing with routine petty shoplifting offenses,” he said. “It will put the youth justice system on steroids.”
Garside is instead calling for a greater focus on the underlying causes of crime.
Kerik, the former NYC police commissioner, agreed Labour’s plan won’t work without a surge in funding for the Ministry of Justice — a tall order with a tight government spending review looming.
“If you’re going to address these crime reductions how we did in New York City, they also have to deal with the courts and the prosecutors. You have to put money into the district attorney, into the prosecutions and the jail system,” he said.
There is also the arguably more difficult problem that Britain’s high streets are in part declining due to global economic forces — think the rise of online retail — beyond the reach of ministers sitting in Whitehall.
On that one, 1990s solutions may not cut it in the 2020s.
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