A new survey reveals the UK to be the continent’s leader in robbery, reports robert chesshyre |
|
Throughout the chaos and disasters that have overwhelmed the Home Office, Tony Blair and his ministers, like drowning men grasping life rafts, have clung to one apparently solid fact: that, while numbers in prisons have soared, crime has been going down.
Now that claim has been put in stark perspective by a report revealing that Britons suffer from the highest level of burglary and robbery in Europe.
Britain finds itself at the wrong end of yet another unenviable league table. The findings confirm, I suspect, what most Britons feel: that despite the 20,000 more people in jail, we are at least as vulnerable to crime as we were ten years ago.
Forty thousand people were questioned for the European Crime and Safety Survey, making it one of the most comprehensive law and order inquiries ever carried out. The
|
|
 |
 |
 |
| Despite the 20,000 more people in jail, we are at least as vulnerable to crime as we were ten years ago |
|
|
usual suspects - ill-disciplined young people; binge drinking; race-hate - are all fingered.
Which one of us, wherever we live, does not instinctively look over our shoulder as we walk home at night or draw money from a lonely ATM machine?
The peace of my leafy suburb was shattered a few weeks ago by banging on my door: outside stood a neighbour, blood pouring down his face from what proved to be a fractured cheekbone, mugged for his mobile a few yards from his home.
I once spent two weeks observing police burglary squads in action. There was no doubting their commitment, but not one significant arrest during my time with them.
By contrast, I interviewed a burglar who had finally been caught and was volunteering to 'clear up' all his crimes before sentencing. He told me that he committed up to ten burglaries a day.
What struck me was his optimism about how easy burglary is against the police pessimism as to how hard it is to catch a thief. 
FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 6, 2007
|
