US gun nuts are full of suggestions about how changing gun laws would 
reduce the crime epidemic in the UK.

As a US gun nut, I do think that the UK's gun laws need reform.  But more 
than that, I think your laws regarding self-defense need reform.

But what you mostly need is reform in the way your police work.

Hence:

   The results were astonishing. By the end of 2007, major felonies had
   dropped 68 percent, and homicides 67 percent, from their 2003 high -
   possibly a national record.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07132008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/
gotham_knights_119673.htm?page=0

GOTHAM KNIGHTS
NEW YORK CITY'S GREATEST EXPORT: CRIMEFIGHTERS
By HEATHER MacDONALD


Last updated: 10:28 am
July 13, 2008
Posted: 3:43 am
July 13, 2008

Since the late 1990s, more than 18 police commanders have left the New 
York City police department to run their own agencies elsewhere. This 
unprecedented migration has spread the Compstat revolution - the data-
driven transformation of policing begun under New York police 
commissioner William Bratton in 1994 - across the nation.

Some of the transplants are well-known: Bratton now heads the Los Angeles 
Police Department; and his former first deputy, John Timoney, has led 
both the Miami and the Philadelphia forces. But the diaspora also 
includes lesser-known young Turks who rose quickly through the NYPD's 
ranks during the paradigm-shattering 1990s. Now, as chiefs in their own 
right, they're proving the efficacy of analytic, accountable policing in 
agencies wholly dissimilar from New York's.

*

José Cordero once led precincts in the Bronx and in Manhattan's 
Washington Heights, and eventually he served as New York's first citywide 
gang strategist. Like other members of the diaspora, he describes the 
1990s NYPD as a life-changing experience: "It was an incredibly 
resourceful, competitive environment. The wave of captains I was 
privileged to serve with fed off of each other's experiments." In 2002, 
he took the helm of the Newton, Massachusetts, police department, 
bringing crime in that already safe city down to its lowest point in over 
30 years.

Then he moved to a very different city. East Orange, New Jersey, has 
70,000 citizens by official counts, about 95 percent of them black, and 
deep pockets of poverty. Crime there began skyrocketing in 1999, reaching 
a per-capita rate in 2003 that was 14 times that of New York City. East 
Orange's mayor recruited Cordero to quell the violence; he started work 
in 2004.

The results were astonishing. By the end of 2007, major felonies had 
dropped 68 percent, and homicides 67 percent, from their 2003 high - 
possibly a national record. (By comparison, from 1993, the year before 
Bratton arrived in NYC, through 1997, major felonies in New York dropped 
41 percent and homicides 60 percent.) East Orange's remarkable experience 
should give pause to criminologists, who too often ascribe crime drops to 
anything but policing reforms.

Intelligence-driven policing, as Cordero calls the Compstat principles, 
is now in the department's bloodstream, as is the still-iconoclastic 
belief that the police can actually lower crime. Compstat refers both to 
the weekly crime-analysis meetings that Bratton pioneered in 1994 to 
grill precinct leaders about crime on their watch and, more broadly, to 
the crime-fighting principles that underlay those meetings: relentless 
gathering of information, constant evaluation of tactics, and a mechanism 
for holding commanders accountable for public safety. East Orange 
commanders now focus obsessively on their mission and revel in coming up 
with new ways to make the city inhospitable to criminals.

The transformation of the East Orange department mirrored the one Cordero 
had lived through as a young NYPD captain. "All we had done up to that 
point was put people in jail, and it hadn't made a difference," recalls 
the 52-year-old Bronx native. "The new concept was, know everything you 
possibly can about crime. What I took away from that period was that by 
challenging yourself continually to know what you don't know, you can 
produce big results."

*

Other NYPD grads have also had a significant effect on their new cities 
through the application of Compstat principles, easily outstripping 
national crime averages.

Jane Perlov, a former NYPD deputy chief, brought violence in Raleigh, 
North Carolina, down 33 percent between 2001 and 2007 by breaking the 
city up into six police districts and making the district leaders 
responsible for crime on their watches. John Romero, an NYPD deputy 
inspector, lowered crime in Lawrence, Massachusetts, over 50 percent from 
1999 to 2005 by demanding performance from his commanders and basing 
strategies on the most up-to-date, accurate information. Timoney, the 
first NYPD Compstat-era commander to take the reins of another 
department, reduced homicides in Philadelphia over 25 percent in two 
years - the first homicide decrease that violent city had seen in 15 
years. And Bratton has slashed crime by 34 percent since becoming chief 
of the LAPD.

New York City is ringed to its north by Compstat graduates. Nearly all 
the major jurisdictions in Westchester County - Yonkers, White Plains, 
Mount Vernon, Rye, and the county itself - are now led by a crime-
analysis disciple.

In some quarters, this has produced - along with crime drops - an even 
greater level of the usual resentment against outsiders. Cordero studied 
management manuals to prepare himself for shaking up the East Orange 
force. "It's a huge challenge, telling a deputy chief with 30 years' 
experience: 'We're doing things differently now.'"


-- 
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly
good ink and make the combination worthless.
		- Milton Friedman