RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: Everything you know about crime is wrong  Sun May 19, 2013 8:28 pm | |
| Crime has been with us since Adam and Eve and, surprisingly, God didn’t spot the solution.
Rather than punishing the miscreants, it might have been better had he put the forbidden fruit higher up the tree. We have been too slow to realise how strongly crime levels are dictated by temptation and opportunity.
It took a lot of research to persuade me of this.
When, in 1984, I started presenting Crimewatch, I shared everyone’s presumptions that crime is caused by criminals.
It seemed obvious: If we want to cut crime we must cut criminality.
Three years later, quite by chance, I had an epiphany.
More...
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I was reporting for the BBC and, at the start of China’s astonishing race towards modernisation, I stood on a top-floor balcony in a dusty town with the local mayor. He proudly pointed out the local hospital, a big school and a prosperous cluster of new houses.
Why, I asked, were some of the new homes surrounded by barbed wire? The mayor responded sorrowfully: ‘Burglaries,’ he said. ‘Mostly televisions.’ I said I hadn’t realised burglary was a problem in China.
‘It wasn’t,’ said the mayor.
‘So what changed?’ I asked.
The mayor recoiled slightly as though it were a trick question. After a moment he responded gravely: ‘We didn’t have televisions.’
Human nature remains more or less constant from one generation to another but situations change, and it is those evolving situations that largely determine how much is stolen, how many people are assaulted and how many citizens get hooked on drugs or even child pornography.
The message is that if you want to cut crime, you need to spend more time on low-hanging fruit.
By seeing crooks as the big issue, we tend to not to notice how important immediacy is.
We favour solutions which are remote – improving parenting, for example – rather than improving security at the scene of the crime.
We still need to catch offenders – I am a proud trustee of Crimestoppers – but we cannot arrest our way out of trouble.
I started looking to criminology for answers but found a lot of political diatribe and pseudoscience.
When my co-presenter, Jill Dando was murdered in 1999, I proposed a more rigorous approach and, with public support, we founded the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London.
It is now thriving and has helped me see that almost everything we are told about crime – certainly everything I once thought I knew – is wrong.
Shock: This is the Daily Mail's front page following Jill Dando's death in 1999
Shock: This is the Daily Mail's front page following Jill Dando's death in 1999
In some ways, my argument is a challenge to everyday reporting of crime. The human condition recoils from the mundane untidiness of reality.
Who, for example, can resist a good conspiracy theory – whether it’s flying saucers, or that 9/11 was organised by Mossad, or that Princess Di was murdered?
Take what happened after the murder of Jill.
She was then the most popular presenter on TV, so her shooting caused a sensation and, given her role on Crimewatch, people leapt to the idea that she had been killed because of one of her appeals.
Within hours, I was trying to calm the speculation down.
The immediate facts made a contract killing improbable but in any case the revenge motive would have been entirely without precedent in modern mainland Britain.
As more evidence emerged, the conspiracy theory became even less sustainable. The killer had hung around with no disguise at the wrong address – it was chance she turned up. He had no getaway vehicle and so had to walk away down a long straight street with no turn-offs.
He didn’t have a real gun or ammunition but home-made versions of both. He held the weapon in contact with his victim’s head, which would have showered him with tell-tale forensic evidence. And so it went on. All in all it was about as amateurish and clumsy as a shooting can be.
So I became alarmed when the inquiry seemed to be taking the conspiracy theory seriously.
I wrote privately to the head of the investigation, pointing out that when celebrities are shot, like John Lennon, the killer invariably turned out to be a loner.
It turned out that Britain’s top profiler at the National Crime Faculty agreed with me, but nobody took much notice. It was a frustrating as well as an upsetting time for me and for Jill’s other colleagues on the programme.
Yet, when this first conspiracy theory began to fade, I could not have imagined that another intrigue would replace it, one that was not just unconvincing but risible.
According to this new hypothesis, the author of Jill’s murder was Slobodan Milosevic. The reason was that a few weeks before Jill’s death, she had fronted an appeal for victims of the civil war in former Yugoslavia and there was conjecture that the Serbs had taken umbrage. Then, when a Serb TV station was hit by a NATO air strike on Belgrade, a plot was hatched to kill her.
However improbable, this Balkans theory made front-page news and became one of the most popular and persistent explanations for Jill’s death.
For the record, the idea was based entirely on a mild letter of complaint to Jill written by a Serb. It was so low-key that Jill’s agent only mentioned it to police, ‘clutching at straws’, some weeks later.
She thinks the Yugoslav connection is ludicrous and so do the detectives and all Jill’s colleagues who have been on the inside track of the inquiry. Yet crime and conspiracy theories go together as readily as Bonnie and Clyde. We love ’em.
Myth One: 'Crime is caused by a broken society'
Liberals and Left-wingers are convinced crime is caused by unfairness and poverty, and social conservatives are equally certain it is down to lack of discipline and failing values.
Yet there can be few clearer illustrations of the huge part played by temptation and opportunity than the rise and fall in car crime.
Car numbers reached ten million in 1970, or one for every two households, and that turned out to be a tipping point. Car theft boomed. Some 20,000 were reported stolen in 1968, and then, suddenly, in 1969 thefts rocketed six-fold.
Did something happen in that time to breed more deviance and badness? Less authority, less self-control, perhaps? Or more unfairness and therefore less compliance?
The numbers add up to a different story: Half the homes in Britain now had hundreds or thousands of pounds’ worth of property sitting out on the street unguarded and it was temptation on an ostentatious scale. It was also staggeringly easy.
My first car, a Mini, had almost no security at all. You could force the flimsy lock with one hand or prise open the sliding window and unlock it from the inside.
By 1990, there were 20 million cars and half a million thefts a year and by 1993, when ‘taking without owner’s consent’, or ‘twocking’ reached its peak, the annual risk of a vehicle being stolen was one in 30.
Then, in 1995, the problem started to decline, which is where social theories hit another problem. Community divisions like income inequality were growing, not diminishing.
Right-wing beliefs also faced a contradiction. There had been no return to hanging, birching or religious observance, and more and more children were born out of wedlock.
Yet car theft tumbled. Within ten years, recorded numbers halved, and by 2011 twocking had dipped below 100,000, the lowest figure since 1968.
For once, politicians were involved in wholesale and dramatically successful crime reduction. They put pressure on car-makers to mend the vulnerabilities in their products.
Immobilisers, intruder alarms, central locking, sophisticated keys, tougher door and boot designs were introduced and much more besides, and all of them had an immediate effect – especially immobilisers, which prevented hot-wiring of the ignition.
In little more than a decade, car crime plummeted in England and Wales by around two-thirds.
Myth Two: 'British justice is the best in the world'
When I started Crimewatch, I thought British justice was the best in the world.
After 30 years’ experience, I am now in contempt of court. It is not as open as it claims, it is slow, costly, and still believes that debate is the best way to establish facts. It is also more concerned with offenders than with victims.
When my 90-year-old father-in-law woke one night to find an intruder, the police were all one could have asked of them. His front room was strewn with glass, drawers and cupboards had been rifled and a random selection of trinkets stolen.
My father-in-law had come down the staircase brandishing his walking stick (‘Well,’ he told us, ‘I was in the Army’), shouted at the intruder to get out, and got a vague impression of someone climbing back out through the broken window.
Critical: Nick Ross says the legal process has divorced itself from decency and common sense
Critical: Nick Ross says the legal process has divorced itself from decency and common sense
The police made sure he had a cup of tea and stayed a reassuring half an hour. The next day, a forensic officer found a bloody fingerprint – the burglar had cut himself as he fled through the broken shards. So far, so good. And that was the last we heard.
Or at least, it was until we called them and were told they had identified the villain – a prolific burglar – but would not press charges because, at 90, my father-in-law would not make a good witness. The matter was dropped.
It was a classic illustration of how the legal process has divorced itself from decency and common sense.
It should not have mattered if my father-in-law, nonagenarian, living alone, frightened and in semi-darkness, got the description wrong.
The fingerprint and blood left by the burglar were proof enough. The offender went on offending and the victim was abandoned.
What police will not have known (and since nobody kept in touch, how could they?) was how that small nocturnal trauma ruined the rest of my father-in-law’s life. Thereafter, he couldn’t sleep. He began hallucinating, seeing a strange man in his room and wandering round his house, a man who used his toothpaste and toyed with his possessions.
His confusion and anxiety were not caused by the burglar – it was diagnosed as a form of dementia – but the form it took undoubtedly was. At his insistence, after a lifetime of domestic tranquillity, his house was thereafter encased with burglar-proof steel mesh.
Myth Three: 'Poverty is the main cause of crime'
Instinctively, almost everyone thinks poverty is the prime cause of crime.
This is especially true for the liberal Left, for whom it has been an article of faith, but even Right-wingers at heart share in the assumption that the poor are somehow dangerous.
Yet surveys show there is no correlation between a society’s experience of crime and its sense of fairness.
In any case, crime rose exponentially at a time of unprecedented prosperity when, in the famous words of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Britain had, ‘never had it so good’.
Whatever else was causing crime to rise, it was not poverty. On the contrary, it was wealth, which brought with it progenitors of crime, including: higher wages and more credit, thus more to steal; more spare time; more late night carousing; more alcohol and drugs; more social mobility; more travel; and more anonymity.
We forget that the class system had been a huge restraining influence on the majority.
Its breakdown has changed our dreams and made us hope that they really might come true. It has made us aspire and made us envious.
As the pitilessly direct Conservative sage Lord Tebbit put it: ‘When I look at what we denounce as the appalling conduct of “ordinary people” I see the way the rich have always behaved.
‘It’s just that they have had the resources to deal with the fallout.’
Myth Four: 'A 'wicked' minority is behind crime
The truth is that most of us cheat and steal and almost all of us can be persuaded to. Yet we rationalise our own behaviours, while we denounce the sins of others.
We have constructed a fantasy world in which we, the goodies, must be protected from a minority of potential baddies.
Most of us break the law. A third of British males born in the 1950s had acquired a criminal conviction by the time they were middle-aged.
If you think that sounds fantastic, several follow-up studies have shown similar results.
And what about the other two-thirds? Have they never been criminals? Or could it be that they never got caught and convicted?
A 2003 survey found almost half of us would evade income tax, two-thirds would dodge a fare or install illegal software, almost as many would steal office stationery and over a quarter would filch a hotel towel. For ‘would’ one might reasonably substitute ‘had’.
We all have ethics, and each of us has different limits, but sainthood is not the default position of humanity and for most of us our morals are for sale if the price is right.
Myth Five: 'There is more crime than ever before'
The more historical archives are analysed, the more it seems that violence was once a much larger part of life than it is now.
Historical records show the homicide rates in 13th Century England were about twice as high as those in the 16th and 17th Centuries, and those of the 16th and 17th Centuries were some five to ten times higher than today.
Recorded crime rose slowly from 1900 to 1930, then accelerated to the 1950s, after which there was a fearful lurch upwards that continued for 40 years.
After that, crime did not just dip, it plunged.
Almost all the downward trends were masked at first by figures recorded by police, but police statistics can be hugely misleading because most crime – including serious violence – is not reported.
Property crime began to tumble around 1995 and violent crime subsided five years later. Hospital attendance for wounding fell every year from 2001 onwards.
Homicide seemed to have peaked in 2002. The speed of crime’s decline had come to mirror the ferocity of its ascent.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2326656/How-Jill-Dandos-death-convinced-know-crime-wrong-NICK-ROSS-tells-shocking-truth-murder-friend-real-cause-crime.html#ixzz2Tmv1S4W6
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CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
| | Subject: Re: Everything you know about crime is wrong Sun May 19, 2013 8:52 pm | |
| - Quote :
- So deeply rooted are our assumptions about crime and criminals that it sometimes seems as though no amount of evidence will shift them: the curmudgeon’s myth that crime is always rising, the deviancy delusion that offenders are abnormal.
But it really is true that opportunity makes the thief. To a vast extent it also creates the football hooligan, drink-driver, and knife-wielding youth too.
This is why crime rates rise, and it is how we make them fall. It is why burglary as well as car theft rocketed until we became serious about home and vehicle security. It is how we so radically curbed football violence and road fatalities.
It is the reason why so many British politicians got caught with their hands in the till until their expenses protocols were changed.
Crime requires more than a predisposition to offend. It will flourish when we make it easy and shrivel when we make it hard.
While I disagree with his analysis, it's still a good reason to abolish the state.
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“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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