In recent years, especially since the current Greater London Mayor Sadiq Khan has been in post, the festive season in London has also been a season of violence. The general decline in safety in London under Khan’s leadership and his position as police and crime commissioner for London is something which afflicts Londoners all year around but seems to get a bit worse at Christmas time. An increase in parties, intoxication and people gathering together brings with it an increase in violence associated with parties. Also some of these parties do tend to attract violent people and there are also conflicts about who should or should not be at certain parties violence that can spill over and affect innocent members of the public.

Christmas 2022 was no exception with a shooting in West Green Road in North London being one of the more notable incidents, although shootings are far more common, but not as numerous as stabbings, than they used to be in the capital . It says something about how violent London has become under Khan’s mismanagement that this shooting didn’t make much of a splash in the national media from what I can gather and one of the few outlets outside of London to pick up on this case was the Wolverhampton Express and Star which carried at as a national news item. At one point any murder in London let alone a shooting would have been headline news in the national press but not any more. They have become far too numerous to be unusual enough to make headlines.

The Express and Star said:

A 24-year-old woman is in a serious condition after being shot near a party in Tottenham, north London.

Officers attended the scene at the junction of West Green Road and Grove Park Road at 6.28am on Tuesday following reports that someone had been shot.

They searched the area but could not find a victim. They then checked nearby hospitals where it was confirmed at around 6.50am that the woman had been taken to a north London hospital without the assistance of the emergency services.

She remains in hospital and is in a serious but stable condition.

Initial police inquiries suggest the woman was shot in the West Green Road area shortly before 6.30am.

There was a significant number of people in the area due to a nearby party, the force said

There’s no indication in this article whether the victim was attending the party and was deliberately targeted or whether was just an innocent bystander just walking by, but the West Green Road area is much more violent and nasty than it once was. Neither my wife or myself when we lived near there had too much trouble on the streets but the fact that a shooting can occur in the early hours of the morning is testament to how much the area has declined safety wise since we were familiar with the place.

The Met Police, to their credit, got to the scene of the shooting pretty quickly but this is reactive policing, turning up after the crime has been committed rather than deterring the crime in the first place. I suspect that violence, both knife and gun violence, has become so endemic in London over the last few years that turning up and picking up the pieces is about all that they can do.

A decent and effective mayor of Greater London, which Khan is plainly not, with responsibility for policing would be doing their utmost to crack down on the many violent subcultures that exist in London today. Unfortunately that is not happening. It’s quite possible that resources that should and could be used to improve pro-active policing of violence and preventing the violence from happening in the first place, is not being allocated to where it is most needed. Couple that with a perception that the Met has become politicised and is not policing the capital equitably and you have the recipe for a perfect storm of crime.

Decent law abiding Londoners are being let down. They are being let down by a police force that doesn’t have the numbers of effective officers on the streets that it needs to do the job and which has lost the respect of many decent Londoners. They are also being let down by Sadiq Khan whose time in office has seen crime rise to horrific levels and who blames everyone else for London’s descent into crime hell, when that responsibility, as Police and Crime Commissioner are Khan’s.