The riddle of peacefulness

On 24 April 2013, the BBC told us this:

“Rates of murder and violent crime have fallen more rapidly in the UK in the past decade than many other countries in Western Europe, researchers say. The UK Peace Index, from the Institute for Economics and Peace, found UK homicides per 100,000 people had fallen from 1.99 in 2003, to one in 2012. The UK was more peaceful overall, it said…

BBC home editor Mark Easton called it the ‘riddle of peacefulness’ and said the fall in violence was ‘perhaps a symptom of a new morality… The answer to the quite remarkable drop in violence may lie somewhere else entirely. Could it be that global communication is having a calming effect on people's behaviour?’…

The research follows the IEP's US Peace Index published last year. IEP chairman Steve Killelea said… ‘The findings of the UK Peace Index show that poverty and economic opportunity are significantly associated with peace… This suggests greater emphasis needs to be placed on programmes that tackle poverty and related issues, such as access to education and economic opportunity.’

Sir Ian Blair, former commissioner of the Met Police, said that, given the downward trend was across the developing world, he believed the fall was due to the ‘change in the way society views and abhors violence. We are a more violence-adverse society,’ he said.

'When I started as a young officer the Friday night pub fight was an extraordinarily common phenomenon. Everybody swung a chair, got a few black eyes and went home satisfied. That is not happening in the same way any more’."

It's not. Now we’re getting stabbed and shot instead.

On 5 May 2013, The Observer reported thus:

"Claims that Britain has never been safer are misleading, according to a study that accuses the government of massaging official crime figures. It alleges that the Home Office is promoting statistics knowing they do not include some of the fastest-rising forms of online crime, making figures significantly lower than the true crime rate... Card fraud was three times as common as theft from the person and at least as prevalent as domestic burglary.

In addition Home Office research found that only 14% had reported credit card fraud to the police, compared with 91% who had reported it to their bank or credit card company.

Cybersecurity experts warn the ways in which people can become victims of online fraud continues to proliferate with experts identifying internet auction fraud, the non-delivery of items, advanced fee frauds, phishing and investment fraud among others. In addition, they warn, the continued growth of online transactions has escalated the opportunities for criminals to perpetuate online crime. Figures from the UK Cards Association show that online banking fraud leapt by more than a quarter in the first half of 2012 as criminals targeted families via the web.

The amount of cash siphoned from UK bank accounts via the internet between January and June rose by 28% to £21.6m compared with the same period the previous year. The increase came against the background of a sharp rise in the number of phishing websites, with 111,396 identified in the first half of last year, a rise of almost 200%."

Professor Marian Fitzgerald, visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent, responded thus to the report:

"The police service has been driven for nearly 15 years by the imperative to demonstrate year-on-year reductions in crime. So it has developed a mindset which is resistant to recognising new types of crime, such as card fraud and the many scams perpetrated over the internet, and has been more than happy for the Home Office to absolve it of taking any responsibility for them...

New opportunities have opened up on an unprecedented scale for property crime and for many other types of crime. Arguably the internet has also massively increased the scale of psychological violence from what was previously possible.

This, obviously, poses significant challenges for politicians, in particular those associated with the previous government, who took the credit for the fall in crime and repeatedly told the public that they were safer than since records began."

Professor Fitzgerald also said she believed the report was based on ‘two fundamental misconceptions’ and added:

“First of all it keeps saying 'isn't it amazing that despite the recession violence has gone down'. Actually, any serous criminologist knows that violence goes down in a recession because most violence is relatively low-level violence and most of it is associated with the late-night economy. So when people don't have money to go out, get tanked up, start having fights, violence goes down.

The other flaw in this is... they said that they took as their starting point in this as 2003 because the rules on how you counted crime changed at that point. What they don't seem to have understood is that those changes meant there was an artificial spike in crime in 2003.”

I can think of another flaw, Marian.

On 30 April 2013, the BBC told us this:

“More than 10,000 serious violent crimes were dealt with informally last year, despite guidelines to the contrary. Police used ‘community resolutions,’ which can include an apology or compensation to the victim, instead of prosecutions and cautions.

Unlike a caution, A COMMUNITY RESOLUTION DOES NOT LEAD TO A CRIMINAL RECORD.

Last year a community resolution was applied in 10,160 incidents of ‘serious violence’, about 12 times the figure for five years ago... They were also used in 2,488 domestic violence cases in 2012.

Incidents classed as serious violence by the House of Commons library in its analysis include: Grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent; GBH without intent; Assault occasioning actual bodily harm; Malicious wounding; Wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm; Use of substance or object to endanger life."

So, when the BBC’s Mark Easton whimsically opines that ‘the quite remarkable drop in violence’ might be ‘a symptom of a new morality’ and Ian Blair says ‘we are a more violence-adverse society,’ they are being ‘economical with the actualité’ to say the least.

If an unflattering picture of the way things are would emerge if the whole truth was presented, Marxist orthodoxy will massage the stats until the picture fits the spin. And this prize pair of establishment wagtails are as culturally Marxist as it’s possible to get.

I wonder, if a disgruntled victim of 'GBH with intent, GBH without intent, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, malicious wounding, wounding with intent to do GBH' and 'use of substance or object to endanger life' decided, after their assailants were freed, to exact a measure of retribution themselves, would they be treated as leniently by the courts?

In a world designed by Easton, Blair and their masters, if an innocent person was stabbed by a lovely, fluffy repeat offender and lived to see him 'dealt with informally,' would that innocent be 'dealt with' similarly if he, in turn, stabbed the offender?

We don't think so, do we.

Where commonsense once told us that certain things were obviously so, now political corectness tells us otherwise. Thus, right is wrong, wrong is right; good is bad, bad is good; criminals are victims and victims who dare to fight back must be criminalised wherever possible.

Check out a little of the 'violent crime' perpetrated in Britain by foreigners in recent times.