Recently, Croydon’s Labour Cabinet was presented with the latest version of the Borough’s Community Safety Strategy. The document is twelve months late and makes for some grim reading when it reports on Labour’s record on tackling crime.
The report tries to put a positive spin on the statistics by using different time periods and comparisons in order to try and confuse the reader, and hide the true nature of the crime wave that has hit Croydon since 2014 when Labour took control of Croydon.
To help residents understand the true nature of this crime wave, I have produced a table below that compares crime figures in Croydon in May 2014, when Labour took control of the Council and the very latest statistics we have. All this data is from the independent Metropolitan Police crime data dashboard:-
At the Cabinet meeting, Cllr. Oliver Lewis tried to claim that the crime wave had nothing to do with local Labour Councillors failing to have a Community Safety Strategy in place but instead tried to blame a cut in metropolitan police numbers. Again, a simple look at the statistics shows that Cllr. Lewis’s claim is simply untrue:-
Metropolitan Police Numbers 2014 = 31,674 officers
Metropolitan Police Numbers 2021 = 33,803 officers
This equates to a real increase of 2,125 police officers across London between 2014 and 2021. The lessons we learnt were simple.
- Under this failed Labour Council, residents are less safe on the streets as crime rockets.
- In the lead up to the next local election, when Labour put a glossy leaflet through your door with a big statistic as a headline, you would be wise to spend a few minutes on the internet checking its accuracy.
