Be careful out there

Knife crime is soaring, killers get only three years and the police and courts refuse to protect you, so all I can say is...

REMEMBER when politicians and police chiefs used to boast that crime was falling, and academics and liberal news media used to believe them? It was a lie, of course, based on fiddled statistics which have now been thoroughly exposed. But it suited the Establishment at the time.

What the figures actually meant was that the police and courts had decided that millions of actions which were once considered crimes were now not crimes any more. So they would neither record them nor do anything about them. This is still true, as you will find out if one of these ‘petty’ crimes happens to you.

But some crimes – in which people die or are seriously hurt – cannot be magicked out of existence in this way.

London saw four fatal stabbings on New Year’s Eve, taking the total of such knifings in the UK capital to 80 for the whole of 2017.

And the use of knives in general is now a serious problem all over the country. In June 2017, the Office for National Statistics listed thousands of ‘blade offences’ in the previous 12 months, including 214 killings, 391 attempted murders, 438 rapes, 182 other sexual assaults, and 14,429 robberies. There were also more than 18,500 assaults involving an injury or intent to inflict harm with a blade and 2,816 threats to kill with a knife. Were it not for the extraordinary skill and swift responses of our paramedics and emergency surgeons, many more of these cases would have been homicides.

If we still had the medical services we had in 1965 (when the death penalty was abolished), we would now have thousands of murders a year.

Malicious, disastrous violence has increased by astonishing amounts in this period. It is not the effectiveness of the police and courts which keeps the homicide rate down. It is the brilliance of our doctors and nurses.

Then we learned that John Worboys, a multiple rapist, could now go free. But this mess is no more absurd than hundreds of seemingly tough sentences, falsely stated by judges and falsely reported by media. We really ought to have grasped by now that these days ‘eight years’ means ‘four years’ and ‘three years’ means ‘18 months’.

I understand why the courts lie, to make themselves look strong when they are weak. But I cannot grasp why reporters, newspapers and broadcasters fall in with this.

To me, an even more striking example of this cruel leniency is the case of Theodore Johnson. The Left-wing Guardian is exercised about Johnson because he repeatedly killed women.

I am exercised about him for the more profound reason that he repeatedly killed humans.

I have long known that crimes which would once have been classified as murders are often now downgraded to ‘manslaughter’. This is done to save money and time, and to make it easier to release the culprits early to stop the prisons from bursting. But in most cases it is legally difficult to point this out.

The Johnson case is different. He is a murderer, but people who should be alive are now dead because he was wrongly convicted of a lesser crime.

In 1981, Johnson pushed his wife Yvonne off the balcony of their ninth-floor flat, after first hitting her with a vase and an ashtray. He was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of ‘provocation’. She had, he said, been arguing with him.

She was, of course, not there to give her own version of who did the provoking. He was sentenced in 1982 to three years in prison. That’s right. Three years, though in those days it really meant three years. He was out by 1985.

In 1992 Johnson strangled another woman, Yvonne Bennett, with a belt. She had annoyed him by refusing to accept a box of chocolates which he had bought her to try to win back her affections. He tried to hang himself from a tree, but the string snapped. String? Yes, string. He was much better at killing others than at killing himself. Doctors decided he was suffering from a ‘depressive illness’ and he was sent ‘indefinitely’ to a secure hospital.

NOT indefinitely enough. He was out and under ‘psychiatric care’ after two years. He went on to kill a third woman, Angela Best, by beating her with a claw hammer and throttling her with a dressing-gown cord. As after his second killing, he tried and failed to commit suicide afterwards, this time by jumping in front of a train.

Now, having first tried the manslaughter plea again, on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’, he has pleaded guilty to murdering Angela Best.

His injuries from the attempted suicide have left him in a wheelchair, though I wouldn’t like to guarantee that he is harmless even now. Far too late, the courts have sentenced him to 26 years, which might just be enough.

Once, I would have said this was all evidence of a system which had lost all force since it stopped treating murder as a specially hideous crime. So it is. Once, I would have said that we should restore the death penalty for heinous murder. Now, I know this cause is lost. So I can only urge you to take care. The law refuses to protect you. Those in charge of it lack the courage or the resolve to do so. Get used to it.