This sickening rise in anti social crime blights ALL our lives
We’ve all seen the aggressive, drunken and foul-mouthed arrogance of those with no respect for fellow citizens, much less the law. But as an SNP minister claims most of us ‘experience no crime’, a leading writer disagrees:
IWAS out one January day for a long Edinburgh walk with my young Jack Russell and we were passing the fringes of a faintly dodgy scheme when, puffing towards us on the same footpath, came a small squat sixtysomething man with a huge rottweiler on a short length of chain.
This beast promptly made a slavering lunge for mine, momentarily unbalancing its owner and almost knocking him off his feet. I picked up my terrified puppy and murmured, politely, ‘Please get your dog under control’.
The man turned purple and launched into a protracted tirade of obscenities, calling me for everything while his mutt continued to bark and to strain.
I said nothing: one does not argue with the enraged possessor of a chainsaw-on-legs. At length, with a final curse, the fool moved on.
And, lest this sound like censorious, bourgeois tut-tutting on working-class vulgarity, I recall another Edinburgh incident several months later.
A few of us were crossing a notoriously busy junction, by the benediction of the green man, when an elegant, muesli-sleek woman and two children – all on bicycles – sped blithely through us. I had to look lively; pensioners scattered in fright.
‘You came through a red light,’ I cried. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ purred the lady over her shoulder, not even dignifying me with eye-contact. Rules, she evidently felt, did not apply to her either: worse, she was raising her children in that example.
I therefore have great difficulty with Justice Secretary Michael Matheson’s extraordinarily complacent speech at the Scottish Police College the other day.
Despite a year-on rise in reported offences, he said: ‘We should not forget that the vast majority of people in Scotland experience no crime.’
It is true that few of us, happily, are likely to endure a family murder, witness a drive-by shooting or be caught up in a bank robbery.
But most of us witness some form of antisocial and illegal behaviour every week. In a major town, you will probably encounter it every day – spitting, foul language, the sight of drug-exalting graffiti.
MANY can attest to disagreeable and noisy neighbours or the unpleasantness, on city streets, in the wake of a major football match. And, trivial as it may sound, how infuriating it is when – especially on public transport – folk listen to devices without earphones, inflicting their own choice of noisy music on us.
I have already mentioned cyclists. Spend an hour of observation in any large town and you will witness abundant self-conscious eco-warriors jumping red lights, cursing motorists, thundering down canal towpaths or through pedestrian precincts and with scant regard for the vulnerable or elderly.
Several weeks ago, our local authority sententiously installed a ‘cycle counter’ on Stornoway’s main throughfare – part of a trumpeted Scottish Government initiative to get more of us on two wheels. It was hard not to snigger: in Stornoway, most cyclists travel along the pavements.
Most of us know that reporting petty crime is an exercise in futility. Few acts of street vandalism or garden theft are witnessed, while police stations – well, those still surviving; all but one on my island have closed – too often take a shoulder-shrugging approach.
Eight or nine years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, I came across a clutch of decidedly merry young men, with cans and bottles to hand, playing an illicit round of golf on the local course and, appended to them, a very small boy.
The Fourth Commandment was scarcely a matter for the Northern Constabulary, but there is a local by-law against al fresco drinking and toddlers should not be in the charge of men the worse for booze.
I rang the police station, where a bored woman told me: ‘We have very few officers available today.’ I doubt my call was even logged.
The growing, aggrieved sense that coppers are more interested in harassing motorists than maintaining good public order is fuelled by such debacles as befell the residents of Troon, Ayrshire, last weekend.
Thousands of teenagers converged on the town for the bank holiday – an event apparently orchestrated on social media – jamming trains, swilling from bottles and dropping live cigarette ends on the floor.
One mother saw a hundred plastered youths board the train at Paisley alone.
Troon beach was practically annexed by the louts. The town station was mobbed in scenes more becoming some South American revolution.
A serious brawl broke out on the Troon sands on Sunday and, somewhere on YouTube, you can view a clip of lads chanting: ‘If ye hate the f ****** polis clap yer hauns…’
One teenager ended up in hospital and there were, in all, six arrests; but it was an inglorious day for Scotland’s police and no one has explained how so many visibly drunk young people were able to board trains and drink and smoke without interference. What is certain is that, whatever the claims of Mr Matheson, tens of thousands of respectable Scots endured disgusting disorder last weekend – and all but a handful involved got away with it.
‘I would appeal to everyone,’ pleaded Police Scotland area commander Gary I’Anson, ‘particularly young people, to be considerate and make safe and positive choices so that you can have a great day out with your friends on the beach and get back home safely.’
What did he think he was describing: Five On Kirrin Island? With Timmy the dog and lashings of ginger-beer?
And what lies behind such endemic antisocial behaviour?
The time of year is certainly a factor: hot weather and boozy, dehydrated younglings, showing off in what the thugs
of Belfast used joyously to describe as the ‘white nights’ of midsummer, always tend to outbreaks of riotous misbehaviour.
Bonds of community have greatly loosened. Few of us now regularly worship in a local church or live within walking distance of work.
Children see much less of their parents and, in a far more mobile society, there is far less extended family.
We are still, arguably, working through the profound disruption of recent decades – the uprooting and scattering of entire communities into hideous new housing estates during the 1960s, the general collapse of Scotland’s heavy industry in the Eighties and the broken, bitter places that it left behind.
Yet we have no poverty today comparable to that stalking Scotland in the 1930s – mass unemployment and malnourished and hungry children in dreadful city slums – and the ugly spirit of the age is by no means exclusive to those on the fringes of society.
THOSE of you who have read recent, darkly funny accounts of life at the heart of British government – Andrew Rawnsley’s books about the New Labour administration, or Tim Shipman’s chronicles of Tory turmoil amid Brexit – you are struck at once by the extraordinary profanity: the vile, hateful language used in the corridors of Whitehall by the most powerful people in the country.
Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, Theresa May’s belatedly discarded aides, regularly bawled out underlings (and Cabinet ministers) in the sort of words one could not repeat in a family newspaper – and, on at least one occasion, unrebuked, did so in the presence of the Prime Minister herself. The ugliest thing I ever saw in Edinburgh was not that oaf with the rottweiler but two lads from a prominent private school – maroon blazers, cheap shoes – on the upper deck of a bus loudly discussing, in the vilest terms, the physical attributes and possible character of a girl in their year.
I turned to stare and saw her, several seats away, enduring this abuse in thin, stony-faced distance from tears. Few Scotswomen will be strangers to similar experiences, or worse.
In an age when even the privileged are potty-mouthed and when popular television drama includes scenes our grandparents would have unhesitatingly damned as pornography, we cannot marvel if our society as a whole grows ever coarser, more atomised and vicious.
Most dangerous of all is any sense of alienation – that our society does not care about us, or sends out all sorts of little signals that it does not care about itself.
By 1990, New York City was an international joke – on the verge of bankruptcy, with a history of machine politics and corruption, swathes of deadly gangland and a crime-infested subway.
That year, its homicide rate was an appalling 2,245. Then, running explicitly on a tough-on-crime manifesto in 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected as New York’s mayor.
He did not, as our own politicians surely would, noisily target resources at, for instance, streetgangs and drug-runners.
Instead, he insisted on a zerotolerance ‘broken windows’ approach, insisting on the pursuit of even petty offenders, the prosecution of vandals and so on.
It worked. New York City’s murder-rate plummeted – as did rape, car theft, burglaries and school violence, as folk saw standards being vigorously enforced and felt, for the first time in decades, that the law was on their side. And that the new sheriff in town meant business.
In Scotland, by contrast, the police have grown farther away from us, with the abolition first of the old burgh and county constabularies in the Seventies and the creation in 2013 of the Police Scotland conglomerate – with welldocumented troubles at the top and the closure of dozens of local police stations.
We have since had officers strutting dozy Highland villages with Glock semi-automatic pistols; a woman who lay dying for days in a crashed car off the M9 because police ignored the call reporting it – and menacing, festive season declarations that Police Scotland is keeping a very close eye on what we post on social media.
GIULIANI turned New York around not only with robust new policies but with considerably more recruits to the city’s police and heavy investment in equipment and training.
In Scotland, our forces have been hollowed out. We rarely see officers out walking on the beat and few of us even know the names of our local bobbies.
And they are certainly not there in the numbers or profile to deter evildoers.
There will always be evil, predatory people in society and, in Scotland, too many of them know that in most instances they can commit crime and get away with it.
That the odds of them being traced, identified and arrested are low, the odds against conviction lower still and, too often and even then, a brief and derisory sentence.
Between sleekit lawyers, mewing social workers and sob-story ‘background reports’, we are – these days – soft-touch Scotland.
It has been wisely said that, in a civilised society, the State should have the monopoly of terror – an environment where malefactors know they are very likely to be stopped, caught and severely punished.
No one, anywhere, is daunted by the Scottish Government or its minions. As of January, convicted criminals owed our courts the cool sum of £5.2million in unpaid fines.
Barely 70 per cent of petty offenders complete community service orders and, while reported crime overall has fallen by roughly a third in the past decade, it has stubbornly flatlined of late before rising, over the past year, by 3.4 per cent.
Increases in antisocial behaviour, and in violent or sexual offences, are particularly alarming.
And it is not the well-off who are most afraid. Those living in the most deprived areas of Scotland are less likely to have confidence in the justice system, according to the latest Scottish Crime and Justice survey, and to say that the police were doing a good or excellent job.
The Justice Secretary evidently leads a sheltered life amid laburnum-clotted lanes. Most of us do regularly encounter one form or another of criminal arrogance – folk who invade our space, behave abusively and flout the rules the mass of us observe.
And, whatever the scale of Nationalist delusion, we know it is growing worse and worse.