Andrew Gilligan: Is Greenwich Safe?

AFTER a local man was murdered in the town centre last week, the question is inevitably being asked: is Greenwich safe?

25-year-old Paul Martin, from Blackheath, never got to see the first day of summer time. He died from loss of blood after being stabbed near St Alfege’s Church in the early hours of Sunday. Two men have been arrested.

Paul’s is among a number of recent stabbings in the area. Three weeks ago, a man named Sunny Eze was found knifed to death in his Shooters Hill flat. There were two non-fatal stabbings in the Westcombe Park area in January, and three at the 02 in November. Those were only the ones that made the news. A little beyond the borough, the high-profile murders of Jimmy Mizen in Lee and Rob Knox in Sidcup have just been through the courts.

“We are so afraid to go out,” said Nichola, one commenter on this site. “We really think the police should have more patrols around the area to show the public they are around…We are not safe any more.”

Are Nichola and others right to be afraid? Is central Greenwich a dangerous place? A first look at the crime statistics would suggest that, at least relatively, it is. In the year to February, in Greenwich West, the council ward that covers the town centre, there were 45.5 offences of violence against the person per thousand inhabitants.

That is 50 per cent higher than the average for the borough as a whole, and 94 per cent higher than the London average. The actual number of violent offences in this relatively small area last year was around 500, or ten a week.

But of course a statistic based on crimes per thousand residents can be misleading. One of the reasons why central Greenwich has higher numbers of violent crimes is that it has more visitors. It’s a tourist hub. It’s the main nightlife centre of the borough, with 26 pubs or bars within half a mile of the church where Paul was stabbed.

Many of the victims of those crimes of violence will be visitors. The high violent crime rate doesn’t necessarily mean that residents of central Greenwich are at greater risk than people in any other part of the borough. If all our visitors were added in, the violent crime rate per thousand people “present in central Greenwich” might well be closer to the borough average.

We can compare central Greenwich to other heavily-trafficked nightlife hubs – that’s a possibly fair comparison, because their figures will suffer the same distortion as ours (although even here the comparison may be skewed by differing numbers of visitors.) The comparison, as far as it goes, is relatively encouraging.

Kingston town centre’s rate of violence against the person is 87.6 per thousand, nearly double ours. Croydon town centre’s is 70.6. Romford’s is 63.3. Even Bromley’s, at 53 per thousand, is slightly higher than Greenwich. The ward covering the main West End nightlife area around Leicester Square has a rate of 241 violent crimes per thousand residents – though it does, of course, get far more visitors than any suburban town centre.

Violent crime in central Greenwich hasn’t increased over the last year; it is more or less exactly the same. Violence in the borough as a whole spiked dramatically in 2004. Since then, it has fallen gradually back to its pre-2004 level.

These are, I know, police reported crime figures – about which there is a great deal of scepticism, much of it justified. They will not reassure many people who feel scared. Nor, in any case, do they say that Greenwich is a demi-paradise of peace and order. Closing time on a Saturday night is probably a moment to avoid. I can’t recall ever seeing a police officer at that time, and we could certainly do with some. There’s what’s billed as a “police surgery” at West Greenwich House, on the High Road, at 6pm tonight where anyone is welcome to turn up and raise their concerns.

But on the evidence of the figures, at least, it doesn’t look like the problem has got any worse, whatever the recent spate of high-profile incidents may suggest.