My image of my England - taken this morning of a field next to the Supermarket.
Posted on 05/31/2008 12:53:52 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Britain is now more dangerous than the Balkans, it was revealed yesterday.
You are more likely to be assaulted, robbed and burgled in Britain than in the region of southeast Europe once synonymous with war and gangsters, according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Your car is at least ten times more likely to be stolen in Britain than in Albania, Croatia or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Western Europe suffers from double the amount of burglary, over four times as much assault, and 15 times as much robbery as the Balkans, the report revealed.
Bringing criminals to justice is also more likely over there.
There are more police and more public prosecutors in Albania than there are in England and Wales, per head of population.
Even impoverished Moldova has more judges than we do.
The wide-ranging report, entitled 'Crime and its Impact on the Balkans', showed that while Britain and other western European countries continue to suffer from a crime wave, Balkan countries have shed their badlands image and have many types of crime under control.
'It seems that an era of lawlessness is passing,' the report's authors said.
'South East Europe does not, in fact, suffer from high rates of crime, at least in terms of the range of offences commonly referred to as conventional crime: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, theft and the like.
'In fact, most of the region is safer than Western Europe in this respect.'
The region, shattered little more than a decade ago by bitter ethnic warfare, is now 'one of the safer areas of the world.'
Figures on vehicle theft were particularly telling. In Britain, 1,330 vehicles in every 100,000 are reported stolen annually, compared to 166 in Croatia, 113 in Macedonia and just 90 in Albania.
The figures are considered reliable, the report pointed out, because victims almost always report the crime in the hope that their car, bike or van is recovered.
The report suggested crime might be low in the Balkans because there is not so much of a gap between the rich and the poor.
It said: 'Income inequality is regarded as the most robust quantitative correlate of crime rates.
'Social inequities give rise to a sense of relative deprivation, which can be used to justify both property and violent crime.
'But the long history of socialist regimes in the region flattened income differentials.
'While this is changing in a free market environment, the standard indicators of inequality are not pronounced in this region.'
It also might have something to do with the justice system. In England and Wales there are just five judges per 100,000 citizens, the lowest proportion among the countries examined, the report pointed out.
In Croatia there are 42, while even Albania, one of the most backward countries in the region, has 11. Moldova just beats England and Wales with seven.
England and Wales also have fewer policemen and women. There are just 261 per 100,000 citizens compared to 353 in Albania and 427 in Croatia.
There are also fewer prosecutors (5.2 per 100,000 citizens) than in Croatia (12.3) , Albania (12.7), Macedonia (8.6) and Moldova (16.6).
The study looked at nine Balkan countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia and compared the statistics it found with samples from Western Europe and around the world.
They created a monster with their “celebrate diversity” mentality. What a bungled social engineering experiment that has turned out to be.
You could say the same about some American cities.
You must understand that a very small percentage of the American population living in big cities (where handgun ownerhship is either forbidden or strictly controlled) commits a disproportionate amount of all murders and violent crimes. My state of Wisconsin has a very high gun ownership rate but an overall very low violent crime rate. It's amusing to read stories of foreigners fearful to travel in many peaceful, non-urban parts of America because they think the whole country is occupied by gun-toting nuts.
When I was in Greece in 2000, they told me that even in Athens, until a couple of years before, no one even locked their doors -- and statistics confirmed it -- Athens had the lowest violent crime rate of any major city in Europe. But that all changed within a few years when Greece was forced to open its doors to immigration.
The reason for the low Greek crime rate had been that Greeks weren't afraid of "the law", they were afraid of what their own family would do to them if they "dishonored the family name". One guy said, "Our prisons are country clubs, that's no problem. But when you get out of prison, your family will deal with you -- and depending on how just bad the crime was -- rape, murder, etc.--it's possible that no one might ever find your body, because the family would take care of what the law did not..." I was thinking to myself, "Works for me!"
It was a plan made up of good intentions that went amiss. Now it must be reversed. Too many came too fast and were not acculturated into British society. It will happen but its going to take a firm law and order hand.
And probably civilian gun ownership with castle doctrine...
I know, I used to live in a small town in the states (near Peoria Illinois if you’re curious). However, the important factor you are forgetting is that fact that family values in small-town america have not broken down to anywhere near the same extent as they have in the cities and the very heavily urbanised UK. Therin lies the problem, not the accessibility of guns.
Restricting guns probably didn’t have any real effect on crime in the UK, although it might have stopped the odd nutter getting hold of the means to kill a school full of children/shoppers etc. But until you address the nihilism that infects our society right now, all american-style gun laws would do is make the criminals better armed than they are now, and yes, contrary to NRA propaganda, gun restrictions do make it more difficult for criminals to get guns....
My image of my England - taken this morning of a field next to the Supermarket.
I wonder why this could be...
LOL...leave it to the British to come up with that as a possible reason for rising crime rates, while ignoring the obvious.
It seems the same is very true of many freepers on this board that believe if they are in Britain they will find themselves in a Muslim controlled State whereas the truth is that is about 3 per cent of our population. I work in a company that only has white English people apart from one China national. We have the St George's flag proudly displayed in the factory and all our local pubs during the various sporting events that England or Britain are in will be covered in flags and bunting with people watching the events in the pub.
The distribution of crime is a big difference between the US and England. US crime is generally very localized. There are dangerous parts of cities, but the middle class neighborhoods have remarkably low crime rates.
England has crime issues throughout the country. It seems that there are a lot of gangs who are able operate with little threat of capture or punishment. There are fewer murders, but crimes like muggings, burglaries and car thefts are higher than in most of the US.
And, yet...there was a time when Britons could own, and even carry a firearm relatively freely. Yet, crime was not out of control. I wonder what the difference was...Could it be that 1) crime was actually punished (severely in many cases) and 2) there was still a relatively in-tact unifying culture and moral/ethical framework?
I go for theory 2 it is since the breakdown of the traditional family unit.
Also there is an awful lot of black on black crime now whereas at one time it was more black v white now each section of the community seems to turning on their own because they no longer have the bedrock of a family and moral teaching from the craddle.
I tend to agree. Visiting Britain with my British-born wife in 2006 we stayed four days in London. We didn't see anything to suggest Muslims have taken over. I think my Brit in-laws would have informed us of such.
Sheesh I always thought of Memphis as being a nice little southern city although I have never been there.
When did this happen?
True for Greece, and also true in Serbia, until chaos in early `90es and I do not anybody who keep the guns in their homes, unless they were police or army officers.
Yes and its slightly funny to see the lieberal press supposing that low crime in the Balkans is a result of "not so much of a gap between rich and poor"???
Typical Marxist mis-analysis.
In the Balkans, the social rule of vendetta is still very much alive. You F up there, and you will disappear, or have your bawrs cut off.
Result: Low Crime, Swift Justice.
Not that I advocate it in America, but it points out that we have become too tolerant of criminals and their rehabilitation needs.
You are right about crime not being about the rich/poor issue, but the press wanting that to be the reason.
But "the vendetta" is no longer the way for anyone other than the Albanians. Years ago it also used to be true among the Montenegrins, but not really anymore.
I do think that the low crime rate is because they are family-oriented and community-oriented societies.
In Greece, it was common to see several generations of a family out to dinner together for the evening. And on the islands, just about everyone knew one another -- (and knew everyone else's business, too).
I was in Montenegro once many years ago. My flights got screwed up and I wound up having to get their via Zagreb, Croatia. In Croatia (several hundred miles away), I met this guy who was on his way to the Bay of Kotor, where I was going. But he was from a town miles away from where my family was -- yet he knew my entire family and exactly where my family house was, etc. In short, people from a general area pretty much knew everybody
The "lack of anonymity" makes people much more cautious of their behavior -- and the reflection of anything negative on the family makes the family regulate the family members behavior much more closely, too, for fear it will blacken their reputations.
It started within the last 15-20 years.
Family values in the USA are only in rural pockets around the country now!
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