Cutting Crime?

[KeyboardJockey]

Most probation officers will agree with you.
Mind you, they'll also explain in great detail that the reason they're useless is because the Major govt started (and the Blair govt continued) a changed in the probation service that altered the remit of POs from independent advisors/supervisors of those on probation to quasi-official policemen.

I'm afraid that I agree partially with making probation officers quasi official policemen. I'd like to see some trained probation staff doing the advising and supervising and other staff doing the enforcement bit.

 

[tarannau]

A lot of the objections to taxation (especially when you look at the content of other boards is about value for money. If people feel safer, if people see a benefit in not being scared to leave their homes at night then it will remove a lot of the sensible objections to extra taxation.

The figures that I've seen I'll see if I can dig them out or maybe another poster could help me is that drug related property crime is a problem and a major factor in things such as burglaries. Remove that with a sensible drugs policy and you will free up resources.


I've seen good and I've seen evil in my life please respect my experiences.

Look they won't feel safer because, as with the paedophile issues, folks are more caught up with the sensational headlines than the reality. You've done it yourself, already closing your ears and denying that any Govt statistics could be trustworthy (and of course not bothering to look for any alternate sources)

And why the hell should I respect your experiences? You;ve clearly shown a tendency to ignore the views of others, promoting your views as correct and accurate without the slightest bit of real evidence to back your theories up. You're turning into a presumptuous, alarmist egomaniac with a nice line in pious, religious terms.

 

[KeyboardJockey]

Look they won't feel safer because, as with the paedophile issues, folks are more caught up with the sensational headlines than the reality. You've done it yourself, already closing your ears and denying that any Govt statistics could be trustworthy (and of course not bothering to look for any alternate sources)

As someone who has worked in Gvt and seen how stats can be manipulated at a very local level I'm a little bit wary of govt stats.

And why the hell should I respect your experiences?

Because I respected yours even if I don't agree with you.

You;ve clearly shown a tendency to ignore the views of others, promoting your views as correct and accurate without the slightest bit of real evidence to back your theories up. You're turning into a presumptuous, alarmist egomaniac with a nice line in pious, religious terms.

Better to be a bit alarmist and realistic than just saying 'everythings OK' when it plainly isn't.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Of course they would. I live in the same area as Poster 342002, as does VP. Do you think he'll ever believe that the area has got better or that crime is decreasing. Not bleeding likely...

And yet I can remember what places like Rush Common, the Streatham end of Tooting Common, "the frontline" etc were like 20-25 years ago, and they're much less dangerous places to be now.

And leave out this guesswork that because we're paying more for jails and rehabilition then the crime rate and policing costs will fall. It's bad enough having to listen to your pathetically oversimplified 'good' and 'evil' crap, but assertions like that are plain daft.

Not just daft, but not borne out by reality. Economies of scale rely on a unified system, and you can't achieve them if the majority of "new-build" prisons are constructed by an assortment of different consortia, so any saving achieved through "less policing" (like the OB would shoot themselves in the foot by saying that demand for their services had decreased!) etc would be eaten up by additional costs for incarceration.

As an aside, the Home Office deliberately hid the comparative costs of state prisons and private prisons of the same category for nearly a decade before admitting how much more the (staffed with labour that were paid around 65% of what a state Prison Officer received) latter cost.

 

[KeyboardJockey]

And yet I can remember what places like Rush Common, the Streatham end of Tooting Common, "the frontline" etc were like 20-25 years ago, and they're much less dangerous places to be now.

Thats true.

Not just daft, but not borne out by reality. Economies of scale rely on a unified system, and you can't achieve them if the majority of "new-build" prisons are constructed by an assortment of different consortia,

That is why any new system and extra prisons must be built and run by the same provider preferably the public sector.

so any saving achieved through "less policing" (like the OB would shoot themselves in the foot by saying that demand for their services had decreased!) etc would be eaten up by additional costs for incarceration.

This is why there needs to be better auditing of what the police get, what they spend and what the outcomes are so that we the public and the govt have an accurate of what is happening.

As an aside, the Home Office deliberately hid the comparative costs of state prisons and private prisons of the same category for nearly a decade before admitting how much more the (staffed with labour that were paid around 65% of what a state Prison Officer received) latter cost.

Yup as usual the private sector looks good in the very short term but when you add it all up it costs more than keeping the activity in house.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I've seen good and I've seen evil in my life please respect my experiences.

I've done evil in my life. Things that run the gamut from "mostly harmless" to "violently harmful". I've also tried to do good. I'm not the sum of my experiences, nobody is. To reduce any person to a value isn't just reductive and ignorant, it's actually a socially harmful act. It buys in to a simplistic set of assumptions that propagate state violence and state authority. It allows room for fear to breed, and for authority through repressive social control to become the norm.

Benjamin Franklin's much-quoted apothegm "The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either" springs to mind, as does Goethe's "Distrust all those in whom the urge to punish is strong".

 

[KeyboardJockey]

I've done evil in my life. Things that run the gamut from "mostly harmless" to "violently harmful". I've also tried to do good. I'm not the sum of my experiences, nobody is. To reduce any person to a value isn't just reductive and ignorant, it's actually a socially harmful act. It buys in to a simplistic set of assumptions that propagate state violence and state authority. It allows room for fear to breed, and for authority through repressive social control to become the norm.

Hmmmmm! Interesting. Like you I'm neither totally good nor totally evil. I do believe that there are good and bad currents that we plug into and a lot of the reason why we choose what we is a mixture of choice and complusion although IMO the balance is on choice. I believe that we are born neutral in the main although there are very very few people who have 'bad blood' and who would be anti social or psychotic even if they had been adopted at birth but that is IMO very few people. Because we are born neutral we make choices to choose good or choose bad. There are very very few people who are born with evil intent and an evil drive.

Benjamin Franklin's much-quoted apothegm "The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either" springs to mind, as does Goethe's "Distrust all those in whom the urge to punish is strong".

I know of the BF quote didn't know that the 2nd quote was Goethe though. I think punishment is a part of the process but it needs to be part of a whole. However, the desire for punishment is very strong in british society - just look at the tabloids on the greek child killer case today.

 

[tarannau]

And yet I can remember what places like Rush Common, the Streatham end of Tooting Common, "the frontline" etc were like 20-25 years ago, and they're much less dangerous places to be now.

I know, listening to Poster 342002 you'd think that Brixton's turned from Chelsea into a lawless hellhole in the space of a few years. Instead of an area which started out with plenty of crumbling tenements and no go areas, yet is now much gentrified.

Which just goes to show how downright peculiar and removed from reality the perceptions of folks like Poster 342002 and KJ can be....

 

[poster342002]

Which just goes to show how downright peculiar and removed from reality the perceptions of folks like Poster 342002 and KJ can be....

So what about the junkies invading that block of flats currently being discuused in the "brixton chitter-chatter"? And all the pain-in-the-arse brazen drug dealers around the main road near the station who had the bus shelters under near-permanent occupation until said shelters were removed? And all the other assorted antisocial lunacy?

 

[ViolentPanda]

So what about the junkies invading that block of flats currently being discuused in the "brixton chitter-chatter"?

I'm sure that some of the older posters could regale you with stories about the "invasion" by Italian smackheads in the 80s and 90s that led to similar "takeovers". It isn't new, and it gets dealt with, arguably faster now than it did 15-20 years ago, thank fuck.
In other words, things aren't actually getting worse, it's all the same as it ever was.

And all the pain-in-the-arse brazen drug dealers around the main road near the station who had the bus shelters under near-permanent occupation until said shelters were removed? And all the other assorted antisocial lunacy?

Which all went on back in the "golden age" too, although it was mostly shop and pub forecourts rather than bus stops.

See, I'm sure that people wouldn't disagree quite so violently with you if you didn't insist quite so petulantly that everything is so much worse than it used to be. In actual terms it's the same old same old. Even of you take the murders into account, the overall volume hasn't jumped significantly, there's rather been a switch in age groups, which is pretty horrible, but (unfortunately) totally foreseeable given the way our urban youth culture takes it's cues from the Yanks.
You should concentrate on the central issues, because until you deal with the causes then all your ranting about feral youth is just so much emotive arse-gas. Take away the social causes, and you remove any EXCUSE for such behaviour. Then and only then can you use harsh sanctions on the true "ferals", otherwise you're just going to criminalise every kid who even looks at an adult or another kid wrong. You KNOW how shittily kids have been treated by society in the UK. Why are you buying into the right-wing fear-mongering?

 

[nino_savatte]

Look they won't feel safer because, as with the paedophile issues, folks are more caught up with the sensational headlines than the reality. You've done it yourself, already closing your ears and denying that any Govt statistics could be trustworthy (and of course not bothering to look for any alternate sources)

And why the hell should I respect your experiences? You;ve clearly shown a tendency to ignore the views of others, promoting your views as correct and accurate without the slightest bit of real evidence to back your theories up. You're turning into a presumptuous, alarmist egomaniac with a nice line in pious, religious terms.

What were you saying to me about "arguments"? It seems you're pretty keen to get into them too.

Please remember this auld maxim "People in glass houses, shouldn't throw stones".