[ligaliaCods]

Look. All I know is that I and many other people feel about 10 times safer in Manhattan than in Central London. The lack of the same type of drinking culture that the Brits have is probably more than 50% of the cause of this. The other 50% is something I dont know about.

From The Guardian
Crime doesn't pay

Neal Lawson

April 27, 2007 5:30 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/...oesnt_pay.html
The rise in street crime will come as no surprise to parents of children, especially boys, living in urban areas. I've lost count of the time my youngest son, who is 16, has had his phone stolen under the threat of violence. It now seems to be a routine aspect of young adults lives. Why?
I think there are two factors. The first is the obvious - you have got something that I haven't and I'm big enough and strong enough to take it from you. When I was young we carried nothing of value and neither did anyone else. So street crime was rare. Now kids as young as six and seven might have a mobile and an MP3 player that are worth £500. So there is value in it. But it is more than that. The type of phone or iPod you have is of huge symbolic importance. "What does your phone say about you" the advert goes. The answer is a lot. We judge each other and crucially ourselves by the quality of the consumer goods we carry and wear. And it matters much more to poorer children. Also, for those who are short on love, care and hope, the type of trainers or mobile they have in relation to those around them takes on huge significance.
My kids live in a middle class area of south London. It's leafy and pleasant. But all around are estates and towns that are much less well to do. So their area becomes a honey trap for poorer children who want the best phone or music player too - because that is what society tells them matters.
But with phone thefts there is more going on. Now, as soon you report the incident the phone is immobilised and is useless. The thieves know this. So why do it? For no better reason, it seems, than they can. For a moment they can take control of lives in which they mostly feel utterly helpless.
We are breading a generation with no fear. They don't value their own lives, so how can they value anyone else's? Society clearly doesn't value them. It brings them up in poverty on rotting estates. Schools are run for league tables and they can't keep up. Social mobility is declining. Unlike their parents they are more likely to stay poor. They can see the levels of inequality all around them. Their inferiority in our consumer society is continuously pushed in their face. They can't keep pace, let alone ever win, by playing by the rules because the rules are not made for or, by them. So they cheat. And let's face it, they get plenty of encouragement to do that from politicians, business people, sports stars and now television shows.
The response to this line of argument is often: "well not all poor kids steal or mug so why excuse those who do?" It's not to excuse, it is to understand the reasons why things seem to be getting out of hand. It can't just be that by some accident moral codes are slipping. They slip for a reason. And one of the biggest drivers is the possessive individualism that was spawned in the Thatcher years and has not been curtailed after 10 years of New Labour.
Every time my son comes home following the frustration and humiliation of having his phone taken or having been chased we talk about where he goes and what he does. But I try to talk to him about the lives of others and what it might be like to feel so insecure, to have such little hope or perhaps parents that don't talk much or show their love.
I can't buy his safety just as I can't keep him in doors forever more. We can only solve the crime wave on our streets by doing it together as a society. That means getting a better balance between the importance of consumption and wider notion of wellbeing and crucially a better balance between the rich and the poor.

One reader from Britain then comments:

Well I could say we haven�t seen anything yet. The country is still relatively prosperous and we can just about afford our current welfare system , health and education services. Of course some of this prosperity comes from the use of cheap unregulated EU labour and illegals. Prosperity for some but a disaster for the already poorly paid unskilled and semiskilled.
We have a seaming inability to deal with illegal immigration which is running at an unprecedented rate and is increasing the breakdown of social cohesion. Not unique to us, it appears that Sweden is starting to feel the pinch and has record levels of crime, particularly in Malmo ( heaviest concentration of immigrants ). Managed migration and integration works but social cohesion breaks down when it is not controlled. Who is suffering the most in the USA? Poor whites and blacks.
What happens when the economic shit hits the fan? It already has. Recent interest rate rises have certainly affected my families standard of living, as have all the other hikes in prices. Not to mention the cap on wage settlements.
I will soon have to seriously consider sending the kids out foraging for extra money to pay the bills. A bit of mugging and burglary of people perceived to be more wealthy. Given my scientific skills I could produce some methamphetamine or even more powerful psychedelics. There will of course be a demand as people increasingly try to avoid the brutal reality of living in 21st Britain.
Of course I and my family would never consider criminality as a solution and we do not consider poverty as a sufficient excuse for indulging in criminality. Smug, no way. I and my wife have struggled all of our lives to keep a roof over our heads and keep the children fed and clothed. We will continue to do so. The world doesn�t owe anyone a living, and given the rise of other economies we all have to knuckle under and do our best. If we don�t we are all lost.

Also from the GuardianA criminal misunderstanding

Natalie Bennett

July 24, 2006 11:34 AM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/...rstanding.html
The latest crime figures are out, and newspapers are, as usual, competing among themselves to find the most negative possible spin to put on them.
"The British Crime Survey, which interviews 45,000 individuals, showed that the total number of crimes rose by 1 per cent to 10.9 million compared with a peak of 19.4 million in 1995," reports The Times.
"A big rise in street robberies across England and Wales rocked the Home Office...," says the Telegraph.
Overall crime recorded by police fell by 1 per cent, while that recorded by the Crime Survey rose by one per cent. Now I was a member of a university class that jointly only passed statistics when they dropped the required mark to about 10 per cent, but I'd confidently guess that neither of those figures is statistically significant, given the range of variables in their calculation.
But even were the swings bigger, would they mean anything at all? Not much.
Those papers with a little sense of perspective already acknowledge, if in nine point body-type rather than a 60-point headline, that the "recorded" figure reflects police activity and interests, rather than any actual conditions. Were police to suddenly decide to focus on jaywalking in central London (which would be a great idea from my point of view as a cyclist - particularly the highly dangerous offence of "mobile phone walking") , the rate of the offence in the figures would suddenly leap, but be no reflection of changed conditions on the ground.
So, it is generally thought, comparisons of what crimes people report privately to questioners are more accurate. And perhaps they are, over a short period. But are comparisons over time by this measure any more accurate?
Public perception of "what is crime" changes over the years and decades, much more, generally, than legal definitions change. So I'd suggest that historical comparisons have little or no veracity.
Some crimes you might say don't change - say the biggie, murder. Well no, at the centre it might be simple - but conceptions of murder and manslaughter change over the years. And what about the specialised case of infanticide - regarded relatively sympathetically in some periods and less so in others? And given the state of modern forensic science, are not cases that previously might have been dismissed as accidents more likely to be identified as murders?
But murder of course is an extremely rare crime. Think of something more common, that really will affect the overall figures. Let's imagine a scenario. Teenage boy regularly beats up and terrorises a fellow school pupil and steals the contents of his pockets. Parents of victim eventually find out; father of victim confronts father of bully. Blows are exchanged. Blood is shed. Bully, who learnt that "might is right" from his father's leather belt, is again beaten by father for causing all the trouble.
Until very recently, the chances of the police being involved at any point in that string of events would be miniscule. Today, it could very easily end up being classified as half a dozen "assaults occasioning actual bodily harm" and "robberies", with a few child abuse charges thrown in for good measure. Certainly, the theft of the victim pupil's mobile phone and iPod will end up in the statistics, so that parents can claim on their insurance.
And that's great. I'm not in any way suggesting that shouldn't be the case. For all the odd obviously ridiculous prosecution of children that got out of hand and should have been dealt with by school discipline, the fact that society is expressing through the law and the courts the fact that physical clashes of any sort are unacceptable is a good thing.
These changes all reflect the fact that we are now more civilised, less violent to each other, than any time in the past. Just think back. Domestic violence wasn't seen as a crime; beating the hell out of your children was just "discipline". Two blokes "having a go" in the pub car park after closing time was highly unlikely to attract attention, unless the whole crowd watching piled in too. Someone of wealth and status would probably drink drive, kill someone, then bulldoze through the police, pay off the necessary relatives and get away with it. These were just "what happened", "a bit of biff", not a "crime".
It mightn't be a fashionable thing to say, and certainly a hard line to get on the front page of a newspaper, but in fact you are almost certainly less likely to be subject to violence now in the UK than in any time in history. And if you are unlucky enough to be a victim, you are far more likely to end up in the statistics than at any time in the past. (And you don't need to just take my word for this, see what a magistrate has to say.)
Yet probably more people fear crime, change their lives because of fear of violent crime, than at any time in certainly the recent past, to their harm, and the harm of general society. (The way to really greatly cut your risk is not to go to the pub late at night if you're a drunk young bloke, and if you are a heterosexual woman to be celibate - two sets of recommendations unlikely to have a high take-up rate.) Instead, people are staying in, locking themselves behind giant bars, and getting in their cars rather than catching public transport - measures whose costs usually far outweigh the risks they are trying to avoid.
Partly the fear - and the utter irrational level of terror about the stranger in the later-night street - is because we're now more risk-averse, and partly because we're much more media-saturated. So why not go out and enjoy that late evening summer stroll in comfort and confidence? That's provided, of course, you're celibate and sober.

And as for the guns/no guns debate:

From the Guardian

Unarmed and dangerous?

Ben Whitford

February 23, 2007 7:30 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/...dangerous.html
The recent spate of shootings in Manchester and London may have shocked Brits, but they came as no surprise to many on this side of the Atlantic. The NRA (rallying cry: “Outlaw guns and you arm the outlaws”) and its allies have long known that British society, with its draconian gun control laws and even - heaven forfend! - a handgun ban, was a ticking bomb.
“The English approach has not reduced violent crime,” notes Joyce Lee Malcolm, an academic at MIT and Bentley College. “Instead it has left law-abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals who are confident that their victims have neither the means nor the legal right to resist them."
The logic is simple: putting guns in the hands of honest citizens deters criminals. With current rules making it impossible for even the Olympic shooting team to get their hands on a shooter, it was only a matter of time before the criminal backlash began. Consider this editorial by John Lott, a researcher whose proclivity for female impersonation has not prevented him from becoming one of America’s more influential pro-gun voices:
"Crime was not supposed to rise after handguns were banned in 1997. Yet, since 1996 the serious violent crime rate has soared by 69%: robbery is up by 45% and murders up by 54%. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50% from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to their 1993 levels."
QED? Well, not quite. For starters, in 1998 - just after the UK banned handguns - the police changed the way they counted crimes. Crimes like common assault and harassment were reclassified as violent crimes; the underlying crime rates stayed the same, but the recorded crime rate almost doubled overnight. Further changes came in 2002, when police introduced a national standard for recording crime; the Home Office estimates the move inflated violent crime figures by at least another 20%.
According to the British Crime Survey, which combines police records with a large-scale survey of UK residents and is acknowledged as the gold standard of British crime statistics, the people of Britain are at less risk of being the victim of a crime today than at any point since the survey began in 1981. Violent crime rates have fallen by 43% since 1995; burglary and car thefts have both fallen by more than half. It’s true that murder rates have been running high in recent years - partly due to the retrospective inclusion of Harold Shipman’s victims - but last year they fell back to about the same level as in 1997, even including the 52 victims of the July bombings.
Even the violent crimes we suffer aren’t usually all that violent. You won’t hear it from the gun lobby, but well over a third of the "violent crimes" recorded in Britain last year were crimes like common assault or harassment that involved no physical injury to the victim. A further 43% of cases involved "less serious woundings" like bruises, grazes or black eyes. These may have been traumatic experiences for their victims, but they were scuffles, not shootings. In the vast majority of these cases, the presence of a gun would only - could only - have made matters worse.
The gun lobby’s fervent belief in the deterrent power of firearms is based on a leaky flotilla of half-truths and half-baked research. The NRA used to fete Kennesaw, Georgia, where gun ownership was made mandatory; unfortunately, subsequent analyses showed that the town's crime rates didn't change after the law was passed. Others trumpet criminologist Gary Kleck, whose work suggests that firearms are used defensively 2.5 million times a year in the United States, preventing some 400,000 murders. Since this would mean gun-toting vigilantes preventing about 15 deaths for every murder that actually takes place, it’s clear his estimate is far too high. (More reliable studies, based on victim surveys and police data, put rates of defensive gun uses at less than a twentieth of Kleck's figure.)
Still, if the cowboys have trouble with calculators there’s plenty of reliable evidence for one thing: the availability of guns leads to murder and mayhem. Ninety people a day were killed with guns in America during the 1990s; three hundred a day more were wounded. People with guns in their home are three times more likely to commit suicide; people living in states with weak gun control laws are ten times more likely to die in an accidental shooting. American children are ten times as likely to die in a gun accident as children in other developed countries. The studies and statistics are too numerous to list here (check out David Hemenway’s excellent Private Guns, Public Health for many, many more) but the facts are clear: guns may not kill people, but people with ready access to guns are far more likely to kill.
The US gun lobby are past masters at cherrypicking nuggets of data to lend a veneer of credibility to their claims; and it’s true that there are areas in which Britain still has much work to do. We have higher rates of crime than many other rich countries; worse, the brunt is born by the most impoverished few percent of the population. But we aren’t a nation under siege; the recent shootings notwithstanding, our problem with violent crime can more often be traced to a surfeit of Stella than to a shortage of Saturday night specials. We shouldn’t let the US gun lobby convince us otherwise - and nor should we hold still while they twist the facts, presenting us as a dreadful warning in order to advance their own agenda.