b) How much
less crime do you want to be cleared up? At the moment we’re at a historic low in detection (“solving”) rates, with
92.6% of all crime going undetected.
I quote from one of my posts on another thread where I gave a description of the film The Ruling Class, the most relevant point underlined:
"In it, Peter O'Toole plays the schizophrenic heir to the Gurney estate. On his father's death, he becomes Earl Gurney. Believing, and acting as if, he is Jesus is the symptom of his condition. Despite being totally harmless, his behaviour causes great embarrassment to his family. They have him treated for schizophrenia and an apparent cure is effected. Earl Gurney now behaves as he should for an aristocrat.
Unbeknown to all, however, Gurney's schizophrenia has not been cured. The symptoms i.e. thinking and behaving as if he is Jesus, have only been supressed. Since the schizophrenia must express itself somehow, and since the "Jesus" symptoms have been supressed, the symptoms re-emerge in a darker form. Earl Gurney has become Jack The Ripper."
As I understand it, the symptoms of a sick society are expressed through, for example, the crime rate. Try and suppress that symptom and it has no where else to go except express itself in a more dangerous form. Or, to put it more simply: the more the government, via the police, tries to control people, then the less control they actually have. Trying to control people's behaviour actually has the opposite to the intended effect. It actually makes things worse, not better. So, the more the police try to control things, the worse crime will get. It is a lose-lose situation.
However, my use of the word "sick" above was deliberate. By that I mean that I think those who commit crimes should not be treated as criminals. Instead I think they should be treated as if they are sick and shown a little more humanity i.e. not automatically banged up in prison where all sorts of abuses are perpetrated.
As to high rates of crime going undetected, I would suggest that the police are allowed to spend more time walking the beat as they used to and with a more friendly face i.e. less intimidating. Another example: I was walking with my father down one of the main shopping streets in Glasgow, then a pedestrian zone. There was some pavement repair equipment on the street, obviously left there for the following day's repairs. This included a small vehicle about the size of an ATV. Some lads had switched it on and with no driver the thing was moving around banging into a shop front and was, in addition, an obvious hazard to pedestrians. My father and I spotted a policeman some distance away. The machine was making so much noise that we could not shout to attract his attention. My father gave a piercing whistle which the policeman did hear. And the look on his face when he approached was
thunderous. That is the only word for it. With hardly a word to us, he managed to switch off the vehicle, and then he turned away and walked off. he didn't even thank us for being responsible citizens. My sister had an experience with the police where she had found a wallet with some money in it and took it to a police station to hand it in. Again, instead of a "thank you", my sister said that she was treated with great suspicion and made to feel that she had stolen the wallet, rather than being honest and handing it in. She has said that she would never, now, do such a thing again given how unpleasant that experience was. So, the police do need to work on their behaviour and show a more friendly face to ordinary citizens.
In addition to walking the beat, I suggest that the government severely cut-back on the amount of beaurocracy police have to contend with - if it is anything like teaching is and nursing is, then the paperwork is phenomenal. The amount of paperwork police have to contend with must leave them no time to do the really important stuff. (There was a really interesting BBC radio programme on a while back in which a stand-up comic, formerly a policeman (Alfie Moore, I think his name was), used his experiences as a policeman for his act. It was really interesting. One aspect of the job he made much of was that always, always at the back of a policeman's mind is the consequence in terms of paperwork, that actions will have. So paperwork prevents the police from doing their job.)
In addition to paperwork, I do not know the extent of the manpower this sort of work takes up, but the police seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on "cold cases". Perhaps police energies would be better spent on the contemporary, not the historical.
Finally, as to "grassing", I think there is a danger of looking at this from too simplistic a point of view. Living in a society where citizens are invited to grass on each other, where no one can trust anyone else, will lead, I suggest, to severe even worse mental health problems than there currently are. And, of course, mental health is a big issue right now and mental health is going from bad to worse. I suggest that perhaps a little undetected crime will be less damaging to people's minds, will be a smaller price to pay, than living in a state where neighbour informs on neighbour, child informs on parent, siblings inform on siblings, pupils inform on teachers, students inform on lecturers etc, etc.