The British Crime Wave
We've come to assume that falling crime rates are the natural order of things. But it's well to recall that a few short years ago, Americans struggled with a crime wave that seemed out of control. Nowadays, it's the Brits who're fighting crime -- or rather, not fighting it, according to a new study by Civitas that's reported in today's Daily Telegraph.
According to the press release heralding the publication of Cultures and Crimes: Policing in Four Nations, which runs to 234 pages, the crime rate has soared in the UK even as it has fallen in three countries used as comparisons: France, Germany, and the U.S.A. The authors, Norman Dennis and George Erdos, present these startling figures:
* In 1964 in England and Wales there were 72,000 domestic burglaries; in 2003/04 there were 402,000.
* In 1964 there were 3,000 robberies; in 2003/04 there were 101,000.
There are now five domestic burglaries for every one domestic burglary in 1964, in spite of a great intensification of security measures being taken by private householders to protect their own homes. However, on the streets, where a person's security of person and property depends not on his own efforts, but upon the ability of the police and bystanders to keep good order, the deterioration of the situation has been by many magnitudes still worse. There were no fewer than thirty robberies of personal property in 2003/04 for every one in 1964.
* In 1955 fewer than 500,000 crimes were recorded by the police in England and Wales. By the end of the 1960s there were over 1.5 million. By the end of the 1970s there were 2.7 million (p.xii).
Over the longer term, the rise in crime is so spectacular as to be difficult to comprehend.
* In 1893 the annual number of recorded robberies in England and Wales fell below 400. There were then never as many as 400 recorded robberies a year in the whole of England and Wales until 1941. In stark contrast, from February to December 2001 there were never as few as 400 recorded robberies a month in the London Borough of Lambeth alone (p.xxiii).
Not surprisingly, there are fewer police officers per crime today than in the past: In 1921 there were 57,000 police officers dealing with 103,000 crimes - two crimes per officer. In 2002/2003 there were 134,000 police officers dealing with 5,899,000 crimes - 44 per officer (p.79).
Rudy Giuliani's record in New York City is a model for community police action, the authors claim. No surprise there, but remember the shrill outcry from the professional handwringers when Rudy began employing the "Broken Windows" approach to crime: round up the squeegee men and loiterers, and the number of serious crimes falls. Replace the broken windows, and you'll create the potential for turning around declining neighborhoods.
But Dennis and Erdos realize that no number of police officers, and no tactics of policing, can make up for the decline in traditional morals that formerly bound individuals to a code of conduct and upheld community standards of behavior. The press release's warning is worth quoting at length:
[T]he real problem is the loss of internalised moral principles that prevent people from committing crimes in the first place. The rise in lawlessness reflects a decline in shared values, and Dennis and Erdos attribute this to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which subverted many institutions through which moral capital was generated - in particular, the family based on marriage. Young people who grow up in troubled and dysfunctional households in which moral values are not inculcated, who attend schools where teachers are afraid or unwilling to teach the difference between right or wrong, who live in communities in which the influence of religious faith is negligible, will naturally be drawn towards the self-gratification and situational ethics that predominate in contemporary culture. This is the aspect of the crime problem that has become unmentionable, but Dennis and Erdos argue that the problem itself cannot be understood except within this context:
'Crime and disorder lie in the loss column of the profit-and-loss account of the material and cultural changes experienced by the rich and free societies of the West. Crime and disorder are not accidental and disposable aspects of post-1960s society. They are part of the price that has been paid for its advantages' (p.201).
Policing becomes difficult when shared norms of behaviour are lost, and there is even disagreement about what constitutes good and bad behaviour:
'A society on a large scale or a small scale ceases to exist when its members lose the capacity to agree on what facts are true and what conduct is good'.
Back when I was teaching, I recall making this point by picking a student (usually a male with a good sense of humor) and noting that "John, here, most likely won't rob any little old ladies on his way home from class, even if there was no one around to see the crime." That wasn't because he was afraid of being arrested, but because he knew such actions were unethical, immoral, sinful, wrong. It was a way of illustrating something we too often forget: fear of punishment alone is a necessary but insufficient deterrent to criminal activity. Absent morality, which must rest upon something beyond a hyper-personalized, ill-conceived (and usually self-serving) set of presumptions, civil society is itself endangered.
| Jan. 4, 2005 | 10:17 AM