Mayor of London’s new Police and Crime Plan offers few clues on fight against antisemitism
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, and the Mayor of London’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) have released the Police and Crime Plan 2017-2021 — “A Safer City for All Londoners” following a public consultation. Campaign Against Antisemitism submitted its recommendations.
Campaign Against Antisemitism welcomes the approach of “zero tolerance” adopted by the plan, but the plan offers few details of measures for delivering it in relation to antisemitism. While there is a general section about hate crime, there is no specific mention of record-high antisemitism, and disappointingly there is very little to give us confidence that the Mayor and MOPAC intend to deal effectively with antisemitism.
In our submission to MOPAC, we set out in detail the challenge presented by antisemitic hate crime in London, and proposed a robust plan for dealing with it, including:
- Adopting the International Definition of Antisemitism and training officers in how to apply it;
- Producing a quick reference guide on antisemitism for all frontline officers;
- Reviving a shelved plan to set up a city-wide hate crime reporting hotline;
- Publishing even more granular statistics on hate crime, and allowing victims to report their ethnicity as “Jewish”;
- Adopting a formal process by which organisations involved in fighting hate crime can point out a flawed investigation for review by a senior officer;
- Adopting a policy of zero tolerance policing for those flying terrorist flags; and
- Working with Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Home Office and others to develop a state-of-the-art monitoring system for online antisemitism.
We look forward to engaging with the Mayor and MOPAC and hope that the initiatives in the plan will be expanded and strengthened to ensure that antisemitism in London is met with the firmest response the law will permit.
