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Camden New Journal - By PAUL KEILTHY
Published: 24 January 2008

BEATEN, BUT NOT EVEN A STATISTIC

Police criticised for failing to report brutal attack on teen

THE failure by police to record or investigate an attack that left a teenager needing hospital treatment has angered witnesses and led residents to cast doubt on official statistics showing falls in crime.
Camden Police has launched an internal investigation after the New Journal asked why no criminal offence was recorded when a 15 year-old boy was wounded in Malden Road, Kentish Town on Saturday night.
Witnesses described how the youth was attacked with a broken bottle during running battles between teenage gangs, some of whom were later seen with belts wrapped around their clenched fists and bragging that they had “scarred up” a rival.
The melée was broken up by passers-by who claimed that when police arrived and found the youth they did not look for the perpetrators.
Both the victim and his parents chose not to submit a complaint, but no crime report was filed by officers as Home Office rules demand.
Residents said on Tuesday that the handling of the incident highlighted the “blasé” attitude of the authorities to the area’s long-running anti-social behaviour problem.
Malden Road resident Yasmin Allen said: “The whole thing makes a nonsense and a travesty of compiling these statistics, which could be used to show that crime is getting lower. Our local police have to bid for extra resources and in order to do that they need to have accurate statistics – but more than that, how can you engage with the problem if you ignore it? It suggests that our issues are not worth bothering with.”
Resident Yvonne McKay was one of a group of passing church-goers who roused the street with cries of alarm. She said: “They ran away and the police arrived on the scene, but they had no interest in what we were telling them.
“People were very angry. Had the community not intervened he could have been a dead boy today.”
The Malden Road area is named as a priority for police in Haverstock ward.
Recorded crime statistics show a drop in burglary, robbery, and theft, and though there has been a slight rise in violent crime in the last 12 months it officially remains on a par with Hampstead Town and low for the borough as a whole.
Hampstead Safer Neighbourhoods chairman Nigel Steward said that crime statistics were vital for community groups to tackle crime and non-reporting by police was “clearly unacceptable”.
But he added: “I know many members of the public remain cynical about the reported drop in crime figures but they really do need to look at their own actions – under-reporting by the public remains a great handicap to assessing priorities.”
Newly-appointed senior officer for the area, Inspector David Peddison-Grant, pledged an immediate investigation into Saturday’s events and a new approach to patrolling problem streets in Haverstock and Gospel Oak.
He said: “I am concerned that this youth was hit over the head with a bottle and we will be reinvestigating how a crime report was not made. The officer concerned will be spoken to – it is definitely not the case that we would not investigate this and any officer who thought or said that was mistaken.
“Recently we have had almost a complete change of management in this sector and we will be looking at various methods of revitalising our tackling of anti-social behaviour. Officers have already changed their patrol patterns.”

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