Tag Archives: crime

Opinion: Crime, transport and the battle for London Mayor

By Paul Haydon | Published 10th February 2012 - 11:30 am

Just six months ago today London was emerging from its third night of rioting, with a semblance of order only just beginning to take hold as a massive police presence descended on the city. The fear in the streets was palpable. We had been given a brief and terrifying glimpse of what sheer anarchy looked like, the rage and shameless opportunism of London’s marginalised youth provoking deep existential questions about what was wrong with our society.

Yet, as the contest for London Mayor begins to build up momentum, Ken and Boris’ campaigns continue to revolve around the same old topic …

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Lynne Featherstone to propose stalking – in person or online – to be made an offence

By The Voice | Published 14th November 2011 - 10:45 am

Lib Dem equalities minister Lynne Featherstone is in the news for examining proposals to make the specific offence of stalking a criminal offence. The Independent reports:

Stalkers are to face jail under government plans to create a new criminal offence after prosecutors admitted it was hard to bring cases to court.

Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat Home Office minister, on a visit to Manchester, [is today to] unveil proposals to introduce a specific offence of stalking, potentially also covering cyber-stalking. A three-month consultation will also look at the use of restraining orders and police attitudes to stalking cases, following concern that

…

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Opinion: Cutting Crime in Scotland’s Festival City

By Paul Edie | Published 2nd March 2011 - 11:08 am

Close partnership working and information sharing between agencies at a local level has contributed strongly to reductions in crime and anti social behaviour in Lib Dem led Edinburgh.

Scotland Capital, with its strong night time economy and festivals, has enjoyed reduced crime and antisocial behaviour in recent years. New shift patterns, leading to more officers being deployed where they are needed and when they are needed, have contributed to the reduction in crime. Co-located police officers, joint patrols with environmental wardens and information sharing between statutory agencies have also helped. Much of the improvement is also down to an …

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Crime down again…and still we’re unclear why

By Iain Roberts | Published 20th January 2011 - 12:29 pm

Crime was down again in the year to September 2010.

Recorded crime shows falls across the board, with the exception of sexual offences which are up slightly.   As ever, changes in recorded crime can be affected by changes in definitions, by the way the police do the recording or by the willingness of victims to come forward, but there are no major shift in any of those which would lead us to think it isn’t a real change.  (In some previous years there have been quite significant changes, some of which have made crime look higher than it really was).

The

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Opinion: good and bad reasons for backing Ken

By John Pugh MP | Published 4th October 2010 - 5:24 pm

Ken Clarke is coming under pressure from the Red Tops about his plans for sentence reform. According to Conservative Home, even David Cameron is getting cold feet. But Liberal Democrats, it is assumed, are bound to be backing Ken.

This might be thought a given as Liberals are, from the point of view of the media, supposed to have a benign, Panglossian view of human nature which unkind souls might call unrealistic or wet.

Wrong on both counts!

I have long thought the only good moral reason for punishing someone is that they deserve it and that the state is …

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Opinion: which is the biggest disgrace – the marriages or the sentence?

By Nick Perry | Published 11th September 2010 - 11:39 am

St Leonards on Sea has had its share of the national news recently – Banksy has been to visit and has left his moniker on our seafront; and in the last few days we have had a local vicar sentenced to four years in prison for his part in a sham weddings scam which has broken immigration law and also, it seems, a Marriage Act from the 1940s.

In case you missed it, the Independent has covered the case of Revd Alex Brown in detail. It transpires that no-one has been able to identify the motive of this errant …

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Tackling anti-social behaviour by training the public

By Mark Pack | Published 15th July 2010 - 1:15 pm

That’s the intriguing proposition in a pamphlet by Ben Rogers, published this week by the RSA. He starts with the case of first aid – point out how the widespread training of the public in first aid has helped supplement the core health services provided by the state – and then goes on to suggest a similar approach to anti-social behaviour:

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David Howarth writes … Now is the time to reform our penal policy

By David Howarth | Published 2nd April 2010 - 10:45 am

Last month the Howard League for Penal Reform launched its Take Action 2010 campaign, with the general election in its sights. The campaign reflects a growing consensus among experts and campaign groups that penal policy has reached a crisis point.

The Howard League’s campaign covers four policy areas – investment in the community not prison, ending short prison terms, justice for children, and creating a scheme of real work inside existing prisons. All four of these themes echo Liberal Democrat thinking and I very much welcome the campaign.

Billions of pounds are spent on maintaining our prisons and …

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LibLink: Chris Huhne – Tough on crime? Jail’s not the answer

By NewsHound | Published 7th March 2010 - 4:05 pm

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website, Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne argues tht locking up more people is a populist ploy that doesn’t cut crime. Instead, he says, we should focus on rigorous community sentences instead. Here’s an excerpt:

It should be a given that important matters of public policy are based on evidence and research, rather than political whim. Why, then, is the field of criminal justice uniquely and scandalously divorced from this obvious rule? … Both [Labour and Tories] continue to try to frighten the public into the arms of their party. It is this

…

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Many women still unsympathetic about rape

By Iain Roberts | Published 15th February 2010 - 9:10 am

A survey of a thousand men and women in London reveals that most women asked believe that the victim of rape is sometimes at least partly to blame.

Almost three-quarters of women said if a rape victim got into bed with the assailant before an attack they should accept some responsibility.

One-third blamed victims who had dressed provocatively or gone back to the attacker’s house for a drink.

More than half of those of both sexes questioned said there were some circumstances when a rape victim should accept responsibility for an attack.

These figures are nothing new. A 2005 survey found …

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Watchdog says Shadow Home Secretary ‘likely to damage’ trust in statistics

By Sara Bedford | Published 4th February 2010 - 12:56 pm

Yesterday I wrote about Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling’s extraordinarily twisted use of statistics to try to justify part of the Conservatives’ ‘Broken Britain’ narrative.

Today the BBC’s Mark Easton, who broke the original story, has the news that Chris Grayling has just been sent a sharp letter from Parliament’s statistics watchdog, informing him that his mis-use of statistics about violent crime is ‘likely to damage public trust in official statistics’. The Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), Sir Michael Scholar, says he does ‘not wish to become involved in political controversy’,  but ‘must take issue’ with Grayling’s comments ’yesterday about violent crime statistics’.

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Conservatives’ use of crime statistics ‘selective and mendacious’

By Sara Bedford | Published 3rd February 2010 - 12:10 pm

This morning’s Today programme provided another of those ‘mustn’t miss’ moments, as presenter Evan Davis  took the Conservatives’ Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling to task over the party’s misleading use of crime statistics.

Last week Mark Easton, the BBC’s Home Affairs editor, had asked ‘Are the Tories being honest with their claims on violent crime’:

Last week, David Cameron told me that one reason he could justify the phrase “broken society” was because of “significant” increases in violent crime, notably gun and knife crime in Britain.  When I challenged him to produce the evidence, his party press office sent the BBC a list of statistics. It emerges that the only way the Conservative leader can back up his claims is to ignore the klaxon warning attached to the statistics following changes in the way police record violent incidents in England and Wales.

Tory Central Office e-mailed this claim to me: ‘Violent crime has increased from 615,985 offences in 1998-9 to 1,034,972 in 2008-9, an increase of 68 per cent’. The document cited, however, includes this massive caveat: ‘The National Crime Recording standard was introduced in April 2002. Figures before and after that date are not directly comparable’. And yet, that is exactly what Mr Cameron appears to do.

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Tackling crime: talking to and involving the public works

By Mark Pack | Published 20th January 2010 - 10:20 am

The Home Office has recently published a review of the research into how to improve public confidence in the police. One of their conclusions? The very community politics idea, expressed in very New Labour vocabulary, that

The strategies most likely to be effective in improving confidence are initiatives aimed at increasing community engagement. Three out of the four interventions classified in the ‘what works’ evidence all included an element of communicating and engaging with the community (embedding neighbourhood policing; high quality community engagement; and using local-level communications/newsletters).

In other words: talk to people, listen to them and involve them. That is …

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High on drugs, yet soft on drivers?

By Sara Bedford | Published 3rd January 2010 - 7:01 pm

Just before Christmas, the Government published two media releases on the subject of crime and sentencing. The first concerned making several ‘legal highs’ illegal; the second announced a review of the maximum sentences for dangerous driving.

What grabbed my attention was the current similarity of sentences for very different crimes. Currently the maximum sentence for dangerous driving is just two years – the same as for possession of amphetamines and less than half the maximum sentence for possession of cannabis or the previously legal high known as ‘spice’. So in the government’s mind, having a small spliff in your pocket is more than twice as bad as putting a child in a wheelchair by knowingly driving a car with defective brakes or by driving on the wrong side of the road at speed.

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Opinion: Youth justice – a golden opportunity for the Lib Dems

By Tim Connolly | Published 9th September 2009 - 2:30 pm

Youth justice has risen, zombie-like, from the place unloved political issues go to die. In July, the Government published an interim report on The Youth Crime Action Plan, its “comprehensive, cross-government analysis of what the government is going to do to tackle youth crime.”

This prompted vigorous activity from the think-tanks and NGOs, and a predictable silence from the dead who may live again, aka the Conservative Party.

Last week, the Liberal Democrats published data showing that the number of 10 to 12 year olds convicted of a criminal offence rose by 87.2% between 1997 and 2007. Nick Clegg, remarking on the figures, argued that:

It is a disgrace the Government spends eleven times more locking up our young people than it does on backing projects to stop them getting involved in crime in the first place.”

Unless you happen to be keen on nineteenth century penal philosophy, Nick’s comment seems to make excellent sense. I would suggest, however, that it is, at best, carelessly imprecise. At worst, it indicates a refusal to challenge the prevailing conservative narrative on youth crime. Given recent reporting of events in Doncaster, a measured rebuttal is more critical than ever.

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