Do we have the will to fight crime?
By Janet Daley
Two days before Christmas, my younger daughter and son-in-law had a chance to participate in what has become one of the great British seasonal rituals.
They returned home after a night away to find their back door smashed in, all the presents - including the toys for their one-year-old's first Christmas - gone, along with the digital camera, the PlayStation and the laptop with all their work records.
Their cat was cowering on the bed amid the debris of emptied drawers, a terrified witness to the ransacking. The house attached to their semi had been burgled at the same time.
They do not live in an inner city, but in one of the leafiest of Hertfordshire towns. In fact, the very bucolic quality of their position, facing to a nature reserve, could be said to have made the houses peculiarly vulnerable.
Except that our next-door neighbours were victims of a very similar break-in last year (which got the car keys, and hence the car), in broad daylight, and they live surrounded by other houses on a quite busy suburban road.
After both burglaries, the police came round and did their thing, acting as trauma counsellors, locksmith advisers and insurance vetting agents. They explained helpfully to our children that there was a housebreaking gang from Luton who seemed to have cracked the problem of deadbolts. Great.
Of course, insurance will cover the material losses: that is the routine pass-the-parcel economic game that we all play now. Buy the goods, have them taken by somebody else, claim their value "as new" on the insurance, pay a higher premium, wait for them to be taken again.
What cannot be easily replaced - for all the friendly attention of the police after the event - is the sense of security (and the sanctity of your privacy) that used to be taken for granted in one's own home. But you know all that. You have heard the stories, or experienced the reality yourself, so many times that the whole rigmarole has become part of the background music of ordinary domestic life.
But the tedium of it does not obliterate the rage and frustration. Every one knows that there is something deeply wrong with this picture, and that, unlike the natural disaster that is commanding our attention at the moment, this is a catastrophe for which there is definitely someone (or lots of people) to blame. Everyone knows it, that is, except that camp of bizarrely purblind intellectuals who insist that the crime "epidemic" is a function of tabloid hysteria.
That "treason of the intellectuals", Norman Dennis and George Erdos argue in Culture and Crimes: Policing in Four Nations (published yesterday by the think tank Civitas), has undermined Britain's capacity to face up to the real causes of crime and our political will to control it.
While it is true that our police seem to be less effective at dealing with crime than the forces of other countries with similar problems, it is also true that we have allowed ourselves to be paralysed by a social philosophy that makes effective policing almost impossible.
On the one hand, the confederacy of liberal opinion formers insists that the rise in crime is largely mythical - a consequence of more rigorous systems of recording and monitoring - and, on the other, that crime cannot be tackled until its "underlying causes" of social deprivation, poverty and inequality are dealt with.
The mutually contradictory prongs of this position - that crime is not really rising and that rising crime is related to wider issues of social justice - have done nothing to prevent it from dominating public discourse on the subject for the best part of 30 years.
In fact, both parts of the selfcancelling argument are wrong. Crime has risen in staggering proportions over the last generation, and it has done so in the teeth of the greatest explosion of widespread prosperity, educational opportunity and economic security in national history.
Never have so many people enjoyed material comforts, or had easier access to life-improving skills through schooling and higher education. Even that great old 1980s refrain about unemployment being a cause of crime has been demolished: crime has continued to rise relentlessly through periods of high and low unemployment, recession and boom.
Of course, the argument can be adapted to suit the economic good times: material prosperity, with all its covetable goods, then becomes a provocation to the "socially excluded" who would rather help themselves to your hard-earned property than help themselves to a better life through education.
What has truly undermined our ability to deal with criminality,
Dennis and Erdos make clear, is that we have dismantled the notions of individual guilt and personal responsibility, and inflated the ideas of collective guilt and social responsibility.
The criminal is not wicked - it is we, in our callous, selfish disregard for his disadvantaged conditions, who are at fault. The feckless parent and the undisciplined classroom are not responsible for children's anti-social behaviour - it is the society that fails to support and understand their attitudes, which "excludes" them, that is to blame.
Where once the entire society of responsible adults shared with the police a common understanding of what was right and wrong, who was blameworthy and who was not, who was a victim and who a wrong-doer, the consensus has now been demolished.
The modern British police were founded on the explicit principle that they were the embodiment of the people's will for an ordered and peaceful society. They were employed simply to give professional, full-time attention to the "duties incumbent on every citizen" to protect the community's welfare.
Until we regain some sense that we are all in this together - parents, teachers and political leaders, each with our private responsibility to enforce decent standards and common values - the police will not stand much of a chance.
