What we must do to halt shock rise in violent crime
IN 1955 the distinguished anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote that “the English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilised world has ever seen”. How unbearably poignant those words sound today as our society is increasingly plagued by crime and disorder. Amid mounting violence there is now a sense of lawlessness and fear across our land.
On Saturday night a man was stabbed to death on a street in Deptford, South-east London. His killing came just after the police announced an inquiry into the murder of former nurse Carole Harrison at her home in Teddington, the sixth such investigation in the last week alone and the 100th in the capital this year.
Nor is the lethal mayhem confined to London. Over the weekend there were murders in Birmingham and Pontefract, while a mass shooting took place in Manchester at a street party earlier this month, leaving 10 people, including two children, injured. Since 2015 the overall rate of recorded violent crime has almost doubled.
This alarming social breakdown has not happened by accident. It is the direct result of misguided official policies that have fed criminality and emasculated the forces that should guard us. Our police have been systematically withdrawn from the streets. Our courts are now addicted to leniency. Our overstretched prison system is sliding into crisis.
UNDERPINNING this loss of authority is the malignant influence of fashionable opinion, peddled by an alliance of academic experts, noisy pressure groups and parts of the Left-wing media. According to their narrative, crime is really a symptom of oppressive social factors such as poverty or racism so offenders deserve support not punishment. This thinking continually undermines tough action by the authorities, such as the use of stop-and-search on the streets or the imposition of spartan regimes in prison.
We can also see the same twisted mentality in the calls by progressive campaigners for the current crime wave to be treated as “a public health emergency” as if violence were a contagious disease for which the perpetrator has no responsibility. We have had quite enough of such appeasement towards criminality. Callous offenders are the enemies of society, not its victims.
Far from promoting compassion this approach has created the butchery and intimidation that pervade our streets. The Government should move in the opposite direction by mounting a real challenge to the bullies and thugs.
That means for a start giving the police the resources they need to take back control of our towns and cities. Since 2010 the number of officers has been cut by more than 20,000 and, according to one recent estimate, only about half of the remaining 122,000 personnel are in visible frontline roles.
The trend is accelerating. Yesterday it was revealed that one in three police on the beat has been axed in the last three years while the number of police community support officers has fallen by 18 per cent during the same period.
It is little wonder then that 90 per cent of all crime in Britain does not result in any prosecution. Even when criminals are caught the sentences can be pathetically inadequate.
One study by the independent think tank Civitas showed that last year just a third of all criminals convicted of violence went to jail. Incredibly even half of those with 11 to 14 convictions avoided a prison term.
The anti-punishment brigade shrieks about supposed “miscarriages of justice” but it is the public that is really suffering from the woefulness of the softly-softly justice system. Hardened criminals regularly walk free from our courts. In one case a thug with 38 previous convictions was found guilty of breaking an innocent man’s jaw in an unprovoked attack yet avoided a custodial sentence.
When criminals end up inside the disorder continues, as epitomised by the meltdown in the privately run Birmingham jail, which Peter Clarke, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, described in a damning report as a cauldron of “appalling violence and squalor” where the inmates behave “with impunity”. His words could serve as a commentary on the wider, institutionalised feebleness of the authorities in the face of brutish criminality.
In the wake of Clarke’s report the Government has taken over the management of Birmingham but problems remain in a host of jails because the number of prison officers has been severely curtailed in recent years, down by 6,500 between 2012 and 2016. Altogether the Ministry of Justice admits that it has “concerns” about 39 prisons.
PROGRESSIVES claim the answer is not higher penal expenditure but a radical reduction in the jail population. But that would amount to another surrender. There is no alternative to incarceration for dangerous criminals. Community sentences neither act as a deterrent nor physically prevent offenders from indulging in further crime. Only lengthy spells behind bars can do that.
If the Tory Government bleats that it does not have the cash for more police and a bigger jail population then it should take the money from the gargantuan foreign aid budget, which has remained absurdly sacrosanct despite reaching £14billion this year. The first duty of ministers is to protect the public, not their own virtue-signalling vanity.
‘Give the police the resources they need’