Were the rioters 'career criminals'?

Excellent post over at fullfact.org. I particularly like the comparison of mean and median.....

Compare and contrast

Interesting to compare the police and government responses the the Grauniad's 'reading the riots' study/conference. Not for the first time, I'm struck by the reasonable tone struck by the MET who, apparently, recognise they must do things differently in the future, and acknowledge that there is a significant problem around stop and search. Whether this translate into real change remains to be seen, of course.

Theresa May, however, seemingly can't climb out of her ideological hole, insisting that any attempt to uncover reasons for the riots amounts to 'excuses'. This know-nothing attitude totally bemuses me. Should we never seek to try and understand things that we can condemn (or, alternatively, only seek to understand things of which we approve)? Gangs get another airing, too, despite all the evidence to suggest that this really wasn't about gangs at all. At least she, too, seems to reluctantly agree we might have a problem with stop and search, and has launched a review.

Ed Milliband, by contrast, said much to agree with (including criticising the government's "simplistic" response to the riots). Let's hope his approach signifies a genuine shift in Labour thinking and a move away from crime policies that have all too often amounted to attempts at outflanking the Tories from the right.

Public trust and police legitimacy across Europe

Article on Comment is Free here. This is (loosely) based on the first findings from the 5th European Social Survey (ESS), which contained questions on trust in the police, legitimacy, compliance and consent.

There was also a linked news story here - which plays rather fast and loose with the issue of country rankings. I would say the UK police come at the top of mid-table across the 20 countries included in the first release of the ESS, rather than being in any way seen as 'untrustworthy'. Although I suppose most of the countries we would want to be compared with - Germany, the Scandinavians - do rank higher. Public trust in the police is certainly higher in the UK than in Bulgaria, Hungry and Russia, but I guess that's not a particularly strong recommendation.

Ethnic variation in sentencing

Depressing article in the Guardian yesterday. Note the academic's caution in assigning a causal link with prejudice within the courts system, though. For example, Coretta Phillips from the LSE:

"[But] on the basis of the data published yesterday, it would be hard to conclude anything about prejudice and discrimination from the magistracy or judiciary or that there is greater criminality among minority groups."


I think this shows admirable restraint! She is of course correct that the statistics on their own cannot prove discrimination or prejudice. They are only the raw numbers, and don't therefore take into account things like offending histories, potential mitigating factors and so on. The figures certainly do not prove discrimination. But the data from certain areas, in particular, certainly indicate it. For some prejudice not to be present, at least in some of the local areas mentioned, we would have to believe that the black offenders had very different records and applicable mitigating factors to the white offenders. I wonder how plausible this idea really is......?

What is it about US cops and pepper spray?

Rhetorical question, obviously.

As I think the article notes, this looks like someone spraying bugs. Watch it to the end though - fascinating and rather wonderful to see the crowd turn on the police, in a non-violent way, and apparently shame them into retreat. The looks on the faces of some of the officers speak volumes.

More on the August riots

Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott have a new e-book on the riots, out today I think. If this summary is anything to go by it looks like an essential read for anyone wanting to understand (as opposed to simply condemn) what transpired.

After a long hiatus .....

..... A new post.

Not much more than a link, though, but at least it's a link to something I've written. That's probably going to be the new plan around here - work orientated posts, less waffle, less often, and links to stuff I think is interesting. We'll see how it goes.

So this is a piece on the London riots for La Vie Des Idees. I think I may have posted some vaguely similar thoughts around the time of the riots. See what you think!

NYPD attack wall street demonstration

The pictures are pretty shocking (although probably hardly surprising if you live in parts of many US cities). But on a lighter note you have to love the ultra-serious delivery and downright anger of the anchorman.

Police forces to cease recording ethnicity during stop and accounts

Really not good news.

The ethnic disproportionality in the application of police stop powers is one of the most invidious aspects of current police practice in the UK - and probably in many other countries as well. There is nothing better suited to driving a wedge between the police and the people they serve (i.e. us) than the sense that we are being unfairly stopped by officers in order that (a) we should account to them for our movements, or (b) that we should be body searched (with no reason necessary under several pieces of legislation). Disproportionality in this type of police behaviour seems to me to be the antithesis of procedural justice (and distributive justice and probably any other type of justice as well).

The argument made by Craig Mackey, who's ACPO lead on stop and search - that police have no real powers to stop and account (so presumably the change is therefore of little consequence) is I think slightly disingenuous. I wonder how many ordinary people distinguish between a stop for an account and a stop for a search, or how often a stop intended to lead to a search does not, and therefore becomes in essence a stop and account.

We should not forget that stopping people in public places merely on the suspicion that they may have committed a crime is one of the most significant powers the police have. On one hand, in the final analysis police officers should be able to approach members of the public to ask them questions and, yes, 'account' for what they are doing. Policing as it is currently construed in the UK would be impossible without this type of contact between police and citizen (for one thing policing would have to become almost entirely reactive). But on the other hand they do this not as ordinary citizens but as wielders of the power of legitimate violence. The coercion in this type of police behaviour lies not in the legal status of the act but in the power of the people doing it. Until they have proved that they can use this power fairly monitoring all stop activity is vital.

Tony Blair's magical reasoning

Tony Blair was interviewed at length on Radio 4 today (listen here - it was in the post 8am section). Among the many pearls of wisdom was his explanation as to why the motivations of Jihadists have nothing whatsoever to do with 'western' actions in the middle east and elsewhere. Rather:

"They believe in what they believe in because they believe that their religion compels then to believe in it"

That's right, they believe in something because they, y'know, believe in it.

Mind you, similar 'reasoning' is used in political discourse all the time. David Cameron recently appeared to blame the crimes committed during the August riots on 'criminality'; although to be fair, unlike Blair he went on to suggest some causes that at least nodded to a move beyond tautology (whether you agree with them or not). Lack of ability to tell right from wrong, lack of self control and so on.

Of course in both cases the magical reasoning is entirely self-serving. Blair is ideologically committed to the idea that Islamist terrorism is sui generis and definitively unrelated to actions taken by western governments; Cameron is a right wing Tory for whom the idea that crime has social as well as personal causes is extremely challenging. It's just a shame that politicians making these types of comments don't get pulled up more often by those interviewing them. If they were, we might at least start to get at their motivations for such laughable arguments.

Access to academic journals

I couldn't agree with George Monbiot more on this.

A particular concern of mine is that virtually all the research I have published has, in effect, been funded twice by the taxpayer. First in terms of paying my PhD grant and then salary while working at university; second in terms of paying for the surveys (such as the British Crime Survey) whose data I and various co-authors have used. It seems to me that in these circumstances everything should be freely available to the people - i.e. all of us - who have funded the research. And it certainly isn't at the moment, because it's sitting behind pay walls charging at least £30 a throw.

Of course there are various ways to get research out there (e.g. www.academia.edu, www.ssrn.com), but the pressure to get papers in the peer-reviewed journals that Monbiot criticises is overwhelming. It's almost the only way to build an academic career. So, obviously, you always make sure the best stuff is that which the smallest number of people can read it!

There are some ways round this problem. Working papers can be posted on the sites above, or on personal websites. Research reports can be - and are - written for the bodies who funded the surveys used. But in a classic catch-22 these will mostly be unread, indeed uncommisioned unless the author has a reputation built by publishing in peer-reviewed journals.....

And this is before we start to consider that the entire system is built on the free (to the journals) labour of academics as authors and as reviewers. I would hope that in the future we can move toward the system proposed by Monbiot. But I won't hold my breath, for reasons for inertia, if nothing else.

I also think, to be fair to the publishers, they are only really responding to a demand from within academia and from the funding bodies. The current system is almost wholly built on peer-reviewd publication, and the pressure to get published is so strong that almost everyone is working on several to many papers at any one time. These all have to go somewhere, hence the multiplication of journal titles in recent years. Which, of course, don't come for free: at the utter barest minimum, someone has to ensure that the review process functions properly and host a website.

I'm not sure the political will exists to change this situation. Indeed the current UK government presumably prefers that private companies make significant profits from the system, and would be ideologically opposed to switching to something entirely publicly funded.

Three deaths in a week following police use of 'non-leathal' weapons

This is very worrying. Of course, the use of non-lethal weapons precludes the idea that the officers involved intended the deaths. I don't think it's granting too much benefit of the doubt, even at this early stage, to assume that they believed use of the weapons was an effective way to control the situation that would not kill or seriously harm the people on the receiving end. The problem, if there is one, must therefore lie in training, the protocols involved and, possibly, the research behind the weapons themselves.

Take the pepper spray cases, for example. This report suggests pepper spray is relatively innocuous, but this, from the ACLU, paints a more complicated picture. A quick read through the ACLU report suggests what you'd probably suspect from first principles. Deaths after the use of pepper spray were concentrated among people with mental disorders, drug users, and so on - all things themselves risk factors in relation to injury during encounters with police officers (or indeed anyone else).

This suggests to me - and I'd like to see more research on this issue - that the use of non-lethal weapons may be particularly prevalent in cases where the person involved is more likely to be injured for other reasons. This obviously confounds the spray as the cause of death, but if true it would mean that deaths after the use of sprays are likely to continue even if the spray itself is not at fault.

In the current climate of increased attention - and arguably suspicion - directed at the police one wonders whether the use of any technique that is associated with deaths in custody might be curtailed or at least reconsidered. Disclaimer: the usual provisos about statistical blips apply. Three deaths don't necessarily mean anything in terms of trends or underlying factors. My point is simply that the police, particularly at this point in time, should avoid using aggressive and arguably dangerous techniques that risk undermining public trust in their ability to manage situations without rapid escalation to violence.

Now with added tweets!

Following some advice here (Paul Gilroy on the riots, worth reading) I've finally signed up to twitter. And in a rush of techno-savvy I've added a feed to the blog. I may get fed up with it - especially as you seem to get messages from people tweeting at what you're interested in, in which case some of the comments might get a bit tedious - but let's see how it goes......

A little something to cheer us up

Lot's of really bad news recently, and bad in lots of ways.

So it's good to see something that makes you smile for a second.

Tottenham riots

Of course it's not only Tottenham, now. Amid the usual welter of worry, concern, condemnation I think three points are worth reiterting.

First, the proximate cause of this was the shooting of Mark Duggan and the (alleged) way the police refused to talk to those protesting on Saturday afternoon. Whatever the intentions of those involved in the rioting on Saturday and Sunday, I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that another Black Londoner has been killed by police, and his family deserve the fullest possible account of what happened as soon as possible.

Second, while you can understand the anger - in this part of London, of all places - nothing justifies people smashing up their own streets and torching their own neighbour's houses (I'd be very surprised if, as David Lammy claimed on TV yesterday, many if not most of the rioters on Saturday came from well outside Tottenham). At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, this is not going to help. As pointed out here it takes a very peculiar mindset indeed to think that burning down the post office on Tottenham High Road is the first step toward righting some of the historic wrongs suffered by this and many other parts of Britain. And there can be little doubt that many of the people involved were in it for the loot, plain and simple.

But, third, even if most of the rioters were just in it for the loot, and even if Mark Duggan was guilty as hell (which would still not justify his death unless he really was shooting back), this still does not absolve the police, the criminal justice system and society more widely of all responsibility for what's going on here. People are not born rioters or looters, they are pushed into these roles by a whole range of external forces as well as internal motivations. Each individual makes a decision to break a window - but how they end up in that street, on that night, in those circumstances and with that state of mind involves economic and social factors far bigger than themselves.

Take two quick examples. On the one hand, the police have genuinely tried to improve their relationships with communities in places such as Tottenham. Things are certainly better, by an large, than they were in the 1970s and 1980s. But some police practices and policies continue to undermine such efforts. I'm thinking in particular of the disproportionaliy in stop and search activity experienced by young ethnic minority and working class men and their communities, and all the negative consequences this disproportionality has for trust and legitimacy. Stop and search is frequently experienced as unfair by those on the receiving end, and this undermines their trust in the police, their willingness to cooperate with officers, and their sense that police can and should work for and with them, rather than against them. This wouldn't matter so much if stop and search was more evenly spread across the population. But it's not, so what happens is a concentration of these experiences in very specific social groups. People increasingly see the police as an occupying power rather than a community resource, they cease to trust what police and other agencies tell them, and they increasingly turn toward ways of solving problems - including those that implicate the police - that put them on a collision course with the law. Naturally, stop and search is just one example: there are others, and all parts of the CJS are implicated.

On the other hand, police and the CJS should not take all or even most of the heat here. There are systemic problems in places like Tottenham that go far beyond the activities of police officers. Long term unemployment and attendent poverty undermines people's sense that they have a stake in society. Add to this a society that celebrates wealth and consumption above all else and you have, I think, a pretty explosive mixture. In particular, in areas that do not grant much legitimacy to the law and where people don't think that the 'system' represents and works for them, is it really surprising that some individuals start to think that the only way they have of obtaining what they want is taking it by force. This holds in the political arena as well - when people feel their legitimate complaints are ignored, they will move increasingly toward more expressive and ultimately violent ways of getting their point across.

These riots demonstrate (again) that we need to move beyond simple condemnation of the people involved from one side, and of the police from the other, to think a bit more deeply about how that boy on that street came to be there and throw a rock or steal a pair of trainers.

HMIC report on police preparedness for cuts

Link. Complete with 'rapid evidence review' on police numbers and crime rates by yours truly.....

Update: I've just notices the above link is dead: there's a PDF version of the note here, however.

Initial media reactions to the Norway terrorist attack

Reading the initial media responses to the awful events in Norway last week I struck by the way that (a) it was initially assumed (based on practically zero evidence) to be Al Qaeda; and (b) even after it was found to be the work of a (probably lone) right-wing Christian zealot mentions of 'a need for debate around multiculturalism and immigration' and 'jihad' kept finding their way into the reports.

I was going to write a bit more on this, but as usual others have covered it already, and better than I could.

More on police numbers and crime

More as promised on police numbers and crime. This is all based on a pretty rough and ready literature review of research since 1996, although I think I got most of the relevant papers - 13 in all. These were a mixture of observational studies using time series data, quasi-experiments and natural experiments. Below, I've copied and mildly edited the discussion section of a document I've written around this literature review. I'll add a link to the final report once it's ready.

To summarise, I'd argue that on the basis of current research (a) there is a relatively robust negative association between numbers of police officers and property crimes, broadly defined; (b) evidence of an association between police numbers and violent crime is weaker and sometimes contradictory; and (c) the 'elasticity' of property crime in relation to police numbers might be relatively conservatively estimated at approximately -0.3; that is, a 10 per cent increase in officers will lead to a reduction in crime of around 3 per cent (and vice versa).

All that said, taken individually none of the studies I looked at came close to ‘proving’ that higher numbers of police leads to less crime. Despite improvements compared with earlier work almost all suffer from potentially significant methodological and conceptual flaws. For example, some of the observational studies that use lagged effects to estimate the effect of police numbers or arrests on crime rate appear to vary the length of the lag used purely to maximise the significance of the association, without giving much if any thought as to why the time spans involved should vary by crime type.

Many of the natural or quasi-experiments rely on what are highly unusual and probably unsustainable deployment patterns that resulted from ‘shocks’, such as terrorist attacks, which are thankfully highly unusual. Furthermore, such events may initiate a context for policing far removed from the ‘day-to-day’, and the policing response to such emergencies may acquire a specific and unique symbolic meaning.  Some of these papers make some pretty sweeping claims about the potential effect of police numbers on crime that may be undermined by the specific context of the events they describe. Despite the fact that natural or quasi-experiments usually allow firmer causal conclusions to be drawn than observational studies, in this instance better evidence for a ‘general’ link between police numbers and crime rates is probably provided from the latter. 

Yet, the observational studies are likely to suffer from all the usual problems around the recording of crime and officer’s activities. For example, most are forced to use the recorded rate of crime as a proxy for the real rate. This may or may not be a valid approach, but in the absence of firm evidence either way some care is need when making claims that more police lead to less crime. Most of the studies that are not natural or quasi-experiments take no account of what police officers actually do, and how this might vary from place to place and over time, while, as noted, the experimental studies rely on highly unusual events and police deployment patterns.

Many of the observational studies also suffer from two further problems. The first is a possibly excessive faith in instrumental variables (IVs) – in many of the studies listed the robustness of the IV used is far from proven, meaning that issues of endogeneity may not have been as fully dealt with as the authors claim. That is, while the authors believe they have solved any problems created by the possibility that the crime rate affects the number of police as much as vice versa, this may not actually be the case.

The second problem is that much of the research I looked at relied on a rather simplistic ‘rational choice’ model of criminal behaviour. Thee idea here is that the commission of crime is vitally influenced by considerations of the risk of sanction weighed against potential reward, with the number of police representing one element of the risk calculation. If this is not a valid theory of crime causation, or at least one that tells only part of the story might lack a plausible causal mechanism to explain the associations between police numbers of crime many of the studies do appear to uncover. Causal claims – that higher police leads to less crime – made on the back of observational data are significantly weakened by the absence of such a mechanism.

However taken together research that has appeared over the last 15 years does indeed suggest that there is a significant negative association between the numbers of police (and/or the number of arrests made) and the level of at least some forms of recorded crime. Two things in particular support this conclusion. First there is the striking extent of agreement between most of the studies I looked at. They varied considerably in terms of methodologies, time-spans, and countries, but still generated broadly similar findings. This kind of triangulation adds some weight to the idea that there is a real effect of police numbers on some types of crime.

Second, there is the fact that the purported effect of police numbers on crime is more consistently found in relation to property crime than violent crime. This adds considerable ‘face validity’ to the overall findings. At least a proportion of overall property crime presumably is committed by individuals who weigh up the relative risks and rewards involved, and who may even pay conscious attention to the presence or potential presence of police. Much violent crime, however, is conducted in the heat of the moment in pubs or on the street, or behind closed doors in the home. In neither case would one expect consideration or even awareness of potential police attention to come into play. A uniform association between police numbers on crime might in these terms be suspicious – one would expect the potential effect of the number of officers on the rate of crime to vary by crime type. 

Of course, considerably more work would needs to be done on this topic before any firm conclusions are reached. But the current state of research is extremely suggestive, to say the least.

Cameron's u-turn on prisons

It's hard to find much to disagree with in Simon Jenkin's eulogy to the lost hope of sensible thinking about criminal justice. I'm not sure which is worse, David Cameron's shameless flip-flop in the face of tabloid hysteria (pretty shocking to hear Ken Clark described as 'the paedophile's pal'), or Ed Milliband's equally shameless attempt to outflank him on the right.

What's most depressing, of course, is that this type of get tough, lock 'em up 'policy' is, on almost all available evidence, worse than useless. Whether we're talking about system contact and deviancy amplification, the well known link between experience of heavy-handed criminal justice interventions and lower levels of trust and the legitimacy of the law, or what happens to people once they actually get to prison, the more heavy handed and punitive the system, the more likely it is that the behaviour of those caught up in it will worsen, not improve.

It's not surprising that newspaper hacks appear incapable of thinking along such subtle lines (although it's hardly rocket science). Most British newspapers are unable to see anything in other than total black and white (for all that, as Orwell foresaw, black sometimes becomes white and particularly vice versa). What is depressing, though, is yet another pathetic abdication in the face of their imagined power. As Jenkins notes, the idea that tabloid newspapers represent the country is frankly laughable, and the evidence that they affect the way people think thin indeed.

Police numbers

First post for a while: I thought it was about time to start the blog up again.

The number of police officers is becoming more and more of a hot issue (see for example here, here and here). In fact I guess it always is. The prime reason for believing that the number of serving police officers should be maintained, or even increased, is of course always that crime will increase if they are reduced.

It seems such a simple equation: more police officers equals less crime, and less police officers equals more crime. So simple, in fact, that most criminologists assume it must be (deceptively) wrong. In general I think I agree. The police are far from the being the only institution that might affect the causes of crime, which lie in a complex mix of personal, social, institutional and environmental factors. Certainly self-report surveys find only weak associations between offending and the risk of sanction - in other words, when people think about offending, they don't really think about how likely they are to be caught by the police if they do break the law. Even when it comes to more definite preventative measures this seems to be much more to do with 'target-hardening' by individuals and organisations than it does with police patrols or other activities.

All in all it seems rather unlikely that police 'crime-fighting' activity can have much impact on the general level of crime, for all that it might be effective in relation to specific areas and/or specific crimes. This was certainly the consensus in academic work up until about 2000. Studies regularly found either no association between numbers of police and levels of crime, or indeed a positive association (i.e. more police were associated with higher levels of crime, even in studies which included relevant statistical controls).

But I've been doing a piece of work in the last few days that has challenged my assumptions. Looking at a small body of papers published in the last 15 years or so, it seems the number of police officers may indeed have a negative association with recorded crime rates. Based on a number of observational studies, quasi-experiments and natural experiments, there's a surprising consensus around an elasticity of about -0.3, which would imply that a 10 per cent increase in police officers leads to a 3 per cent reduction in crime.

Now, there are a number of problems with the research I've been looking at. Most obviously, it usually looks at associations between numbers of police and recorded crime, which is obviously only a small fraction of actual crime. Another is that much of it has been produced by economists and has as such an impoverished theory of crime causation, essentially rational choice theory, that may not provide a robust enough causal mechanism for the observed correlations. In other words there are significant doubts that the research can explain the associations it uncovers. Yet if nothing else these studies raise some very interesting questions.

I'll write more when I'm finished. It's always interesting to have your preconceptions put under the spotlight, I think ......

This is just terrible

The female officer shown inside Fortnum and Masons telling the protesters that their exit from the store and  subsequent journey home was going to be expedited was either lying or was being seriously mislead by her colleagues outside: the UK Uncut protesters were all arrested as they left the building. I'm actually not sure which is worse, but either way police actions like this have, I think, enormous potential to seriously undermine public trust. Especially when they are caught on camera.

Whatever the potential justification - presumably, to make sure people (a) left the building and (b) did so peacefully - police officers simply cannot mislead people in this way. To do so completely undermines the role the police should have in maintaining an honest, respectful and open relationship between state and citizens. More specifically, such dishonesty damages the ability of the police to act as honest brokers between competing parties (here, Fortnum and Masons and the protesters), public trust in their fairness, and their ability to give unbiased evidence in any subsequent trial.

A couple of more specific points arise from this situation. Firstly, the protesters were, apparently, only inside the building for so long because the police outside would not let them out. One obvious defence -or at least mitigation - at trial will presumably therefore be "I wanted to leave when I was asked, but the police wouldn't let me".

Second, and much more important in terms of public perceptions of last Saturday's events, of the 149 charges made so far 138 arise from the UK Uncut occupation of Fortnum and Masons.1 In other words, to an entirely peaceful event exactly the same in format as several previous protests. These figures completely undermine press and government accounts that paint last Saturday as marked by massive violence. There obviously was some trouble, but there were only 201 arrests in total. So violent protests lead to a maximum of 63 arrests (actually less, since some were for drunk and disorderly etc.). So it can't have been that bad, surely?

1. For a full list of the charges made see here.

Priceless

I don't think I'd be the first to point out the alarming hypocrisy of the variation in the British government's reaction to events in Libya and Bahrain, respectively, or more particularly its lack of reaction to the Saudi intervention in the latter (probably using, incidentally, British built weapons).

Perhaps the first 30 seconds of this clip puts it all in some kind of context .....

Hat-tip.

Social cleansing? Maybe it is .....

Many of these boats are literally across the park from me. I always think to myself that the people there have a great set up - genuinely living in a different way to most of us and usually, as far as I can see, having a good time doing it. I'm not sure I could live on a boat, but I can certainly see the attraction of waking up on the water every morning - in inner-city London, mind - to nothing more than the sound of waterbirds and wind in the trees. OK, so the birds might grate after a while .....

Now it seems that the little niche they've carved out for themselves is to be taken away, in a move that must be linked to the area's proximity to the Olympic site. Just another step down the financially/commercially ordained homogenization and, frankly, mundanization(1), of all our lives. It seems to me difference that involves not buying into the dominant tropes of work/consumption/mortgage-holiding is increasingly intolerable to commercial and indeed governmental interests. Who, naturally, have the whip hand in almost all cases. So a group of people who weren't doing anyone any harm and in fact improving the nature and fabric of the area in which they live are to be moved on, for no other reason, it seems, that they may look a bit scruffy and had found a way to live on the cheap.

(1) Hideous neologism, I know.

The Old Firm, political opportunism, and police agendas

Every so often you read something and think 'I wish I could have written that'. Sometimes it's just a pithy comment, sometimes the way the thing's put together, sometimes the overall tone and content.

I think this pretty much has it all. Well worth reading in full, but a few choice sections must include:

And we read, too, about the pious outrage of assorted local politicians and police chiefs, which, yet again, betrayed a disturbing level of ignorance and stupidity about the nature of drinking in parts of Glasgow and its link to poverty and lack of education.

....

The clear implication by the police is that Old Firm games cause all of this. It's a depressingly simplistic attitude from an outfit whose role is to remain at the end of a very short leash held by our democratically elected institutions.

...

Our political chiefs and assorted executive plods should stop wasting our time and money posturing at their bogus "Old Firm" summit. Instead, they should be holding a poverty summit to look seriously at the issue of deprivation, which in turn leads to alcoholism, drug addiction, violent crime and domestic abuse. This is the apocalypse that stalks the needy in our midst, not Celtic versus Rangers.

I should say for the sake of balance that there's a danger of hyperbole at the end - I'm not sure the centre of Glasgow is really a no-go area for women on Friday nights, for one thing - but I think someone who manages to put both politicians and senior police (who really should know better) so firmly in their place, punctures right-wing myths and middle class snobbery and appears to have some actual alternative suggestions of their own can be forgiven for getting a bit carried away.


In related news, we're reminded again that having elected 'police commissioners' is not necessarily such a great idea. And this the view of someone from a country were they regularly elect dog-catchers, for chrissake, so I doubt it's the mere notion of elected police that's worrying her.


In fact it's interesting to note, in what appears to be a disturbing outbreak of informed comment, that one objection is that the US political system is, you know, different to ours, and you can't just import policies willy-nilly and expect them to be gleaming successes and/or magic bullets. Something all the more concerning given it's not at all clear what, precisely, is the ill elected police commissioners are intended to cure, even if they are just about the only innovation in police policy (other than cuts) the coalition government have come up with to date. Not that a cut, or at least ceasing an activity, is necessarily a bad thing.

No 2 AV campaign ad

Bad enough to make you want to vote yes whatever you thought before.

They should have cut straight to the chase and brought the fluffy kittens out.

I'm such a smug liberal

Just been reading this - right-wing Arizonan vigilantes kill two Mexicans (a nine year old girl and her dad) in cold blood.

These 'minutemen' are everything I hate. Vicious bigoted rightwing gun-loving nutjobs. Who killed a nine-year old girl, ffs. But I still don't think they deserve the death penalty. No matter what the wrong they've committed, executing them would still simply compound it.

At the risk of total solipsism - the important thing here is obviously the people who were murdered - cases like this create interesting dilemmas. Do we only oppose the death penalty in cases where we can feel some understanding for the social, structural and/or medical reasons why people end up committing the 'ultimate crime' (even if we might not want them living next door). Or do we oppose it in all cases, no matter how egregious the crime or ideologically repellent the murderer?

This is why I find Amnesty International and Liberty so admirable - they seem to consistently oppose the wrongs committed by governments and states no matter how individually unpleasant are some of the people they help. Human rights if they are to mean anything apply to everyone, including people who we should loath on almost every count.

At the personal level, though, such cases seem mainly to serve toward reinforcing smug liberalism in its ultimate Guardianista incarnation......

Votes for prisoners

I don't get it. The court judgement is that there should be no blanket ban, not that all prisoners should have the vote. So instead of everyone getting all het up, surely the right response is to sort out a system in which, say, people imprisoned for non-violent crimes get to vote, and those that were, don't. Or whatever. Seems pretty sensible when you look at some of the pathetic things for which people can be sent to prison (why should someone imprisoned for shoplifting be denied the vote, while those found guilty of more serious crimes that don't result in a prison sentence retain it).

Anyone would think this issue was being used as a political football by people with other interests. And that's before we start to think about the example being set by a political class which seeks to pick and choose which court judgements it wants to follow.....

David Cameron and multiculturalism

It's not very often I wholeheartedly agree with a Guardian editorial - usually a bit too wishy-washy - but I think this just about nails it.

Of course, as the leader writer kind of says, it's become difficult to even talk about this in a sensible way because on this issue we're all Humpty Dumptys. Multiculturalism means exactly what we want it to mean. But two particularly problems I have with the 'anti-multi-culti' brigade are these.

First, the fetishisation of Britishiness and 'British values'. If you look at the evidence, people from almost all ethnic and religious minorities, including da Muslimz, feel more British than those from the majority White British group, who are increasingly likely to say English, Welsh etc. Two exceptions tend to be White folks from the US, Australia etc. and Buddhists, a large number of whom are, er, White British, but nobody seems to worry too much about them. Can't think why.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that 'British' is such a broad church (no pun intended) that it's almost meaningless. In a sense this is obviously true and always has been. National identities are imagined communities that enable people who otherwise have absolutely nothing in common (think welders in Tyneside and hunting squires in Devon) to feel a sense of togetherness. But more likely I think is that British is an aspirational term for people from minority groups - saying you feel British is part of making it so. People in the US have always seen this - part of becoming/being American is hyphenating your original identity to Irish-American, Italian-American etc. On this measure alone 'multiculturalism' has been a resounding success. An overwhelming majority of people from minority groups want to and indeed do feel British.

The second issue is the implicit, and increasingly explicit, suggestion that if 'they' don't accept 'our' values they will be excluded in some sense (this is ultimately of course a go back to where you came from argument, but we'll leave aside the difficulty of sending people born in Walthamstow or Lancashire  'back'). Cameron mentions women's rights and democracy. But the essence of living in democracy is precisely that we don't expect everyone to think the same. We expect them to act according to the law, but that is something different. So it's admissable to think that women should be chained to the kitchen sink, but not to act on that belief and, for example, deny women jobs on the basis that they might get pregnant at some point. If people are going to get pulled up or excluded on the basis of a dubious commitment to gender equality we'd have to sack the entire editorial staff of the Daily Mail, for a start.

The suspicion must be that 'they' are being held to a higher standard than 'us' because they are inherently different and have something to prove, while being one of us means automatic inclusion whatever the particular views one holds. I think you'd be hard put to find a better way to proving to people they're different, excluded, and dissuade them from entering in open and rational discussion of differences of opinion.

I don't wish to sound panglossian here - there are problems with some young Muslims in terms of violence extremism, and more widely in terms of some pretty antediluvian attitudes to gender, sexuality etc. But with regard to the latter at least that makes them no different to some Hindus, Sikhs, Catholics, or right-wing Tories. To blame multi-culturism for linking political incorrectness (which is, of course, what Cameron was talking about, even though he'd never say it in those terms) with violent extremism seems to fly in the face not only of the evidence concerning how multiculturalism 'works' but also any sensible consideration of the actual distribution of 'wrong-thinking' in our society.

Crime maps

Not much to disagree with here. One thing I can't quite grasp is how these maps are supposed to empower people (in any straightforward way at least). How do they do this? Answers on a postcard please.

But more pertinently, why do they have to? This is information collected using public money, and, unless there is a good reason, it should be publicly available. This should be the principle involved, not any dubious claims about the utility of the data. Would it not have been released if it wasn't 'empowering'?

Not good

This incident has been doing the rounds on the blogosphere. And now, as is usual these days, some video footage has come to light.

To me, the issue is actually less the use of CS gas - although this certainly seems to have been disproportionate - but rather the initial arrest. Arresting someone for criminal damage for pushing leaflets through a gap in a door (which is allegedly what transpired) is plainly ridiculous and was bound to increase tension. Events then took their course and, to give him the benefit of the doubt, an officer felt threatened enough to use the spray (less generous assessments certainly suggest themselves, but it's hard to see from the footage).

Whichever way you look at it, this seems to have been a situation created by the police. The range of powers available to the police at demos is very wide, and they don't need to use arrests like this to manage situations, which is what I suspect they thought they were doing (presumably to protect property).

Police have a duty to maintain order that is at least as powerful as their duty to protect property - and it certainly seems to be the case that here they've taken one course that directly affected their ability to maintain order at what seems to have been, up to that point, an entirely peaceful demo.

The Killing

Having watched two episodes of The Killing on BBC4, I think the phrase 'may actually be as good as the Wire' might not be too far off the mark. What is it about Scandanavians and crime thrillers?

Like Prime Suspect channelling the first series of 24 through the lens of State of Play. And yes I think I did steal all that the Guardian's hype piece......

The public's use of public spaces

OK so this puts me firmly in the realm of grumpy old gitdom, and I'm note even sure that buses count as public space, really, but still .....

Perhaps it's just me, but the habit of standing on the bottom floor of double-deckers - rather than walking up the stairs to find a seat there - seems to be spreading. I've counted at least three buses this week that didn't open the front doors at stops because the bottom floor was packed, so no one else could fit, but on which there were clearly spaces upstairs. While some people obviously can't make the stairs, or are only going one to two stops, it's also obvious that some simply can't be arsed to climb them.

A minor problem of urban life, clearly, but it set me thinking about the way people use public spaces, whether this be walking down the road, in parks, or on public transport. On the one hand, even in London people remain generally fairly thoughtful, or at least careful to keep out of the way of others. But it would be a miracle if the privatisation and commoditisation of almost every other aspect of life had no impact on the way public spaces are negotiated. Encouraging people to be selfish in so many other aspects of life must surely mean greater selfishness when using scarce resources such as urban space in London?

But is this really what's happened? The bus thing winds me up, but perhaps one reason why it does so is that things like that are actually pretty unusual. Perhaps people aren't, in general, any more selfish in their use of public space than they were before? And if they aren't, does this tell us anything about other aspects of social life? It the selfishness of modern life exaggerrated?

Just a thought. I suspect if I drove regularly I might have a different opinion.

David Cameron is being interviewed on Today

Talking about the imminent NHS reform: "we are now close to EU average levels of spending on health in this country, but we are far from having the best health outcomes".

Perhaps, you know, if we have just below average levels of spending we have just below average outcomes. Oh look, it seems we do.

Further to the last post .....

An interesting - and different angle - on the 'Asian gangs targeting white girls' story here. It seems the gang itself was ethnically mixed (albeit largely 'Asian'), while the ethnic background of the victims almost exactly matched the ethnic composition of Derby itself (victims, 81 per cent white; Derby, 85 per cent white).

Jack Straw should probably keep his mouth shut

As has been pointed out here and here (or go straight to the source of the data used in these posts). Just to  add the data for Derbyshire, where the case that started the furore occurred: of the 666 people arrested for sexual offences in 2007/08, 2.9 per cent defined their own ethnicity as Pakistani, compared with 85.3 per cent who self-defined as White British. So very similar to Straw's Lancashire, then, and broadly in line with the ethnic composition of the area, I should think.

Naturally we have to be careful with the stats. Police arrests do not necessarily provide a good estimate of the extent of criminal activity in an area. But the MoJ report does at least provide some evidence, in marked contrast to the not-so-considered remarks of Straw et al. who seem to seem so ready to extrapolate from this one (very nasty) case to the views, and indeed actions, of large numbers of British Pakistani men.

It seems to me that the self-justifications of these two scumbags are essentially identical to those always used by men who abuse women - 'she was asking for it', 'she wanted it', 'she was wearing a short skirt' etc. etc. That in this case the excuses may have been given a cultural gloss is in no a sense a reason to tar a whole community with the brush of 'potential rapists'. As others have pointed out the similarities with the Black rapist moral panic of the 1970s and 80s are striking.

I very much doubt that Jack Straw is racist. But his comments will provide succour to those who either are, or are so concerned with selling newspapers that they'll whip up any story, no matter how ill-founded, in an attempt to shift a few more copies. Wouldn't it be nice if politicians looked at the data (in this case produced by the department they themselves used to head) before making public pronouncements. You know, thought a little before opening their mouths.

Hopelessly idealistic, I know.