crime – All Things Considered

08 Apr

Murder Most Avoidable

Fifty-one – and counting – people murdered in London since the beginning of the year. The Metropolitan Police must be very concerned. But Commissioner Cressida Dick insists, “This is a horrible, horrible spate of deaths but there is no crisis.”

What would be a crisis Ms Dick – a hundred deaths, two hundred? Well, you’re in charge, so what do you intend to do about it? She answers: “We need to reduce the number, particularly the number of young people, who are dying in street attacks.”

Really? You don’t say! We ought to examine the career of a person capable of making such an anodyne, asinine statement.

Cressida Dick is a policewoman – but not such as we used to see in the street in the olden days. She is not the sort of copper we might expect to find plodding Letsby Avenue. Let’s give her the full title: Commissioner Cressida Dick CBE QPM, the daughter of two senior academics, educated at the Dragon School then at Balliol College, Oxford and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Just the sorts of places where you can learn how to give anodyne answers, and where you don’t even need to wear size tens. Cressida is not your typical copper. She is – what shall we say? – a theoretical copper. Shape without form, shade without colour. Paralysed force. Gesture without motion. And she has an MPhil in Criminology to prove it.

She knew she was intended for superiority from that day – sometime in her mid-teens, I would imagine – when she realised that she belonged to the liberal elite and all the prizes awarded by its culture of entitlement would soon fall into her lap. She was fast-tracked for high office in 1993 and – I mean fast! – appointed Superintendent only two years later. That culture of entitlement is multifarious, enabling its members to flit from one exalted position to another. So in 2015 it was announced that she would be leaving the police force for a Director General’s role at the Foreign Office. Then in 2017 she flitted back to the Met on her appointment as Commissioner. I would not have been surprised if, in the meantime, she had served a spell as Archbishop of Canterbury. She self- identifies naturally – I mean unnaturally – as homosexual.

So what will this theoretical copper do about the non-crisis epidemic of murders in the capital?

Not very much. She will make a few speeches and sign rather more newspaper articles than usual. She will turn up for the telly the morning after another murder, or three. In other words, all appearance and no reality. She will pursue the futile policy of studied inactivity and wait for things to calm down. Good grief! – you don’t expect theoretical coppers actually to do anything, do you?

Something can be done. The active police – not the theoretical police – have intelligence, and with this intelligence they are able to identify the sorts of people who are likely to be carrying knives and guns. And so, as they say, apprehend them. This is called stop and search. Unsurprisingly this intelligent tactic worked. But, by deliberate act of policy, incidences of stop and search have declined by 65% since 2011. They declined further after 2015 when Theresa May, the longest-serving and most incompetent Home Secretary since 1945 – probably ever – decided, as she put it, “to rein in” stop and search because this “inflames tensions between the police and black people.”

But what if it was – and it was – mainly black people who were carrying guns and knives and committing crimes of violence? Well, rein in stop and search just the same, of course. Better have an epidemic of murders than offend the canons of political-correctness.

Baroness Lawrence, the mother of the schoolboy Stephen murdered twenty-five years ago, said this week on the anniversary of her son’s death: “The government needs to get a grip. Look who’s dying. If that amount of kids (sic) were in the white community, d’you think something would have been done?”

Baroness Lawrence is on to something – sort of. Yes, the government should support the forces of law and order precisely in those areas where the stabbings and shootings are being committed by those shown by long experience to be the likely perpetrators. That means stop and search. And to hell with political-correctness.

S’common sense innit? You don’t need an MPhil in criminology to understand that.

07 Apr

Hats off to the BBC!

I switch on Radio Four just before seven o’clock in the morning for the weather forecast, listen to the news headlines and then turn off before the relentless barrage of propaganda from the lefty clones who present The Today Programme have chance to reduce me to a gibbering wreck. But this morning I was late and, by the time I’d switched on, Britain’s very own version of Pravda was in full swing.

They were discussing this weekend’s election in Hungary in which Prime Minister Victor Orban is seeking another term.

This is how the unbiased, balanced, public service BBC presented the matter: “The populist leader Victor Orban is expected to be re-elected with a large majority.”

I pondered ever so hard what this word “populist” might mean. Clearly it was more than enough to send the state broadcasters on Today into a decline.

The distress in the voice of Sarah Montague – or it may have been Humphrys, Robinson, Husain or Webb – I can’t remember, they’re all identikit mouthpieces – was palpable. But my mind was stuck on a word they used to introduce that news item. As we noticed, Orban was described as “populist.”

Anyway, one of the Today clones interviewed an “expert” on Hungary. This man informed us that, while three years ago immigrants were pouring into Hungary in their tens of thousands, now the influx has been halted. Orban has built a wall to keep them out and he makes sure that it is patrolled by soldiers. The expert went on to say, “Unemployment is less than 4% and wages are increasing at the amazing rate of 10% each year.”

Why wouldn’t the man in the Budapest street or the woman pushing her pram through Paprika Park vote for Victor Orban? I thought to myself: Orban pursues very popular policies. And then it dawned on me like a vision, the answer to my puzzlement: a “populist” leader is a “popular” leader whom lefty broadcasters dislike.

I was keen to find out more about Hungary, a country in which the people seem to like and admire their prime minister – an opportunity which I only wish we enjoyed in Britain. Where might I find the information I was seeking? Why, the BBC website of course. Where better to find a balanced, unbiased account?

The BBC website told me that Orban’s policies are “controversial.” Not among Hungarians – Sarah, Justin, John or whoever is holding the mic at the moment. Or the Hungarians wouldn’t vote so overwhelmingly in Orban’s favour.

The BBC also told me: “Orban alarms other EU leaders with his brand of nationalism and populism.”

And there the BBC is dead right! Naturally, the unelected apparatchiks and international bureaucrats in the European Commission have nothing but contempt for the idea of the nation state and for the wishes of its people.

So hats off to the BBC for such a clear and accurate explanation of what’s going on in Hungary this weekend

16 Feb

O Gun, shoot thyself!

Justin Webb opened his remarks on the Florida shooting by saying, “Another day in America and another school shooting. And still nothing is done.” Predictably, it turned out what what he thought should be done is to ban the private ownership of firearms. Justin Webb is a genial chap if rather lightweight. I am going to thank him for his contributions to The Today Programme because these always revive in me the instincts, now a little rusty, alas, fostered by my old philosophy professor: “Look for the non sequitur, the logical solecism.” So here goes…

Dear Justin,

I listened carefully to what you said about guns in American society. You are absolutely correct of course. Guns are extremely dangerous instruments. “Another day, another school shooting,” you say. Dead right. Let us examine what happens in these terrible incidents:

One morning a rifle or an automatic handgun wakes up in its gun cabinet and says to itself, “I fancy going on a massacring spree at the local high school today.” Unfortunately for the gun, he is locked away safely in the cabinet. But his owner doesn’t know that during the night the gun has ingeniously manufactured a key with which he is able to unlock the cabinet from the inside. This he proceeds to do. Then, all by himself, clever Master Gun, catches the tube and makes his way to the school campus. The gun, all unaided, walks into the quadrangle and opens fire as the pupils are gathering for their lessons. Then, if the mood so takes him, the gun ambles nimbly into a classroom and continues his orgy of killing. All this is done without human agency.

It is a pity, Justin that in America guns are so bad-mannered and downright murderous. They should learn better manners from their colleagues in Switzerland.

In Switzerland 90% of the population carry guns wherever they go. Switzerland has one of the lowest crime rates of any country in the world and there hasn’t been a war there since a light skirmish between Catholics and Protestants in 1847. This, despite the fact that in Switzerland there are four million guns in a population of only eight million people. Deaths from shootings in Switzerland amount to 0.5 in 100,000. In the USA the figure is ten times that.

Clearly the problem is that American guns are so much more unruly, antisocial and homicidal than the friendly old guns in Switzerland.

You should ask the BBC, Justin, to send you on a fact-finding trip to Switzerland. there you should talk to the millions of Swiss guns and ask them to make their way to the USA and teach better manners to those pesky Yankee guns.

But Switzerland is a long way from America. You could, Justin, visit Canada instead. And I think Canada is quite near to America. There you would discover that the number of homicides perpetrated by guns – all by themselves and without any help from human beings – is seven times lower than in the neighbouring USA. Happily, figures are available: 8813 murders by guns in the USA as against only 172 murders in Canada.

And you know, Justin, we shouldn’t stop at banning guns. There are other ill-behaved implements such as knives. So ban all knives, eh? Not just axes and brutal hunting knives but breadknives, penknives and butter-knives.

Unfortunately, this won’t eradicate the problem. Other naughty objects and substances kill people too. Just look at the delinquency of bleach. Or at those murderous pillow-cases which leap up out of their blanket chests every morning and embark, all unaided, on wholesale smotherings. In short, we should be extremely ruthless and ban everything

And do be careful, Justin: mind out that BBC microphone doesn’t decide to stuff itself down your throat and choke you.

Yours affectionately

Peter

PS (to my old prof): “Will this do, Charlie?”

05 Jan

It’s not the economy, stupid!

The heart is always gladdened when someone in authority makes a definite and determined statement. So congratulations are in order for Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, who stated in his election manifesto of 2016:

“I shall challenge gang culture and knife crime head on.”

Well said, Sir! So how’s he doing at the end of his first year in office?

Homicides in London rose by 27.1%. Youth homicides increased by 70%. Serious youth violence is up 19%. Robbery up 33.4%, while home burglaries rose by 18.7%.

That’s a remarkable increase in serious offences of all sorts. But there’s more…

Thefts increased by over 10,000 incidents in a year, up 33.9%, Alarmingly, there were more than 4000 additional knife crime incidents, a rise of 31.3%.

Rape in the capital rose by 18.3% and there were 2,551 incidents of gun crime, a rise of 16.3% on the previous year.

Meanwhile, we have seen new and ingenious forms of sociopathic behaviour, such as the epidemic of acid attacks.

First the mayoral authorities crack down on the possession of firearms: then incidents of gun crime increase to surpass those in New York.

Secondly, these same authorities “challenge knife crime head on”: then we get those 4000 “additional knife crime incidents.”

Can we expect a ban on sales of Domestos end to the terror of acid attacks?

Mr Khan continuously blames central government’s “police cuts” for this shocking increase. Is he right? There has been a small reduction in the number of police officers but there are still 30,379 of them in the Metropolitan Police. The Met has an annual budget of £2billion and £240million of reserves.

The mayor says it’s all a result of central government’s economic policies as people are impoverished and deprived of adequate social infrastructure by the Tories in Westminster. But London is booming and there are more people in employment than ever.

So instead of subscribing to the prevailing Marxist explanation that increases in criminal behaviour – and just about everything else, actually – are the result of immutable economic forces, let’s try looking somewhere else to find answers. If economic depression leads inexorably to an increase in crime, why is it that – as Christie Davies pointed out in his book The Strange Death of Moral Britain – “Crime persistently decreased in the long economic depression at the end of the 19th century and crime has increased terrifically during the long period of economic expansion since the Second World War. The only people who believe the opposite to be the case are sociologists and left wing politicians.”

Oh, and Mr Khan of course.

For him and for all those sociologists and lefties, I have a question: “What if virtue and vice, law-abidingness and criminal behaviour are not mere functions of economic forces, as Karl Marx vainly believed, but have actually to do with the individual freedom which makes possible personal and public morality?

09 Sep

Preposterous and shameful

“Chief Constable defends his decision to take evidence which helped to convict a paedophile gang from a man convicted of raping children.”

That was the newspaper headline. But Chief Constable Steve Ashman should not be required to defend his actions

Northumbria Police’s decision to pay the unnamed convict almost £10,000 came to light when details of the case were revealed last month.

The seventeen rapists were sentenced for their crime of recruiting mainly underage girls, giving them drugs and then persuading or forcing them into sex, Steve Ashman described the “outpouring of public support” for his force’s decisions.

Mr Ashman said: “When reflecting upon the morality of the decision, I think it’s important to take account of public opinion. If the moral compass was spinning when it was first made public a few weeks ago, when the verdicts were handed out, it’s absolutely fixed now in our favour. If I had any doubt, and I didn’t personally, but if I had any doubt whether it was the right thing to do, then I’m absolutely determined now that it was right.”

Of course it was right. The only consideration in this matter is not the pedigree of the witness but that of whether his evidence was reliable: in a word, whether it could be certified that what he told the police was the truth. It was. And without it the seventeen men and one woman who constituted that gang of child molesters would still be at large. The fact that these wicked people are now behind bars is a tribute to Steve Ashman’s courage and a cause for small rejoicings.

Regrettably, mind you, only for small rejoicings.

The conviction in Northumbria was a rare event. For the systematic rape and sexual abuse has been going on for decades in a score of British towns and cities. The perpetrators get away with it because they are all Muslims and they operate in ghettoes into which the police rarely venture. If they do so venture and make accusations, the cry goes up, “Islamophobia!” And the police, fearful they will be charged with “racism” and lose their livelihood, back off.

If these rapists were white men, they would be behind bars before you could say “Allahu Akbar – drug that girl!”

The most shocking aspect of this sordid affair is that, in all those towns and cities, the systematic rapes are still happening and the perpetrators remain free to do as they like.

There was one word missing from that newspaper report I read this morning. The word is “Muslim.” It is the correct word. For all the rapists were Muslims. There was not a Methodist among them, nor a Seventh Day Adventist, nor a Guardian-reading freethinker. The rapists’ defining characteristic is their adherence to Islam.

Two different systems of criminal justice are operating in this country today: one for Muslims and the other for indigenous whites. This is shameful and utterly preposterous. And the matter is further compounded by the fact that hardly anyone dares mention the fact.

31 Aug

Celebrating cultural diversity with knives, blood and acid

“I’ve never known of a single murder at the Glastonbury Festival,” said Commander David Musker, the man in charge of policing this year’s Notting Hill Carnival.

He was replying to an accusation by a “rapper” known to his fans as Stormzy who had claimed that the police precautions against looting and violence at the Carnival targeted only “black events.”

(Wasn’t it rather racist of Stormzy to introduce apartheid in this way?)

Stormzy taunted Mr Musker’s officers: “Where were you guys at Glastonbury?”

As a pre-emptive tactic before last weekend’s three days of anarchy, the police made around 300 arrests and this is what enraged Stormzy. But, Stormzy and his mates aside, no reasonable person could argue that the police action was unjustified in the light of the fact that the 2016 event turned into a riot in which six people were stabbed and 454 arrested.

The cost of policing this annual cultural extravaganza is £7 milion.

Besides the customary knives and guns, this year offered a novelty when two people had their faces sprayed with acid.

So did the Notting Hill Carnage 2017 live up to previous years?

It looks as if it excelled itself.

This year twenty-eight police officers were injured by the mob. Bottles were thrown at them – but then that’s only par for the course. In 2017 blood was spat at them as well.

The carnival has got so dangerous that Ken Marsh, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, would like Stormzy’s annual “black event” to be banned. He asked, “What other event would be allowed to carry on regardless with so many police colleagues under attack?”

He added, “If this is the norm, it is unacceptable. It is a disgrace. Twenty-eight brave colleagues went to work this weekend and were attacked just for doing their job. This is not normal.”

Altogether 312 arrests were made, 58 for possession of an offensive weapon, knife or blade.

The dictionary defines “carnival” as “A special occasion of public enjoyment and entertainment involving wearing unusual clothes, dancing, eating and drinking, usually in the streets of a city.”

The dictionary might like to add, “With the chance of being stabbed, spattered in blood and having acid thrown in your face.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the London Assembly has declared, “Championing black culture is as important as ever and Carnival should continue.”

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, notoriously told us that we must put up with the occasional terrorist atrocity as “Part and parcel of living in a major city.”

Similarly, what are twenty-eight injured police officers – so long as “black culture” continues?

10 Jun

Don’t mention the civilisation!

Amnesty International yesterday published a report into racist incidents in Germany. Amnesty’s spokesman Marco Perolini said.”With hate crimes on the rise in Germany, long-standing and well-documented shortcomings in the response of law-enforcement agencies to racist violence must be addressed,”

You have to admire his self-confidence in his assumption that his international pressure group – not without its own political and sectional interests – has the authority to say what must happen to political and social policy in a sovereign nation state.

So far as I know, no Germans voted for Amnesty in state elections in that country – for the very good reason that Amnesty put forward no candidates to stand in the democratic process.

“The number of racially-motivated attacks has never been as high as now in the history of post-World War II Germany,” according to Selmin Caliskan, Amnesty International’s director in Berlin.

Perolini says, “Racist violence must be addressed.”

But how is it to be addressed? I suppose it depends what we mean by racist violence. This becomes pretty clear if you read further into Amnesty’s high-minded, and high-handed, report. The pressure group is complaining that Muslim immigrants into Germany are being roughly treated by some native German people; and they add that this is compounded by institutional bias against immigrants by the German authorities.

It is as well to get this clear from the start. Otherwise, you might think that Amnesty were referring to the racist violence perpetrated by Muslim thugs and rapists against German women. But no, they don’t mean that at all.

Perhaps they were referring to the institutionalised racist violence which Angela Merkel has committed against the whole nation by her encouraging a million Muslims to take up residence in Germany last year alone – and with the promise of many more to come?

Europe has historically fought wars to keep these aliens – these foreigners with a religion, culture and way of life at odds with and a threat to – Europe’s traditions and practices. To invite very large numbers of such aliens to come in and take root is to do racist violence on the grand scale to the whole country and, by extension, to the whole continent.

But of course, Amnesty are not talking about this either.

At present, Germany is not being defeated by alien foes. Germany, under Frau Merkel, is committing national suicide.

This is leading very speedily to the destruction of 1000 years of European civilisation

10 Jan

Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow

Listening to the news this morning, I was reminded of an interview given some years ago by the composer Peter Maxell Davies. He was asked what he had on the stocks, what was his work in progress. He replied, “I was writing an opera about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ but, when I got to the bit where Christ descends from the clouds, I found myself saying out loud, ‘Oh no – you’re only an advert!’”

What brought this back to mind was the announcement by David Cameron, which has received saturation coverage, in which he said he is going to to regenerate a hundred rundown estates described as “brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways which are a gift to criminals.”

A new £140m fund will be set up to transform dilapidated council homes – some of which will be knocked down and replaced.

Mr Cameron added: “Decades of neglect have led to gangs and anti-social behaviour. And poverty has become entrenched, because those who could afford to move have understandably done so. The mission here is nothing short of social turnaround, and with massive estate regeneration, tenants protected, and land unlocked for new housing all over Britain, I believe we can tear down anything that stands in our way.”

So that’s that then. Job done. The concrete and glass high rise slums and the Soviet style apartment blocks turned into model suburbs.

And all done for £140million!

Look, £140million won’t even pay for the blueprints, won’t even pay for the paper on which the blueprints will never get to be printed.

What we have here is government by advert. Make a speech dripping with extravagant promises and get it splashed all over the mass media. Then do nothing. But won’t people remember and hold Cameron to account when the project never happens?

Of course not – for their recollection of his promise will be erased by a new and different promise next week. And another the week after. And so on forever. This is how government works – or rather doesn’t work.

Other promises have come and gone unfulfilled. Cameron promised, for instance, that he would “reduce immigration to tens of thousands.” Last year the number of immigrants was 600,000.

He promised a decision on a new airport “by Christmas.” There was no decision.

Earlier he promised massive investment in new rail links across the north of England. “Northern powerhouse” sounds good eh? We didn’t get that investment.

Peter Maxwell Davies was right: the world today – the whole lot of it – is fashioned after the model of the advert. Nothing happens.

Soren Kierkegaard produced a parable which describes our times exactly: “If you see a sign in the shop window saying TROUSERS PRESSED HERE, don’t take your trousers in for pressing. Only the sign is for sale.”

03 Aug

Come with me along “a real avenue” in Rotherham

Barnardo’s children’s charity has received £3million to pay a team of specialists to tackle child sex abuse in Rotherham. The charity intends to hire fifteen workers to help victims and those at risk of child sex exploitation (CSE). This is a direct result of last year’s Jay report which revealed that 1400 children, mainly indigenous white girls, in Rotherham were abused by gangs of men, mainly Muslim, between 1997 and 2013.

Why this preference for white girl? Why don’t the Muslim men pick on their own girls? Ah but they do. But, as a BBC File on Four documentary some months ago discovered, the mothers of abused Muslim girls tell them they must not report the abuse to the police, “In order not to bring dishonour to the community.”

Funny use of the word honour. We were told there is honour among thieves. Now it seems that we must believe there is honour among rapists.

The three-years programme, funded by the government, Rotherham Council and the KPMG Foundation, will start in the autumn.

Council leader Mr Chris Read said the scheme was an “innovative project.” That phrase tells us absolutely nothing we didn’t know before: of course it’s innovative – it wasn’t happening earlier and it will happen now only because it is being funded by the tax-payer, Rotherham council tax-payers and KPMG shareholders.

It’s a waste of money, a gimmick designed to persuade the public that something is being done to prevent the rape of children.

Strangely, the Jay report found Rotherham Council had “failed to tackle the abuse.” Strange, because it’s not the job of the council to do that. Odd choice of words, that tackle the abuse. I can attach no meaning to it.

What is actually required is the arrest of the perpetrators, and that is the job of the police. But this was never done, because practitioners of the well-known religion of peace and love – who also happen to be rapists – scream “Islamophobia!” if anyone ever dares suggest their conduct falls short of perfection.

Barnardo’s chief executive Javed Khan says the project “will help teach organisations working with children in the town how to spot the signs of CSE.”

Well, I’m sure Mr Khan is delighted to be informed that his charity is to be better off to the tune of three million quid. But there’s no need to spend money trying to spot the signs. The abused children themselves complain frequently to the police. The problem is that they are not listened to because the police are shy of offending practitioners of that well-known religion of peace and love.

In succulent bureaucratese Mr Khan said, “A project like this will be a real avenue for people to get that support and we have got to work really hard to make sure we don’t let the children of Rotherham down,”

What the hell is a real avenue? And the children of Rotherham have been let down already.

Here is the scandal and here is the disgrace: in today’s Britain there is a particular and very identifiable section of the community which is above the law.

09 Jul

Methodismophobia

The BBC has done us a great service by revealing that between 2010 and 2014 more than 11,000 honour crimes were recorded by the police. We are even given the definition of an honour crime which is “one committed to protect or defend the reputation or supposed honour of a family or a community.”

Diana Nammi, director of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation – a charity that provides support to Middle Eastern women living in the UK who are the victims of honour crimes – said the figures suggested incidences of the crime remain “consistently high” in the UK and that the issue is “not going away.”

She said: “Unfortunately the figures do not show the real extent of the problem. So many crimes are unreported because the perpetrators are often the victim’s own family. We need a national strategy for all agencies – including police forces, courts, and schools – to be trained and to work together to end this problem.”

A police spokesman said, “These crimes go largely under the radar of local agencies, including the police. The number of crimes reported is certainly only a very small proportion of total crimes committed.”

These crimes are usually committed against women and include beatings, abduction, imprisonment in the victim’s own home, ostracism and female genital mutilation.

Estimates of how many women and girls have been subjected to FMG in Britain range from 65,000 to 137,000. FMG has been illegal in this country for thirty years.

In all that time, not a single perpetrator has been convicted.

Unfortunately, the BBC report doesn’t tell us which community is overwhelmingly responsible for this disgraceful practice. But I have my suspicions and I can understand why prosecutions are not brought against the barbarians, bigots and sadists who subject women ands girls to this torture in the name of religion and cultural integrity.

I’m pretty sure that the practitioners of FMG are mainly Methodists – give or take a handful of low church Anglicans. These people are very sensitive and they don’t like to be accused. When they are accused, they complain that they are being subjected to “Methodismophobia” or, as it might be, “Low churchophobia.”

And immediately the police back off for fear of giving offence to these Methodist and Anglican communities.

This must stop. The police must be given authority to enter the chapels, tin tabernacles, manses, bring-and-buy sales and coffee mornings and root out the atrocity of FMG once and for all.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: crime