STEPHEN GLOVER
Awoman was sitting on a bench after visiting her daughter’s grave when she was splattered with acid by a young thug engaged in a dispute with another rogue. Horribly burned, she died 11 days later.
This unimaginably awful crime didn’t take place in a godforsaken Brazilian favela or dark new York back alley. It happened in High wycombe, a Buckinghamshire town not famous for ghastly acts of random violence.
The assailant, Xeneral webster, had travelled there from his home in west London to confront Saqib Hussain over a drugs dispute. webster threatened Hussain with a bottle of acid. Hussain knocked it out of his hand and it hit Joanne Rand, a 47-year-old dementia nurse, several feet away.
The yob then cycled off, brazenly clutching the empty bottle, a hood covering his head and much of his face, without local police (surprise, surprise) having been aware of his presence on their patch.
on Tuesday, webster was jailed for 17 years for the manslaughter of miss Rand. Long enough? I don’t know. The measure of the man can be gauged by his crude outburst in court as he was sent down. ‘all of you will probably be dead by the time I’m out of here. F*** you, bro.’
now we could regard this heartrending incident as a one-in-a-million mishap that tells us nothing except the capacity some people have for committing evil. But we would be wrong to limit our reflections in such a way.
It was that, of course — a wicked act. But it was something more. It happened not where most of us — certainly not poor miss Rand — would expect. High wycombe is a pretty ordinary sort of place. It’s not the wild west, or Inner London.
YeT — this is the really horrifying thing — I suspect we have become so used to the reality of violence in once law-abiding places that it is no longer especially shocking when we hear of it in somewhere like High wycombe.
Crime rates are rising everywhere, but the increase may be even sharper in rural areas than in metropolitan ones. according to the most recent office for national Statistics ( onS) figures, robberies rose by 49 per cent in Durham, 48 per cent in warwickshire and 68 per cent in north wales.
The number of burglaries was also significantly up in rural counties. So was knife crime. of this scourge, the onS observed: ‘These offences were concentrated in London and other metropolitan areas. However, the majority of police force areas saw a rise in this type of violent crime.’
what is going on? Drugs have a lot to do with it. For example, London gangs have been flooding neighbourhoods in the medway towns and the Kentish seaside towns of margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate to cultivate lucrative new markets.
Ringleaders control phone numbers — the so- called ‘county lines’ — to advertise drugs and hook up with buyers. Teenage ‘mules’ carry heroin and crack cocaine out of the capital, and return with cash. So widespread has this menace become that the headmaster of a grammar school in Broadstairs was recently warned by the police that one of his pupils might be stabbed to death within 12 months because of the spread of drugs gangs.
of course, drugs are only part of the story. mindless aggression can be a cause. In the Suffolk market town of Bury St edmunds, police arrested four teenage boys a few days ago for pelting a disabled woman with eggs and flour. a celebratory photo of their gratuitous attack had been posted online.
and yesterday Donell wilkins, 18, was sentenced to six years for an even worse unprovoked attack in Kingston upon Thames, a leafy London suburb. He had sprayed a corrosive substance into the face of another man after a dispute.
If nothing else, the authorities must make it harder for young people to buy acid. Police figures suggest that the number of acid attacks has climbed from 400 in 2016 to 700 in 2017. The figure will be higher this year.
But the issue of rising crime — and the apparent inability of police to get to grips with it — obviously calls for much more extensive action than simply restricting the sale of acid.
It is hardly surprising that, in the countryside, less than a third of people believe the police are doing a good job, according to figures from the annual national Rural Crime Survey that were published last week. on the one hand, crime is soaring in many rural and suburban areas. Yet, on the other, the police are solving a decreasing percentage of crimes.
nationwide — and there is no reason to think the figures are significantly different outside the big cities — police charged a suspect in only nine per cent of reported crimes last year. Three years ago the figure was 15 per cent.
according to the police’s own figures, in 3,000 neighbourhoods in england and wales (just over a tenth of the total), officers did not solve a single burglary last year. Isn’t that shameful?
as we know, the usual police justification for their worsening performance in the face of rising crime is that their numbers have been cut by 14 per cent since the Coalition assumed power in 2010.
BuT is this really credible? Surely the main problem is the virtual absence of police on the streets, especially in suburbia and smaller towns, where crime is so markedly on the increase.
It was ever thus. I can’t remember there being many, if any, more police on the streets back in 2010, when numbers stood at an all-time high. I would be more convinced by the argument that more resources are needed if I thought they would be sensibly deployed.
after all, the boys and girls in blue have no difficulty in turning out in numbers when required to tackle ‘hate crime’, investigate bogus claims of sex offences said to have been committed by dead statesmen such as former prime minister edward Heath, or arrest blameless tabloid journalists at six in the morning.
By all means, let there be more police — but, first of all, can the ones we have show they have their priorities straight? This entails, among other things, a greater presence on our streets.
They can’t be everywhere, I know. But if rogues such as acid attacker Xeneral webster and Saqib Hussain had feared that police might be keeping watch on them, or at any rate be in the vicinity, it is possible Joanne Rand might be alive.
needless to say, I don’t at all discount the severity of rising crime in London and our big cities. Indeed, I believe Cressida Dick, the metropolitan Police Commissioner, was unwise to claim on Tuesday that violent crime in the capital has begun to ‘stabilise’. There is no evidence it has.
But if incidents of crime are increasing even more quickly outside the large conurbations, isn’t it time our rulers showed they cared? Virtually the only recent contribution was the misguided suggestion by a junior justice minister that prison sentences of less than a year should be scrapped for all but the most serious offences.
The sad truth is that there’s no one in government or the upper echelons of the police who shows sufficient concern about rising crime, or has any idea how to deal with it.