If police move folk on just for sitting in the park, then real criminals must surely face REAL justice

AMONG the most cheering discoveries I made on scoping out the fresh urban pastures I moved to last year was that of a community book box in a public park.

Much of its charm lay in its vulnerability. It was a handmade wooden thing, painted green, with glass doors anyone could open and several dozen works of quality fiction inside. It stood on a wooden pedestal sturdy enough to withstand the seasons but nothing more malicious.

Now I am aware of unswizzed honesty boxes in public facilities in remotest Wester Ross, pristine bothies in deepest Argyll, front doors in the Shetland archipelago which have scarcely been locked this century...

But this was Maxwell Park in Glasgow. The restraint shown by inner city delinquents in sparing this little oasis of community synergy their destructive instincts seemed almost remarkable.

Until a few days ago, that is, when the community book box was torched overnight. The spot where it stood is identifiable today only by the ash discolouring the grass.

And, now that it is no longer present to gladden the hearts of those who doubted it might survive a week, its elimination hurts much more than I imagined it could.

We are in lockdown and, by necessity, our worlds have contracted. We are told to stay at home and, if we must go out to exercise, to do so within our communities.

Grounded in our quarters or confined to the handful of streets surrounding them, I daresay many of us have formed a closer attachment to our neighbourhoods than at any time since childhood when it was our parents, rather than the government, who set our boundaries.

That would partly explain the level of outrage experienced in my community over a relatively bog-standard act of wanton thuggery.

But it doesn’t explain it all. No, for a better sense of the depth of displeasure at work here we would have to consider some of those town and city dwellers too fearful to set foot outside at all in the current climate.

I learned this week of one elderly resident in a Glasgow tenement who, at the end of his tether after more than a month-and-a-half alone in his flat, phoned a hospital advice line. He needed fresh air, he said, or he would no longer cope. But the tiny garden at the foot of his building was a communal one. What if his neighbours were in it? How could social distancing be guaranteed?

The man was advised to drop a note through his neighbours’ doors asking if it would be all right for him to sit in the garden once a day for an hour at an agreed time.

Inspired by the plan, the caller thanked the nurse as profusely as one trapped in a fire might thank their rescuer or a cardiac patient might thank their surgeon.

Agonise

Isn’t it galling that, as citizens like this one agonise over the risks of crossing the thresholds of their own homes, others are outside, roaming communities in packs, trashing stuff for idle amusement?

The book box is typical and yet just the tip of the iceberg. In my own area eggs have been thrown at windows and yobs have wandered down streets trying the doors of every car in the search for a vehicle to steal.

Elsewhere in Scotland commercial premises have been attacked, golf clubs looted, sports facilities broken into and despoiled and much that is cherished in our urban areas given a fresh coat of graffiti.

In the realm of adding insult to injury, the injustice done to the vulnerable householder in lockdown whose windows are pelted with eggs takes some beating. So, too, does that suffered by the business owner compelled to shut up shop for who knows how long, mired in money worries and now counting the cost of a visit to their empty premises by unconscionable louts.

Yet even consideration of their plight does not fully account for the levels of anger and frustration experienced in the wake of a community book box torching.

To get there we must also consider how Police Scotland are officiating over the nation’s extended lockdown.

Much of their work at this time, I do not doubt, is challenging and deeply discomfiting. The other day an Inverness man was jailed for four months for coughing in officers’ faces. I dread to imagine the worst elements of human behaviour they are encountering.

But isn’t it ironic that one of the most visible roles of the police right now is patrolling public parks and telling anyone stopping for a breath of fresh air to move on? Failure to comply, you will be aware, is punishable by a fine.

The paradox here, of course, is that people using those park benches to take a load off for a moment or two are exactly the sort who might happen upon a community book box and smile at the warm, trusting human intentions behind it. Perhaps some of them were regular users.

Now, sitting ducks that they are, they are being cajoled off their behinds by uniformed officers, reminded of the conditions of lockdown and told to go home if it’s a quiet seat they are after.

I suppose the irony would be tempered by news of some arrests in the Maxwell Park community book box arson case but I await it still.

Likewise I do not hold my breath for breakthroughs in the investigations which surely attend the practice of dumping rubbish in other householders’ back lanes while the recycling centres remain closed.

No, but keep a weather eye out for the thin blue line next time you fancy a read of your newspaper on a park bench.

None of this is to suggest that, in these difficult days and weeks, police are not interested in catching criminals. Of course they are.

They caught one in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, last week when he confronted police officers with a sword.

The 38-year-old appeared in the dock on Monday to hear what kind of a jail sentence Sheriff Moira MacKenzie had in mind for him. Several months at least is normal for this kind of offence.

Criminality

She fined him £200 and left it at that. Such a disposal for a crime of this nature was ‘unusual’, she said, but she was prepared to limit it to that in the current lockdown circumstances. And here, at last, we confront the full explanation for people’s boiling mad response to criminality in a nation up to its neck in crisis.

Life is tough enough as it is right now without thugs running riot and compounding the collective misery. If they are injudicious enough to do so, people want them to be caught and punished.

Instead, soft-touch justice in Scotland has taken yet more Fairy Liquid squirts into the mix. Prisons are sending prisoners home and sheriffs are sending offenders there too.

It is hardly a recipe for harmony in lockdown. Rather, it is yet more insult heaped on yet more injury.

Call it stir craziness if you like, but I would like to see a full police investigation into the Maxwell Park book box burning – door to door inquiries if necessary.

I’d love to see arrests and for those responsible to at least consider the possibility the sheriff they faced might send them to jail rather than home after a finger-wagging.

What a boost the spectacle of real justice would bring lockdown’s silent sufferers.