The manifold causes of crime

I urge all visitors to this blog to read this fascinating essay by Nick Ross about crime.  He talks a lot of sense, and yet all the same he is perhaps in his own way as guilty of error as the people he criticises.

When in the 1990s the then leader of the opposition Tony Blair talked about crime, he did so from a classic left wing perspective.  The mantra was "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".  Crime was the result of injustice in society.  It is true that areas of high unemployment were often areas of high crime, and yet many people were far from convinced when Blair wanted us to believe that reducing poverty would automically lead to less crime.

Conservative party politicians or supporters often talk about crime in terms of a lack of discipline or the decline of family values, and there is definitely something in this.  For example I read a few years back about how a prison in Africa had greatly reduced the reoffeding rate by teaching inmates about The Bible. I also remember a letter in a newspaper from a former colonial magistrate who had dramatically cut the local crime rate through a policy of sentencing people to be flogged.

As Nick Ross points out, car theft fell in the 1990s, but not as the result of the government tackling social injustice, and neither as the result of the government bringing back flogging.  It fell because people were buying cars that were difficult to steal. I remember in 1991 buying a video player for £150, when I could easily have paid as much as £400 for a video recorder.  I also remember a colleague at work saying that he had been burgled, but that nothing had been taken.  I remarked that burglars wanted video recorders, and he said he did not have one.

If the number of burglaries falls, then it can be for several reasons.  It could be because people are buying security alarms and CCTV, or it could be because people do not have anything worth going to prison for.  I can buy a DVD player for less than £30.  Why should anyone want to burgle my home for that?  Then again, a fall in the number of burglaries could happen because people are going to church, or because married couples are not divorcing, or because fewer people are living in poverty, or because there are more police officers on the streets.

The trouble with the last four points is that each one of them should logically account for a reduction in crime generally, not just in the number of burglaries.

As a patriot, I recognise a huge correlation between the level of crime and the level of immigration.  Nick Ross, as a BBC man, would perhaps be less likely to see this correlation.  How many murders are committed by immigrants? How many stabbings? How many rapes?  How much poaching?

If eastern Europeans in Peterborough steal fish from the river, then all they are doing is what anyone other person in the vicinity can do. So why don't the native British people in that locality go poaching.  Can Nick Ross explain this?

Ross points out that the homicide rate in this country peaked in 2002, which may well be true.  However it had previously been rising for many years at a time of high immigration.  The homicide rate remains high, and yet it ought to be falling.  Remember the Dundee gun shop murder of 1989?  It was solved using CCTV footage at a time when CCTV was prohibitively expensive.  It is now widespread.  Add to that the advent of DNA profiling at around the same time.  Surely these two advances should make murders far easier to clear up, and thereby discourage people from turning to homicide. Can Nick Ross explain why this has not happened?

I congratulate Nick Ross for the extent to which he makes sense.