The head of London’s Metropolitan Police has warned that pressure on Britain’s prisons and courts is undermining efforts to keep dangerous knife and firearms offenders in custody, as suspects accused of serious offences are increasingly released on bail.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said he was “flabbergasted” by cases in which defendants accused of carrying knives and guns had been repeatedly charged before being returned to the streets.
His intervention comes as the government seeks to ease severe overcrowding across the prison estate by releasing thousands of offenders and expanding the use of measures designed to reduce the number of people held in custody.
Sir Mark warned that the strain on the criminal justice system was diluting the practical effect of successive governments’ efforts to strengthen legislation on knife and firearms offences.
“An overloaded justice system is not executing on the back of those laws in the same way, as the government has to make difficult choices based on prison capacity and other areas, and we’re now seeing the consequences of that,” he said.
We are seeing rapidly reducing imprisonment for people sentenced for knife crime offences, knife crime possession, even repeat knife carriers, so that’s going down.
The commissioner told the London Policing Board that the consequences were already being felt on the streets.
He said the failure to remand some knife-carrying suspects was not merely a “theoretical risk” and had resulted in “stabbings” and “one or two homicides”.
The comments follow last week’s Notting Hill Carnival, where a record 636 people were arrested. The Metropolitan Police nevertheless described the event as “[positive and celebratory]“.
Among those arrested was a man allegedly carrying an 18-inch knife, described by Sir Mark as “something that looks like a small sword”.
It was the suspect’s fourth knife offence of the year, but he was subsequently released on bail despite the repeat allegation, Sir Mark said.
The commissioner said similar patterns were emerging in firearms cases, with suspects being “charged again and again and again” before “being bailed again and again and again”.
“I’m flabbergasted by this,” he said. “Two or three, four years ago, before the criminal justice [system] was struggling, that just would not have happened.”
Sir Mark cited research conducted by the Met’s Trident team, which investigates gun crime, showing that 34 people charged with firearms offences were currently on bail pending trial.
In nine of those cases, the accused had fired shots during confrontations, he said.
The figures underline growing concern among police leaders that capacity constraints across prisons, courts and probation services are beginning to affect the ability of law enforcement agencies to manage high-risk offenders.
Sir Mark warned that the pressures could eventually threaten the Met’s ability to sustain recent reductions in crime across the capital.
“This overloaded justice system is getting weaker and weaker in the support of what we’re doing for what I would call ‘offender control’,” he said.
“This isn’t a criticism of individual agencies or individual people. This is a worry about a system that is massively stretched in carrying all this load.”
The warning comes at a politically sensitive moment for the government, which is attempting to balance pressure to reduce prison overcrowding with demands for tougher action against violent crime.
Ministers have argued that their wider approach is producing results.
A government spokesman said: “Since coming into office, knife crime has fallen by 11 per cent and knife homicides by 26 per cent.
“We have banned more dangerous weapons such as ninja swords, zombie-style knives and machetes and we have taken more than 63,000 knives off our streets.
“Bail decisions are a matter for the independent judiciary.”
The dispute highlights an increasingly difficult tension at the centre of criminal justice policy: while ministers have introduced tougher restrictions on weapons and increased police powers to tackle violent crime, the effectiveness of those measures depends on a prison and court system with sufficient capacity to process and detain offenders.
For Sir Mark, the concern is that the gap between legislation and enforcement is widening.
As pressure on the justice system intensifies, he warned, police may find themselves increasingly successful at identifying dangerous offenders but less able to ensure they remain off the streets.
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