So many types of crimes have been, at least in the judgement of the press, de-criminalised, wouldn’t it be more healthy for debate to take it from there? asks Mark Rowe.
Once we lived in a flat that overlooked the back yard of a second-hand car sales business. The security lights would go off of an evening, usually if a cat passed. One night, it was a man instead, plainly not meant to be there. My girlfriend must have rung the police, from the living room where the land-line was (which dates the story – before the time of mobile phones). It did mean that we had slightly different stories as witnesses. The town’s police station was not far away, we saw a police car approach, the man climbed over the back wall and away, only for police to stop him. A policeman who was on light duties due to injury came to take our statements. My girlfriend was unable to state that she had seen the intruder all the time from him shinning the wall to the cops catching him (walls being tall and it was dark and all). The officer taking the statement (by hand) regretfully told us that any case for the entering the premises couldn’t go ahead, because of the doubt whether the man who entered was the same one the police caught. Although the police had caught the man ‘going equipped’, so they had something. While the police, then, had responded faultlessly, I did wonder, as the officer left, if it was worth being kept up until gone half past midnight on a work night.
Such is the background to the Daily Telegraph’s front page lead article yesterday bemoaning that burglary has become de-criminalised as in half of neighbourhoods, police haven’t caught any burglars lately. In a land with legal standards, prosecution is difficult, let alone detection (as you cannot rely on burglars to carry bags marked ‘SWAG’, nor, these days, boast of their crimes online, to make the job of police easier). Perhaps the problem lies in our unrealistic expectations, fanned more or less permanently by daft or plain wrong cop or detective dramas, when the heroes neatly solve the case inside one hour (with breaks for adverts). To take a recent example of BBC1’s asinine Beyond Paradise on Boxing Day evening, that hinged on a burglary 50 years ago of a computer games console (that had not been invented then!) and the hero doing a search of a police database into a crime 50 years ago (the stuff of fantasy – unsolved burglaries from paperwork days digitalised, without inputting errors making a search impossible?!).
Not only burglaries, but (to quote the Daily Mail recently) bicycle theft has become de-criminalised, as has fraud (the most occurring crime type), and theft from shops (and for some time; the authority on retail, Prof Joshua Bamfield, said so in his book Shopping and Crime, in 2012). It’s not new. Into the 1980s and 1990s, police forces were routinely condemned for low detection rates of burglaries, until the statistics were no longer published, a simpler response than raising the detection rates.
Wouldn’t it be a more healthy public policy debate, if we stated it differently: that far more crime is around than there are police officers, prosecutors and prison places for? Then we debate whether we want far more police and prisons, and more criminals jailed, which would come at a cost (and the likes of the Mail and Telegraph argue adamantly for ‘low taxes’). In that case, we ask what the police are for – to prevent crime, or to keep the peace, other things than go after every crime (which historically they have not done?). If that were agreed, then private security would fill come in. Police would still have a monopoly on crimes of violence, say; if in shops thieves did not threaten violence or carry a weapon, retailers would be left to go after thieves or at least deter them through civil recovery schemes (which again, are not new).
This has occurred in healthcare; some things you pay for, even on the National Health, ever since prescription charges. Every few years I have an ear blocked with wax. Previously, I went to my doctor’s surgery and a nurse unblocked it with apparatus. Last time the surgery over the phone told me they didn’t do it any more and directed me around the corner to a place that did the same thing and charged £60. That, and my story of the second hand car yard burglar, won’t ever be made into a BBC TV drama.
