Governments and police recently devised a brilliant plan to eradicate crime. They would pretend it didn’t happen.
This fantasy was summed up beautifully in Anthony Blair’s 2007 farewell address to parliament when he set out to become one of the super-rich. At least he had a lot of guts. But his boast that day—that he was the only government since 1945 to claim to have reduced crime—went beyond guts. It was a ridiculous lie.
Of course, high-ranking politicians can actually believe this sort of thing. They live so secluded, behind rows of bodyguards, that they have no idea what’s going on in the big suburbs where most of us live.
They never have to travel late at night on trains full of drunks. Their local convenience stores are not robbed by violent men, who are not caught, or looted by shoplifters who have no fear of the law at all. Even normal MPs, guarded by police regiments in Westminster, as most of us never see, can have similar delusions.
And those who questioned the Blairite fantasy were mocked for years for engaging in “moral panic,” or fabricating a problem that didn’t exist. Official statistics, we were told, revealed a country at peace, largely crime-free and safe.
When I said on the BBC Today program in May 2012 that ‘the reason people don’t agree with these numbers is because they see in their personal lives that life is becoming less safe and disordered… being recorded’, I was denounced by leftists.
In fact, in 2010 even the State Police Inspectorate (HMIC) had suggested that there could be as many as 14 million incidents of antisocial behavior per year, based on the assumption that nearly three-quarters of them went unreported.
Governments and police recently devised a brilliant plan to eradicate crime. They would pretend it didn’t happen
The lie that crime was under control has increasingly come to light as such in recent years.
It wasn’t just antisocial behavior that went unrecorded. Serious crimes of violence or theft were also covered up.
In 2013, after a claim that recorded crime had fallen by at least 10 percent in 19 of the 43 police districts in England and Wales, I investigated the facts with the invaluable help of Dr. Rodger Patrick, a former Superintendent in the West Midlands Police, has since turned academic. He showed me the many ways numbers can be massaged, when the police are campaigning for more funds, or down, when they are under political pressure to show they are winning the fight against crime.
In the end, the House of Commons Public Administration Committee confirmed that this fiddling was underway. In November 2013, it heard astonishing stories of how it was done, including credible allegations that serious crimes such as rape, child sexual abuse, robbery and burglary went “in a cloud of smoke.” Police are said to have downgraded crimes to less serious crimes and even wiped them out by calling them accidents or mistakes.
But fiddling with crime rates isn’t the only way we’ve fooled ourselves. In September 2010, HMIC warned in a report titled Anti-Social Behavior: Stop the Rot that the police had become far too ready to “define” acts of anti-social behavior as we became more accustomed to them.
Problems such as street quarrels, noise, threats, graffiti, vandalism and drunkenness through drink or drugs are rightly regarded as crimes by the public. They can and will ruin people’s lives. But they are often fired by the police and the courts.
And this is the direct result of a huge revolution in morality, law and culture developed by social liberals since the 1960s.
As the social historian Jose Harris has written: ‘Had late 20th-century standards for police surveillance and sentencing been applied in Edwardian Britain, the prisons would have been virtually empty; conversely, if Edwardian standards were applied in the 1990s, most of Britain’s youth would be in prison.”
Problems such as street quarrels, noise, threats, graffiti, vandalism and drunkenness through drink or drugs are rightly regarded as crimes by the public. They can and will ruin people’s lives. But they are often fired by the police and the courts
The big change—a collapse of the idea of personal responsibility—came after militant social-liberal Roy Jenkins became Secretary of the Interior in December 1965. Until his time, the official purpose of prisons was still the Edwardian principle of “appropriate punishment of responsible persons.” ‘. And the job of the police was the Victorian job of deterring crime and, failing that, catching the criminal and bringing him to justice. The task of the courts was to punish the convicts. They didn’t necessarily expect that they would do the criminal any good, but that they would stop others from doing the same.
But after the Liberal victory, both responsibility and punishment were considered obsolete relics. Bad behavior was attributed to poverty and poor housing, the alleged ’causes of crime’. So punishment was outdated and cruel. The purpose of the prison was to rehabilitate, not to punish.
And the police were there to control rather than prevent crime, such as paramilitary social workers, neutral arbiters between offender and victim. One of their main tasks was to prevent victims from defending themselves. Instead of trying to deter the crime, they waited for it to happen and then intervened. The courts reflected this by being less and less willing to send people to prison early in their criminal careers.
Instead, they waited until they had no ignored warnings, unpaid fines, outrageous community service, ineffective probation, and suspended sentences that were never carried out. This meant the death of the deterrent. And many more people have committed many more crimes in the right belief that they would get away with it.
In the 1990s, there was so much crime that it was embarrassing to record, so it went unrecorded. And there were legions of common criminals—who eventually had to be imprisoned out of desperation, having committed so many crimes.
If they had experienced deterrence and punishment early on, they might have avoided it, and so have we. Even though the prisons often release such criminals within weeks, often with tags (so far the fantasy of “rehabilitation”), and even though judges strive to avoid custodial sentences with all their might, the prisons remain horribly full. That’s how soft liberalism paradoxically led to overcrowded, bulging prisons, while hard conservatism kept prison numbers low.
How long can we go on in this unhinged state, where the Labor and Tory governments, and the police, refuse to recognize the utter failure of the criminal justice system in this country, when the public knows all too well how badly they have been cheated?
The madness of weakness and self-deception continues. This week, police have failed to solve a single theft in more than eight out of ten neighborhoods in England and Wales in the past three years. A closer look at this showed that nine out of ten cases of bicycle theft and almost all thefts from a vehicle were closed last year without a suspect being identified. In total, nearly two million cases were closed by the police in the past year without identifying a perpetrator.
How long can we go on in this unhinged state, where the Labor and Tory governments, and the police, refuse to recognize the utter failure of the criminal justice system in this country, when the public knows all too well how badly they have been cheated?
If the political elite continues to deceive themselves, we will not have long to go before we enter the Third World. Even the dumbest criminals need to begin to understand that they can rob, rob, and rob quite a lot without much realistic fear of detection or punishment. In such circumstances, only the very wealthy can live in safety, with heavily defended houses and bodyguards, and everyone else must suffer.
Look around the world and you will see that too many societies have already settled for this terrible arrangement. For over a century we have managed to escape it. We still have time to avoid it. But to do this, politicians will have to let go of dead clichés like “tough on crime” and “crackdowns” and “more bobbies to the beat” to fix it.
And they will have to stop believing and repeating nonsense, complacent statistics that hide more than they reveal.
The liberal experiment has failed. It’s time for it to end.
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