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Someone is lying If you live in Britain and you do not think crime, casual violence and the background of anti-social behaviour is mounting problems based on the evidence of your own eyes, then stop reading now and keep taking the NHS prescribed Prozac. For all the rest of you, take a look at this report by Civitas.
Of course the government and police claim the truth lies elesewhere. No prize for guessing who I am inclined to believe.
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From what I have read on this subject it would seem that government refuses to discuss the increase in recorded crime since, say, 1950. The only comparisons they will talk about are those that relate to comparatively recent times.
In fact, according to figures I extracted from official records three or four years ago, there was an increase in recorded crime between 1950 and 2000 of almost 1000%.
The instinctive reaction of most people is to look to the law enforcement agencies to catch the offenders; of course, what we do with them in the unlikely event that they are apprehended, is an entirely different matter.
Whilst I wish for a better performance from the police and the courts, I am more concerned with establishing the reasons for the seeming collapse of our national morality. Yes we must do something to halt the criminal and antisocial behaviour but we also need to examine the activities of successive governments and those in the academic, media and entertainment fields to identify the policies and fashions that have combined to cause our descent into a new era of hedonism.
Crime will reduce steeply in Britain over the next two decades. Most of it is committed by youths and young men aged between 14 and 30. Their numbers, both absolutely and as a proportion of the population, are set to fall sharply because the Baby Boomers were so infertile and, possibly, because legalised abortion targeted the poor who are most likely to engender malefactors. Less testosterone in the nation, less crime on the streets.
All sorts of vested interests will claim the credit for this fall, but it will be down to biological factors which are little understood and outwith the control of governments… until they find a way to set the birth rate.
A second reason to expect less crime is the intensification of public surveillance: CCTV, police and quasi-police on the prowl, more effective anti-burglary and anti-vandalism technologies.
Comparisons of recorded crime over long periods are unsafe. Much theft went unreported before house contents insurance became general, and much juvenile offending was dealt with informally: a clip on the ear or talking-to from the beat bobby rather than today’s trudge through the social-work system.
What was the population then and now?
Effra, do you want to wait 20 years? Why not begin now?
Effra is correct in part. Demographic factors are significant in crime and he identifies a very significant one, the presence of young adult males.
However if periods of time in which there were a large number of young adult males are measured against other criteria the issue fuzzes up.
Chief among the other data criteria are cultural predispositions and racial/religious groupings and how these do or do not “fit” with the previous cultural predispositions.
For example, a decline in the number of white lower class youth in London would be essentially meaningless in the face of an increase in sub saharan African blacks or much more to the point, locally born blacks imbued with notions of “disenfranchisement”. Far more powerful will be the effect of the vast increase in militant Muslims who have a conflicting set of cultural assumptions including a demand for personal rectitude and a desire to oppress “dhimmis” and especially to brutalize women.
One truly significant matter is the fact that British law punishes the victim who fights back (which offers little discouragement to the bully) and an antagonism to the personal ownership of weapons.
Further the collapse of the monarchy signals and portends rather than causes a decline in social cohesion and polite social interaction.
This is not exhaustive as a set of points for discussion, but clearly suggests demographic analysis is an inadequate explanatory device.
Effra is correct in part. Demographic factors are significant in crime and he identifies a very significant one, the presence of young adult males.
However if periods of time in which there were a large number of young adult males are measured against other criteria the issue fuzzes up.
Chief among the other data criteria are cultural predispositions and racial/religious groupings and how these do or do not “fit” with the previous cultural predispositions.
For example, a decline in the number of white lower class youth in London would be essentially meaningless in the face of an increase in sub saharan African blacks or much more to the point, locally born blacks imbued with notions of “disenfranchisement”. Far more powerful will be the effect of the vast increase in militant Muslims who have a conflicting set of cultural assumptions including a demand for personal rectitude and a desire to oppress “dhimmis” and especially to brutalize women.
One truly significant matter is the fact that British law punishes the victim who fights back (which offers little discouragement to the bully) and an antagonism to the personal ownership of weapons.
Further the collapse of the monarchy signals and portends rather than causes a decline in social cohesion and polite social interaction.
This is not exhaustive as a set of points for discussion, but clearly suggests demographic analysis is an inadequate explanatory device.
Sandy P,
The population increase between 1950 and 2000 was about 4 million – not enough to account for the phenomenal increase in recorded crime. No, I believe that those who influence social affairs were the cause of the loss of virtue – human rights legislation, political correctness, the abandonment of previously acknowledged limits in the field of entertainment etc., etc.
effra: if crime is the fault of the “poor who are most likely to engender malefactors” then I doubt crime is going to fall anytime soon. Have you ever heard of ‘council housing’? It is an area where schoolgirls who become pregnant are rewarded with a home and income so long as the father doesn’t want to live with her. She gets more money the more kids she has as long as she doesn’t get a job.
Incredibly, this well-meaning system generates large numbers of large families of under-educated people (why under-educated? Because there is no impetus to learn. You get looked after the more of a failure you are). These are now into the third and fourth generation of social jetsam.
Want some proof? Chat to the local (local to the council estate, not local to cloud cuckoo land) postmaster/mistress about the level of income his customers are on.
Sorry folks but I doubt that demographics will help here. Abortions aren’t something the underclass have very often – why bother when they get rewarded for producing unwanted children. A 17 year old single mother will get herself a nice council flat and plenty of “benefits”. From what I have seen those having abortions seem to be from the middle classes. As a result the proportion of dim , violent underclass youths are likely to increase as a percentage of the population.
I think the people who arn’t telling the whole truth are the those who say they live life leery of liberal larceny.
If you read this:
A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics since 1900
You will see that from a selection of statistics that the ones that track the amount of crime most closely are the number of First Degrees by full time students in the UK. Goverment expendature and GDP per capita.
The increase in both the private and public larceny (and students) is almost certainly due to the increase in GDP per capita bacause there is quite simply more to nick. There are also other factors such as an increase in personal mobility which means you can nick from people you don’t know more easily, and no doubt the crims both private and public don’t feel as guilty if they don’t have to look their victim in the eye every day.
Civitas, however, has an axe to grind so they don’t tell us that.
And I think you’ve been watching way too much TV.
1327 – A friend of mine overheard a classy-sounding (not really) young lady in a London chemist enquiring about the cost of the “Morning After” pill. The chemist went through an elegant, professional spiel about the pros and cons of it, how to avoid the use of such medication through safer sex, etc etc. This information was impatiently disregarded; price was the seminal issue here. Okay, 20 pounds. “20 quid?! Think I’ll take a chance!” said the breezily-departing young lass to the somewhat aghast chemist.
I’d get annoyed if I asked the chemist for the price of something and they went off on a “speil about the pros and cons of it”
DYOR, Buy online, avoid the beurocrat.
Della: and is that increase in wealth and therefore ‘things to nick’ not also present in countries with less of the problems Britain is exhibiting? I suspect your theory has a largish hole in it.
An acquanitance of mine sits as a Liberal Democrat councillor in Haringey, one of the bastions of the Tony Blair style “whatever happens its not my fault, please may I have a massive payrise” of local government. She was shocked to discover that between Monday and Thursday there are just 20 officers allocated to police a population of about 224,000 (2003 figures) in one of the more ethnically diverse areas of London. This figure generously increases to 30 police officers for both Friday and Saturday nights.
One of the reasons given for such disastrously low numbers is , as one might expect, “lack of proper funding by the Home Office”.
Oops, I inadvertently omitted to mention that that figure is for police officers patrolling at night.
Many apologies.
Lets cut through the circumlocutions. Easy sex, uncensored TV, individual hedonism = rising crime? Sounds to me more like somebody pointing to a correlation, deducing a cause (which so conveniently matches the axe they have to grind). I’ve seen that done in other contexts too. Some libertarians are prone to pointing out the parrallel rise in government interventionism. Leftists are prone to blame atomized individualism and the end of social obligations. Luddites point to future shock. Christians bewail creeping secularization.
I think the reality of the situation’s more like: so much has happened, all at once, that there’s no whay to sift apart what’s causing what. It has been the perfect diammetric opposite of a “controlled experiment”. Anyone who purports to draw conclusions is selling you something.
“We actually need 200,000 police officers right now – not 140,000 – if we are to have a significant presence on our city streets and in our rural areas.”
Society for Action Against Crime
Dear Staffordshire Knot,
The rate of crime in a country seems to be due to cultural factors or other facors particular to a country just as various counties have different levels of wealth.
It seems to be rather difficult to get accurate cross country comparisons of crime over the period in question, because of language problems different methadoligy in collecting crime statistics, different categorisation of crime, and other countries not seeming to keep as many statistics. I remember I have looked at rates of crime in Texas and the USA and the rate of crime seems to follow a similar upward track as the UK over the time period.
Effra’s point about demographics and the impact on crime rates carries some sense, in my view. In the early 19th century, Britain was a relatively violent place, with frequent riots (Peterloo, Luddism, Great Reform Act, etc). Some may have been caused by lots of soldiers and sailors returning from the Napoleonic wars, as noted crime historian Joyce Lee Malcolm has written. This period also saw a rapid rise in the birth rate. Britain’s population was relatively young and no doubt there was lots of testosterone about.
Much of the Victorians’ efforts to make the “lower orders” more respectable etc can be seen in this context. It may be fashionable for moderns to laugh and poke fun at those stuffy Victorians, but they had a more hard-headed appreciation of how to deal with an unruly society than we do now. And by the end of the 19th Century, Britain was, relatively speaking, a very peaceful nation.
Julian Morrison makes a good point, but I’m still rather inclined to agree with Joyce Lee Malcom, who holds that crime has risen with gun control. I don’t think criminals are afraid enough. The report blames low police numbers, but any number of police won’t change this.
Police numbers won’t ever help. The best emergency response I have personally gotten was 1 minute and 30 seconds after I called on a cell phone that I was being chased by three muggers on the street.
I survived unharmed because I pulled a pistol out and pointed at the muggers, who immediatly turned pale ( literally ) and fled.
As a thought experiment, try having someone near you count slowly to 90, and count to yourself how many times you could get killed by a group of attackers in that time.
The best the police can do ( almost always ) is clean up the mess afterwards.
I have heard the case from libertarian-leaning friends (and on this thread) that crime has soared _because_ of the ‘disarmament of law-abiding citizens’ by tougher legislation on guns. Although, i can see why this might be the case [after all, if the govt toughens up laws on guns, the law-abiding are likely to obey this and hand in prohibted firearms they possess and those with criminal intent won’t], it seems to me this is not the case. I don’t think that many law-abiding citizens had firearms in the low-crime era of the 40s and 50s, after all.
As far as i am aware, British legislation on firearms became noticibly tougher than the US in the post-WW1 era when _conservatives_ actually brought in legislation on gun licences, the type of guns that could be owned etc as they feared that there would be a revolution as in Russia (after all the era 1917-19 saw revolutionary movements throughout Europe and the old order was on the defensive).
I suspect that the increase in crime is more to do with there being (a) more things to steal; (b) people becoming more greedy and materialistic and (c) negative influences from the media and certain sub-cultures.
People have always been greedy and materialistic…
A friend of mine overheard a classy-sounding (not really) young lady in a London chemist enquiring about the cost of the “Morning After” pill. The chemist went through an elegant, professional spiel about the pros and cons of it, how to avoid the use of such medication through safer sex, etc etc. This information was impatiently disregarded; price was the seminal issue here.
Is anything about the morning after pill ever a ‘seminal’ issue?
“I don’t think that many law-abiding citizens had firearms in the low-crime era of the 40s and 50s” – they were certainly a lot more common, since IIRC gun control then largely applied to handguns. Rifles and shotguns were assumed to be sporting implements. Plus the police attitude would be “nice shooting, sir”, and many more people had large dogs, and many more houses were continuously occupied by a stay-at-home housewife.
Still a wildly uncontrolled experiment though, given the multitude of other simultaneous changes.
If you want a thoroughly credible explaination of why this problem is worse in Britain than elsewhere, I recommend James Bartholomew’s book “The Welfare State We’re In.” see also
http://www.thewelfarestatewerein.com/
Should have done this;(Link)
Sorry
I don’t think that many law-abiding citizens had firearms in the low-crime era of the 40s and 50s, after all.
There were plenty of guns about back then. One of my dad’s friends at university in the late 40’s had a Luger as a war souvenir (illegally!), and my dad bought a shotgun. He forgot to buy a gun license, and was once stopped by a policeman, who advised him to get one. Imagine that happening now. He just had to go to the post office and pay ten shillings for a license. There was no real control on the sale of shotguns until 1967.
Back in the 40s and 50s criminals had no difficulty getting hold of guns, either legal shotguns or illegal war trophies. They were rarely used, perhaps because if one criminal in a gang killed someone they were all liable to hang. I do think capital punishment acts as a deterrent to serious criminals planning raids.
I believe that criminals started to use guns more often from the late 60s because tougher security measures at banks meant they needed them to threaten staff. When banks had open counters the crims could use coshes and ammonia sprays. I don’t think the guns were actually used often, they were there as part of the “theatre” of the robbery.
Nowadays bank raids are a bit infra dig in the serious criminal fraternity, there is too much risk for too little reward. The big money is in drug dealing, where guns can also come in handy from time to time…
Of COURSE the crime numbers will go down. The BritGummint will just change the reporting basis (as they’ve done regularly over the past few years) to ensure that. When the facts are doubleplusungood, change them.
Duh.
I believe that criminals started to use guns more often from the late 60s because tougher security measures at banks meant they needed them to threaten staff. When banks had open counters the crims could use coshes and ammonia sprays. I don’t think the guns were actually used often, they were there as part of the “theatre” of the robbery.
abolition of the death penalty
People went to great lengths to drink during Prohibition. Likewise, I think there’s an increase in crime (especially gang-related shootings) because they’ve made guns “forbidden”, “taboo”, and therefore seductive, especially to young males. That could perhaps be part of the reason why they’ve become so popular with the criminal gangs.
Oh don’t worry so much about the rising crime and lowering anglo birthrate. Between the breeding like rabbits, moslim group, and eventual implication of shar’ia law in Britain you haven’t a thing to worry about.
You’ll all either convert, become
slavesdhimmis or die. And since there will be such a cultural change, the excess usage of beer, open sex, homosexulality, oh and yes your dogs will all be cleaned up by your new governance. I expect with the shar’ia in place, all those things you discuss as being immoral, amoral and illegal will be either legalized or completely banned.Then you will all live comfortably under the religion of peace.
If you think I’m funning you, go take a look at Melanie Phillips latest speech.
It should scare about ten years of life right out of you, if you’re still sane and capable of logical reasoning.
Guns are popular with criminal gangs because they work and since there are no real differences in the penalties between beating someone to death and shooting them,gangsters opt for the more efficient method.
The profits from the drug trade are so huge that it is cost effective to carry arms.
Well, I was going to talk about crime, but after that comment about online slots, I haven’t the strength.
Post-Modern societies are criminalising more and more. No wonder that the figures are rising. The state can now enter our houses (family crime), minor anti-social behaviours, CCTV, and an extended middle-class of owners who want a panopticon in action to watch over their goods. It had to raise in the continuum path of our societies to less violence. See Norbert Elias work. You have to choose. Of course, britain as well as all other western developed countries have a new growing problem – urban juvenile violence -, and i don’t think criminalising – the result of new york’s broken windows model -, will be solution. Single parents families, as well as disfunctional families are rising, individualism and materialism are the standard, and now we have the result. The online slots is somehow symbolic.