Calls for national strategy on gun crime

Friday, 10 October 2003 4:49 AM

A senior police officer has called on the Home Office to introduce a national strategy to tackle Britain's growing problem of gun-related crime.

It comes after a spate of attacks in the last fortnight in which two people died and several were left wounded.

Marian Bates was murdered in her jeweller's shop in Arnold, Nottinghamshire, on September 30.

Chief Constable Steve Green of Nottinghamshire Police Authority said isolated homicides compromised detectives in tackling serious "volume" crime.

"The rise in violent crime and the necessary investigations cannot continue without consequences for other areas of policing. The impact will be on volume crime, such as burglaries. I am confident we can still reduce volume crime, but we won't be able to reduce it as much as we want," he said.

"There is clear evidence that we are a county police force dealing with big-city problems," he added.

He told an emergency meeting at County Hall in Nottingham that since January 2003 police in Nottinghamshire have dealt with 57 shootings and nine murders including four category A killings.

The police chief said his force was "overrun" by gun crime.

Conservative home affairs spokesman Oliver Letwin said the number of recent violent shootings was a 'dramatic symptom of the collapse of law and order' under the Labour Government.

His party has pledged a tenfold increase in serious, compulsory treatment for young hard drug addicts and 40,000 extra policemen on British streets.

But Dr Marian Fitzgerald, a specialist in street crime at the London School of Economics said gun crime would not be defeated by simply creating extra police officers.

"All the best evidence shows that having more bobbies on the beat par say is not going to make any impact on crime immediately and certainly this type of crime and it would be cynical to say it can," she said.

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