Posted on 01/10/2002 5:39:34 AM PST by deadrock
The thin blue line is vanishing
Theodore Dalrymple
National Post
Britain's esteemed -- or perhaps I should say self-esteemed -- Prime Minister, Anthony Blair, wants to bring peace to India and Pakistan. He would be better employed in the far more difficult and intractable task of bringing peace to London's streets.
Last year, street crime in London (already no haven of law and order) rose by 35%. It rose by a similar amount the year before. There is no reason why it should not continue to rise at this rate, for the great majority of such crime is completely uninterrupted, or affected in any other way, by the Metropolitan Police. Britain is now by far the most crime-ridden country in Europe, indeed in the Western world. Never has the thin blue line been thinner: Indeed, it is so thin as to be almost invisible.
And that, of course, is what our liberal intelligentsia always wanted. They have long pretended the police were a greater threat to the citizenry than the criminal who, poor chap, had a hard time early in life. And so it was delighted when the opportunity presented itself for emasculating the police yet further, as if what Britons needed at this juncture was more freedom for the mugger.
In 1993, a young black man named Stephen Lawrence was brutally murdered at a bus stop by a group of white thugs. The subsequent police investigations were carried out incompetently: a fact that will not entirely surprise Britain's millions of victims of crime.
The public inquiry into the case -- virtually a kangaroo court --found the Metropolitan Police were rotten with "institutionalized racism": a finding that was pre-ordained, since the inquiry's definition of a racist incident was one that was perceived by any participant in it, or witness of it, as being racist. On such a definition, passing the time of day could become a racist incident.
In the wake of the publication of the inquiry's report in February, 1999, the police became so terrified of accusations of racism that they refused any longer to stop and search suspicious characters -- amongst whom, of course, were a higher proportion of young men of Jamaican origin than could be explained by chance. The rate of street crime shot up at once.
Needless to say, no one dared to speculate on what this parody of the law of supply and demand might mean, just as no one has ever dared to disaggregate the figures for black crime in Britain, for fear of discovering that, for example, expatriates of Ghanaian origin were respectable and law-abiding citizens. Such a finding would not be of merely empirical interest: It would destroy one of the tenets of the liberal world view, that the true victims where crime is concerned are the people who commit it. Incidentally, this is an attitude that soon transmits itself, as I know from my experience of working as a doctor in a British prison, to the criminal: He generally regards himself as hard done by, especially if he suspects his interlocutor to be a liberal sympathizer.
But the show must go on: hence the institutionalized mealy-mouthedness, the institutionalized indifference to the victims of street crime, the institutionalized dishonesty of the British liberal intelligentsia. The report into the Lawrence case recommended workers in all sectors of the British criminal justice system be subjected to racism awareness courses, courses that amount to a semi-Maoist denunciation of the original sin of those charged with law enforcement, by those whose minority ethnicity is proof of immaculate conception.
A friend of mine, an eminent advocate, was recently elevated to the bench and was compulsorily subjected to such a racism awareness course, during which he and other appointees were harangued for two days by self-designated representatives of various minorities. The crowning glory of the weekend occurred at the final dinner, when a Muslim haranguer refused to sit down next to a judge-to-be, on the grounds that he was Jewish. How multi is my culti!
Our newspapers have regaled us recently with horror stories from our streets, but I know from experience liberals will dismiss them as mere anecdotes, as symptomatic of what they condescendingly call a moral panic. An Asian student shot in the head while being robbed for her cellphone? A man killed by two car thieves whom he was trying to stop? A 10 year-old child robbed at knifepoint? No need to worry: terrible things have always happened.
In fact, urban life in much of modern Britain is a living Hell, thanks to crime. And crime isn't caused by unemployment, which is now lower than it has been for years. It isn't caused by racism: A quarter of all medical students in the country are of Asian origin, so it is simply not true that ethnic minorities are driven to crime by the unjust closure of other opportunities. Crime is caused by the decision to commit it. And the decision to commit is decided in part by the firmness and confidence with which criminality is repressed. Black or white, it matters not.
Theodore Dalrymple is a British physician and contributing editor to City Journal.
I wish it was that simple, the courts are packed solid, jails are packed solid, the police are overstretched and under resourced.
But there is good news over 90000 cannabis users were arrested and convicted last year.
So at least we are getting are priorities right.
Cheers Tony
I read a BBC discussion thread on this yesterday and was just astounded. It's the judiciary's fault. It's the victims fault. It's the cell phone manufacturers fault. It's the policemen's fault.
Actually, the cause of this kind of thing should be apparent to a blind man at midnight during a total eclipse.
That 5-10 pound cell phone was worth far more to the murderer than the life of the victim is to society.
I'm not sure what the problem is. Well yes I am. Racial splits benefit Liberal political power. The deeper the racial divide, the more policital power they get so they do their best to ensure that that political divide is an unbreachable abyss.
Over here, we call it justifying your existence :)
Godspeed
yes you do as you stated That 5-10 pound cell phone was worth far more to the murderer than the life of the victim is to society.
What we need is police on the beat and a re prioritising of dealing with crime.
I read a report about young street thugs awaiting up to 6 months or more for a court appearance, of remand jails full to bursting.
The only other country that locks up as many people as we do on criminal charges is your country, we have up to 4 prisoners sharing cells designed for one individual.
The Prison service is run down due to the stress of officers dealing with so many prisoners.
We need a firm line from the top down, and we need to sort out what is a crime, what isn’t what deserves a custodial sent ace and what doesn’t.
We have the toughest jail sent aces in Europe, the problem is at least 40% of those in jail were for what you could term victimless crimes.
Cheers Tony
We have the second biggest prison building construction project in the west, only America beats us.
Cheers Tony
They are not "liberals",they are "leftists". The left has ALWAYS pushed for violence and anarchy in the streets because they know this scares the sheeple into demanding a police state,which the left is more than willing to provide. You didn't have much street crime in communist countries because the criminal there has no rights,and the authorites there sentence them to hard labor camps for 20 years for 1st offenses.
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