For Dorothy’s sake, we really have to get tough on crime
EVEN IN OUR increasingly lawless society, there are still crimes that have the capacity to shock. Two such incidents occurred last week. In the first, 89-year-old Dorothy Woolmer was raped and murdered by a thug who broke into her north London home.
This was an act that shows how badly order has broken down.
In any morally cohesive society, a widower like Mrs Woolmer, whose late husband served this country in the Royal Navy, would be cherished in her old age, not targeted in this appalling way.
The second incident happened when a police officer was subjected to a machete attack, having pulled over a suspicious van driver in Leyton, east London.
The blows from the foot-long blade inflicted wounds on the officer’s face and hands, covering him with so much blood that one eyewitness thought “he had been scalped”.
Incredibly, in the midst of this ordeal, he still had the courage and strength to Taser his assailant. Just as remarkably, the heroic officer is expected to make a full recovery, though the assault is a reminder of the daily risks that the police have to face in trying to protect us.
Almost 80 years ago, George Orwell wrote that “the gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic”.
It would be absurd to write such words today, as violence cast its long shadow over modern Britain. On Thursday evening, a 20-year-old man was shot dead in a Birmingham street. His death was the latest in a roll-call of barbarism that has seen the murder rate rise to its highest for a decade, while knife offences have gone up by eight per cent and reported rapes by 11 per cent in the past year alone.
THE first duty of the state is to protect its citizens, but our authorities are failing miserably in that task. Instead of displaying resolution in the fight against crime, they have engaged in continual retreat. Police numbers have been slashed, prison sentences made too lenient. As a result, hardened offenders have developed a contempt for the justice system. In a climate of worsening anarchy, it is the public, not the lawbreakers, who are left afraid.
But thankfully there is now a glimmer of hope. In keeping with the vigour shown over Brexit, Boris Johnson’s new Government has promised a “blitz” on crime, through measures such as the
recruitment of 20,000 more police officers and the creation of more prison places.
This crusade to restore order will be led by Priti Patel, the tough-minded Essex MP who was appointed Home Secretary. As a daughter of immigrants who made a successful life for themselves in Britain after their expulsion from Africa, she has no time for the fashionable, softly-softly ideology which continually excuses criminal behaviour.
On the contrary, as she explained in an interview last weekend, she wants offenders “literally to feel terror” at the thought of being apprehended. She is absolutely right. Fear is exactly what criminals should feel towards the state. Yet her commonsense remarks provoked a chorus of synthetic outrage from the liberal handwringers who have guided policy for too long.
Their fashionable dogma promotes the belief that criminals should not be held responsible for their actions because they are the victims of factors such as poverty, inequality, poor housing, unemployment, social media or inadequate youth facilities. So, according to this logic, offenders really need support rather than punishment.
It is precisely this enfeebled attitude that has helped fuel the crime explosion. Dressed up as compassion, such an outlook is in reality profoundly cruel and immoral. It not only denies justice to the real victims of crime, but also degrades humanity by its frivolous pretence that killers are driven to act because they don’t have access to a table-tennis table or are insufficiently popular on Facebook.
There was far worse poverty and joblessness in Britain’s past without any of the carnage we are currently experiencing.
IF THE tide is to be turned, the Government must adopt a more robust approach, as signalled by Johnson and Patel.the planned influx of police will act as a deterrent and give a badlyneeded boost to arrest rates. Shamefully, despite rising crime, the number of arrests has halved over the last decade, while charges and summonses have fallen by 26 per cent since 2015.Those figures must be reversed.
But increased police vigilance will only have a real impact if accompanied by a regime of far tougher jail sentences, in contrast to the present culture of institutionalised leniency.
Recent analysis by the thinktank Civitas revealed that only a third of those convicted of violent crimes are put behind bars. Disgracefully, even half of those with 11 to 14 previous convictions avoid prison.
A study published in November showed that 40 per cent of criminals caught more than once in possession of a knife are spared jail, making a mockery of the “two strikes and you’re out” law from 2015.
The courts should be instruments of retribution, not arenas of indulgence.the bullies flourish when they face no consequences for their actions.
‘Fear is exactly what criminals should feel towards the state’