Rising crime blights our lives... and we deserve better than ministerial platitudes

Crime is crime is crime, margaret Thatcher once insisted. ‘it is not political.’ Her words came to mind this week as, for the first time in 11 years, the overall level of recorded crime in Scotland showed an increase.

Crime is not political. it is horribly intimate. if you have ever risen on Christmas morning to find practically every panel on your car kicked in; if your bicycle was stolen as a child…

Or if you have been jumped on a dark street by a thug, sent sprawling on raw tarmac and then repeatedly kicked; if a hoodlum accosts you and frogmarches you towards a petrol station to buy him cigarettes (and in each instance i speak from personal experience), you know the feeling well.

The terror. The sense of violation. The incredulity that anyone would so invade your space, damage your property, steal your things or want to hurt you physically. The fear. The humiliation. And, over time, cold hard anger.

The interesting thing about crime is, really, how few of us do it. it is actually very easy to commit. Folk who work in banks on modest salaries handle vast sums of cash without choosing to pocket it. Shoplifting is a doddle and, if you are quick, cool and ruthless, making off with something from a garden or shed is the stuff of simplicity.

We might inch over the speed limit, or on occasion park somewhere where we really should not, but otherwise the vast majority of us are honest, law-abiding people. Prone to absent-mindedness, i have lost count of the number of times i have dropped my wallet or left it on a counter; it has invariably been returned, contents intact, and on two occasions before i had even realised it was missing… and that in edinburgh.

No such reflection was evident from Scotland’s Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf as he spoke to the latest embarrassing statistics this week: the first rise in reported offences since 2007; the police ‘clear-up’ rate falling below 50 per cent; violent crime up by 1 per cent on last year; sexual crime up 13 per cent – including a 20 per cent increase in rape, attempted or successful – and, indeed, sexual offences generally at the highest level ever recorded.

And, though the national increase in recorded crime was only 1 per cent overall, some areas saw double-digit rises – the Borders, east renfrewshire, edinburgh and Falkirk.

THE overall trend in Scottish crime, for now, remains downwards. The SNP administration rushed out statistics on Tuesday showing that muggings have more than halved in the past decade; that teenagers and those in their twenties are much less likely to commit a robbery or be a victim of one; that robbery in public settings by strangers has fallen from 2,080 in 2008-09 to 860 in 2017-18 – and use of a bladed weapon in robbery has also dropped, from an estimated 1,270 to 550 over the same period.

Of course there are reasons for this. Now that even towns such as Stornoway are clotted with CCTV cameras, only the daft or drunk would attack someone on the street. Fewer and fewer people carry cash in sufficient quantities to be worth jumping, and evidence from all over the world attests to a decline of violence and hooliganism since the disappearance of leaded petrol. Lead, a neurotoxin, is said to have driven decades of rising crime by warping young minds.

And in today’s climate, people are much more willing to come forward to report molestation or sexual abuse than they were back in 1971, when Scottish statistics begin.

But crime is crime is crime. it has increased this year, and mr Yousaf’s platitudinous comments sounded less like sombre empathy than a hostage situation.

‘Scotland’s streets are now safer and less violent than they were a decade ago,’ he bleated. ‘While any small rise in crime is disappointing, we remain focused with the police and other partners on keeping crime at historically low levels.’

it was a complacency wholly unbecoming a man responsible for the most fundamental duty of any government, namely upholding the rule of law.

it is but ‘disappointing’ for the Justice Secretary that crime has increased. ‘Disappointing’ that Scotland’s mucked-about, turned-over, underfunded police last year solved fewer than half of all crimes reported.

is ‘disappointment’ likely to be your uppermost emotion if your daughter has been accosted in an alley, someone has stolen your much-loved dog or you have come home to find your back door kicked in, your house ransacked?

These are not ‘disappointments’. These are lifechanging traumas, be they the violation of your body or the desecration of your home. They happen, somewhere in Scotland, practically every night, and a public servant who brushes off such outrages in such language is a public servant evidently tone deaf.

AND, if you live in rural Scotland, you sense uneasily there is not nearly enough awareness of the increasingly serious crime in the countryside.

Amidst the bens and glens and straths there are no pesky CCTV cameras and very few policemen. But there are many things to attract criminals: big, isolated houses, full of desirable things; costly agricultural equipment; guns and riding tack and even livestock.

Last year alone, 30 sheep were stolen from a Skye crofter, 50 from a moray smallholder and 134 from a Perthshire farmer. Only in April, at an equestrian centre near Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, a gang made off with ten cows, ten goats and 11 black lambs.

The theft of something as prosaic as domestic heating oil is a problem even in the Western isles and national statistics show a 51 per cent increase in the crime since 2011.

Countryside plunderers know that it may be several days before thefts on a farm or estate are even noticed – and that a squad car will be with you in a day or two. Weather and the ferry permitting.

in 2011 the Northern Constabulary announced the closure of 15 police stations, four of them on my own island. We no longer have resident district bobbies in Ness, Barvas, Carloway or Tarbert – officers we personally know.

People are inevitably more reluctant to bother the distant nick in Stornoway and officers no longer have the local knowledge, the keen antennae of intelligence and ‘information received’ necessary not just to solve crime but, with firm if gentle discretion, in many instances to prevent it.

Crime is crime is crime. We hope these numbers, this week, are but a blip. But, given the centralising instincts of the SNP Government and the ongoing travails atop Police Scotland, the Justice Secretary may yet bitterly regret his unbecoming nonchalance.