This week the Metropolitan Police announced a dedicated Community Protection Team of one hundred extra officers to tackle antisemitic hate crime across London. The announcement followed a fresh wave of arrests, the Golders Green attack, and pressure from the Jewish community that frankly should not have been necessary in the first place.

Let me be very clear about my position. Antisemitic crime is a poison. Anyone targeting Jewish people, synagogues, schools, kosher restaurants or community centres should expect the full weight of the criminal law. One hundred new officers is welcome. It is also wildly overdue.

Where Were These Officers For The Last Five Years?

The recorded antisemitic hate crime rate in London did not start rising in April 2026. It has been rising every year since 2021, with a particular surge after October 2023. The Community Security Trust has been publishing the data quarterly. Every single front-page Jewish community group, every police authority, every London Assembly member with eyes has been raising this for years. The Met's response has been almost entirely reactive — and where it has been proactive, it has been proactive about the wrong things.

While Jewish schools were paying for their own private security guards, the Met was investigating non-crime hate incidents, knocking on doors over tweets, and assigning officers to sift through social media for "concerning" posts. The political bandwidth of British policing has been chronically misallocated. Now, only after attacks have reached crisis level and only after political embarrassment has reached the front pages, the Met is suddenly able to find one hundred officers.

The Golders Green Wake-Up Call That Should Not Have Been Needed

The Golders Green attack was the political tipping point, but the operational warning signs had been flashing for two years. It should not take a near-fatal incident outside a synagogue to produce a serious policing response. If you have to wait for headlines before deploying officers, you are not running an intelligence-led police service. You are running a public relations service that occasionally polices when it remembers.

The new Community Protection Team is the right idea. It is also a flat indictment of how British policing got here. Resources should have been moved towards genuine hate crime — and away from non-crime hate incidents and tweet-policing — at least three years ago. The Crime and Policing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on 29 April, helps. But it is the political will behind the Act, not the Act itself, that will determine whether anything actually changes.

Two-Tier Policing Has To End

British voters across the political spectrum have lost faith in the impartiality of policing for one straightforward reason: they perceive that some demonstrations are policed lightly while others are policed heavily, and that some online speech is investigated while other online speech is ignored. The perception, fairly or unfairly, is two-tier policing. The Met denies this. Voters do not believe the denial.

Restoring trust will require chiefs to be visibly even-handed in the next twelve months. It will require the same energy applied to genuine antisemitic crime to be applied to genuine racist crime, to genuine assaults on Christians and Sikhs, and to all forms of community-targeted violence. It will also require the Met to stop spending officer time on things that are not crimes and would never be prosecuted.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK has been clear from day one: abolish non-crime hate incidents — done, in legislation that took effect this April. Restore proper community policing, with named officers responsible for named beats. Recruit beyond the 13,000-officer pledge and recruit British, with proper standards and proper training. And direct the College of Policing to focus on operational competence rather than the ideological fashions of Whitehall.

One hundred officers protecting London's Jewish community is welcome news. That it took until May 2026 for those officers to be deployed is a damning indictment of priorities at the top of the Met. Reform UK exists to ensure those priorities are corrected — properly, and permanently.