ninme

Telegraph - Middle-class guilt means we are doomed to more crime. By Janet Daley

I have lost count of the number of Home Office ministers and opposition spokesmen who have made their pilgrimages to William Bratton, New York’s famous former police chief, to ask, like questing travellers in an Arabian legend, “What is the secret?” - and been duly and patiently told.

Virtually everyone who influences public policy in these matters can recite passages from James Q Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of law enforcement. …

So here is the real mystery. Why hasn’t it happened here? Why do British police still act as if the “little” crimes and the epidemic of commonplace destructiveness in the streets are beneath their notice? Why do they not accept that imposing order, as Mr Bratton said again last week, is an essential step to preventing crime? And why do the courts not actively support that concept of policing?

Because there is a lack of political will. Why is this so? And, more to the point, why is the will lacking here when it is not in the United States? Because public officials in America do not suffer from historical class guilt: the guilt that is embodied in that Blairite aphorism about the “causes of crime”. …

What follows from this is a disastrous fatalism: we must resign ourselves to the fact that we will never be able to reduce crime until we have solved the social problems of deprivation and poverty. But one thing they have learnt definitively in America, as Mr Bratton says repeatedly, is that good policing affects behaviour.

In other words, even people who are potential criminals can be influenced to make other choices if the community, through its approach to policing, asserts its will. Politicians talk endlessly about “respect” and the role it must play in promoting civil order.

And then, in the comments:

I think you’ve left out the other half of the story….one out of every 136 persons in the United States is today either in prison or in jail. Do you find that in the ‘housing statistics’–that so many persons in the US live in cages? You’re right; it’s easy to prevent civil disorder–all you have to do is to lock up all the ‘wrong kind of people’ to make the streets safe for ‘the right kind of people’. Some miracle. As a life-long New Yorker, I preferred the old seedy Times Square to our new Disney village. Where’s your common sense, man?
Posted by Paul Eckstein on June 26, 2006 3:41 AM

Yeah, man!

How perfect. The people in jail are there because the middle class are snobs, not because they’re freaking criminals. How wonderfully illustrative of her point.