Give Londoners the power to fight crime ourselves
I have never made a citizens' arrest and am wary of people who make a habit of doing so. Former Home Secretary Jack Straw has reportedly made three, including rugby-tackling a man and then tying him up.
But despite the novelty of such arrests for most of us, the news earlier this week that citizens' arrests in London have fallen dramatically seems to have caught the Met and policing experts by surprise.
None of them seems to have noticed the trend before. Figures show that while 14,000 citizens' arrests were made in 2002, that number had more than halved by 2005, to 6,300, and more than halved again, to just 2,600, in 2010. This is despite the appearance on London's streets during that time of large numbers of police community support officers, who have only powers to make a citizen's arrest.
How to explain people's apparent new unwillingness to arrest lawbreakers, as is their right? It's not down to some change in recording techniques or Government policy: if either of these was the reason, we would see a sudden fall, not a gradual year-on-year decline.
Alternatively, it is natural to see this as another sign of the collapse of old-fashioned civic responsibility. Yet crime and fear of crime have fallen over the past decade. Two-thirds of people tell pollsters that people in their neighbourhood "pull together", a figure unchanged for a decade. And the proportion saying that local people can be trusted has increased nationally from 40 to 50 per cent.
Nevertheless, we should take the fall seriously.
Citizens' arrests have only ever made a small contribution to overall arrests but they do reflect people's readiness to take a stand - and that matters.
Police are important for maintaining public order but our safety depends too on public willingness to get involved. Here our politicians and police have not always been helpful. The instinct of the police is to warn people off "having a go", while the focus of the last Labour government was on giving new powers to police rather than equipping the public to address low-level conflict themselves.
The Coalition has followed suit. Recent reforms simplifying antisocial behaviour legislation have been largely welcomed by police and councils. But for all its talk of a Big Society, the Government does not seem to be giving thought to how to encourage people to deal with crime themselves.
That's doubly strange, as the move elsewhere has been to engage the public in delivering services. The NHS has long relied on first-aiders, and increasingly on "expert patients", especially in helping people manage long-term conditions.
Schools look to parents and volunteers to contribute.
Yet the skills needed to tackle antisocial behaviour and mediate conflict can be taught, just as first aid can be. Former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross helps run a charity, Dfuse, that does just that.
Let's hope that now that the Met and ministers have been alerted to what their own figures were telling them all along, they will begin to think more constructively about empowering Londoners to take a stand against crime.
Ben Rogers is director of the Centre for London think-tank
