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April 20, 2006
The sun sets on Britain
Just how bad is it in Britain? Theodore Dalrymple, the eponymous British writer and physician, says it's worse than you think.
[My wife] noticed some youths setting fire to the contents of a dumpster just outside our house, a fire that could easily have spread to cars parked nearby. She called the police.
“What do you expect us to do about it?” they asked.
“I expect you to come and arrest them,” she said.
The police regarded this as a bizarre and unreasonable expectation. They refused point-blank to send anyone. Of course, if they had promised to make every effort to come quickly but had arrived too late, or even not at all, my wife would have understood and been satisfied. But she was not satisfied with the idea that youths could set dangerous fires without arousing even the minimal interest of the police. Surely, some or all of the youths would conclude that they could do anything they liked, and move on to more serious crimes.
My wife then insisted that the police should at least place the crime on their records. Again, they refused. She remonstrated with them at length, and at considerable cost to her equanimity. At last, and with the greatest reluctance, they recorded the crime and gave her a reference number for it.
This was not the end of the matter. About 15 minutes later, a more senior policeman telephoned to upbraid her and tell her she had been wasting police time with her insistence on satisfaction in so trivial a matter. The police, apparently, had more important things to do than suppress arson. Goodness knows what homophobic remarks were being made while the youths were merely setting a fire that could have spread, and in the process learning that they could do so with impunity.
It is not difficult to guess the reason for the senior policeman’s anger. My wife had forced his men to record a crime that they had no intention whatever of even trying to solve (though, with due expedition, it was eminently soluble), and this record in turn meant the introduction of an unwanted breath of reality into the bogus statistics, the manufacture of which is now every British senior policeman’s principal task—with the sole exception of enforcing the dictates of political correctness, thereby to head off the criticism levied at them for many decades by the liberal Left—not always without an element of justification. Proving their purity of heart is now more important to them than securing the safety of our streets: and thus Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
What's amazing is that the Broken Windows theory of policing has been known -- and proven correct -- for more than twenty years. Aggressively pursue small crime, and bigger, badder crime is deterred. But not in England. That's not the worst of it; violent street crime gets barely a slap on the wrist.
A 42-year-old barrister, Peter Wareing, [was] attacked in the street while walking home from a barbecue with two friends, a man and a woman. They passed a group of seven teenagers who had been drinking heavily, one of whom, a girl, complained that the barrister and his friends were “staring” at them.
[...]
The girl attacked the woman in the other party. When Wareing and his male friend tried to separate them, two of the youths, aged 18 and 16, in turn attacked them. They hit the barrister’s friend into some bushes, injuring him slightly, and then knocked the barrister to the ground, knocking him down a second time after he had struggled to his feet. This second time, his head hit the ground, injuring his brain severely. He was unconscious and on life support for two months afterward. At first, his face was so disfigured that his three children were not allowed to see him.
... [H]e made an unexpected, though partial, recovery. His memory remains impaired, as does his speech; he may never be able to resume his legal career fully. It is possible that his income will be much lower for the rest of his life than it would otherwise have been, to the great disadvantage of his wife and children.
One of the two assailants, Daniel Hayward, demonstrated that he had learned nothing—at least, nothing of any comfort to the public—after he had ruined the barrister’s life. While awaiting trial on bail, he attacked the landlord of a pub and punched him in the face, for which he received a sentence of 21 days in prison.
Before passing sentence for the attack on Wareing, the judge was eloquent in his condemnation of the two youths. “You were looking for trouble and prepared to use any excuse to visit violence on anyone you came by. It is the callousness of this that is so chilling. . . . You do not seem to care that others have been blighted by your gratuitous violence.”
You might have thought that this was a prelude to the passing of a very long prison sentence on the two youths. If so, however, you would be entirely mistaken. Both received sentences of 18 months, with an automatic nine-month remission, more or less as of right. In other words, they would serve nine months in prison for having destroyed the health and career of a completely innocent man, caused his wife untold suffering, and deprived three young children of a normal father. One of the perpetrators, too, had shown a complete lack of remorse for what he had done and an inclination to repeat it.
Even at so young an age, nine months is not a very long time. Moreover, when I recall that for youths like these a prison sentence is likely to be a badge of honor rather than a disgrace, I cannot but conclude that the British state is either utterly indifferent to or incapable of the one task that inescapably belongs to it: preserving the peace and ensuring that its citizens may go about their lawful business in safety. It does not know how to deter, prevent, or punish.
[...]
As for Peter Wareing, even in his brain-damaged state, he had a better appreciation of things. He was evidently a man of some spirit: having been a salesman, he decided to study for the law, supported himself at law school by a variety of manual jobs, and qualified at the bar at the age of 40.
The extent of his recovery astounded his neurosurgeon, who attributed it to Wareing’s determination and “bloody-mindedness.” He is avid to get back to work, but the contrast between the nominal 18-month sentence for his attackers and his own “life sentence,” as he called it, of struggle against disability is not lost on him. “If there were real justice,” he said, “they would have gone to prison for life.” Could any compassionate person disagree?
Perhaps the final insult is that the state is paying for him to have psychotherapy to suppress his anger. “I have this rage inside me for the people who did this,” he said. “I truly hate them.” Having failed in its primary duty, the state then treats the rage naturally consequent upon this failure as pathological, in need of therapy. On reading Peter Wareing’s story, ordinary, decent citizens will themselves feel a sense of impotent rage, despair, betrayal, and abandonment similar to his. Do we all need psychotherapy?
Yes, Dr. Dalrymple, any fair-minded person is indeed filled with rage -- and sorrow -- when informed of the Mr. Wareing's ordeal, but at least in America we haven't yet reached the point where we demand more rehabilitative efforts of victims than criminals.
Yet.
Dalrymple has more examples of the speak-loudly-and-carry-a-very-small-stick school of law enforcement in the Emerald Isle; it makes for a dispiriting picture when the author decamps for France, deeming it safer -- and less disappointing -- than his homeland.
At least one doesn't expect the French to show courage in the face of crime -- or anything else.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 20, 2006 07:22 AM
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Comments
Education, education, education is the key. People will always respond to kindness if you show that you care about them. That's why many seemingly "bad" people still love their mothers. If society could give the same love to all of its citizens that they come to expect from a mother or father, crime would literally go away as we currently know it.
Posted by: Sbarro at April 22, 2006 11:53 AM