In the UK today, it’s sometimes safer to be the criminal than the victim of crime.
Take the perplexing case of Rob Davies. In Wrexham, north Wales, the frustrated shopkeeper was told off by police for complaining about the scourge of thieves in the area. Davies, who runs a vintage clothing store, had resorted to displaying a sign in the shop window that read: “Due to scumbags shoplifting, please ask for assistance to open cabinets.” He explained to the Telegraph that, due to an increasing number of thefts, he was forced to lock away some of his goods. “Over the past year,” he said, “I have caught five people shoplifting. The first one I called the police and they handed the shirt back to me and let him go. Now I don’t bother reporting them and I have had to put locks on my cabinets.”
You might think the fact that local business owners are publicly lamenting growing lawlessness would prompt police into action. But Davies instead received a visit from North Wales Police, who told him to take his sign down in case branding shoplifters “scumbags” caused offence. Offence to who, exactly? Criminals? Davies said officers told him it was a member of the public who reported the sign. North Wales Police would later be forced to admit that calling criminals nasty names isn’t actually against the law.
Though it might not be a crime, Prime Minister Keir Starmer took umbrage with the wording used by Davies, too. When asked what the PM made of the situation, a spokesman at No.10 Downing Street said: “It is not the language I would directly use but we have been very clear through our actions we take shoplifting seriously, we understand the blight that shoplifting has on our high streets and local businesses.”
The Telegraph on Sunday also revealed that the Information Commissioner’s Office warned shop owners against putting up pictures of local thieves, in case it breaches data-protection rules. Apparently, the common practice of pasting wanted-style posters of particularly prolific shoplifters could be “inappropriate,” according to the data watchdog.
How seriously is the British state really taking shoplifting, or crime in general? Not very, it would seem. The UK feels plagued by low-level crime.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the nation’s capital. Also last week, a video went viral of a man exposing himself on a busy London Underground train last Thursday. In the footage, the man can be seen dropping his trousers in front of a carriage full of stunned passengers, including children. A group of male commuters stepped in, shouting at him to cover up. The flasher responded by repeatedly telling them to “fuck off” and began waving his belt around his head, still trouserless. The group of vigilante passengers proceeded to tackle him to the floor and a fight broke out, until the flasher was bundled off the train at the next station. He was reportedly put under arrest by an off-duty officer and was later detained under the Mental Health Act.
This is all bad enough. But the truly shocking part is that the passengers who tried to stop the erratic man are now wanted by the police and may face arrest. British Transport Police announced yesterday that they are officially investigating the passengers for assault.
This is a perverse moral inversion. Had I been on that train, I would have been relieved someone had stepped in. We’ve all seen far too many videos of lunatics ranting and raving on packed Tube carriages, sometimes even harassing or assaulting women, while fellow passengers either look on in horror or pretend not to see at all. The truth is, you have no idea what’s going to happen when someone who is clearly mentally ill exposes himself or threatens someone, especially in an enclosed space. Similarly, when a gang of masked men burst into a shop, shouting, looting the shelves and smashing bottles on the floor (a scenario I witnessed firsthand not that long ago), you have no idea if the situation is going to turn violent. In most cases, thankfully, no one is physically harmed. But there is never any guarantee that people like this won’t become aggressive and attack someone. Thank God there are still some out there who feel a sense of duty to step in when they see something potentially dangerous.
The same can’t be said for our actual police, who seem more interested in policing our tweets than our streets. Phone-snatching, for example, has become quasi-legalised in Britain. Despite practically everyone in the country now possessing a glorified tracking device in their pocket at all times, a pathetic 2% of mobile phone thefts in London are followed up by police. And given that one phone is stolen every 15 minutes in the nation’s capital, that’s a lot of lost banking data, payment methods, emails, passwords, and personal info. Around 80,000 every year, in fact.
The police have made it very clear that this kind of ‘petty’ crime is nowhere near their priority, and police are highly unlikely to respond to ‘low-value’ thefts. Even when cases are considerably higher stakes and there is clear evidence of the crime, it’s a lottery whether or not police will actually attend. One woman had £17,000 worth of handbags stolen from two of her shops in Surrey and Wimbledon and, although the perpetrators were caught on CCTV, police were entirely uninterested until she made a fuss on social media. Similarly, a couple had their Jaguar SUV stolen from outside their West London home, only to be told by Metropolitan Police that they were busy and didn’t know when they could investigate. Luckily, the couple had an AirTag inside their car that showed them the location, and they were able to ‘steal’ it back. One man who tracked his stolen bicycle to the building it was being kept in was told by police that they couldn’t possibly retrieve it, because they couldn’t go up stairs. He, too, was forced to go there and get the bike back himself.
This is far more serious than just fare-dodging, phone-snatching, and shoplifting. One writer in The Times this Monday described how a relative of a family friend was left hospitalised in a hit and run that the Met refused to properly investigate. This is despite another driver’s dashcam having captured the entire incident, number plate and all. Months after being handed the footage, police are yet to charge the driver or even interview any witnesses.
The result of police indifference is plummeting levels of trust. In London, just 40% of crimes are recorded. And of those, 40% of victims withdraw from the process altogether, largely because they just don’t believe anything will come of it. Why should they? Zak Asgard writes in the Telegraph: “Right now, there are 77,000 cases waiting to be heard. One hundred cases won’t go to trial until 2029. That’s four years until a victim—a person courageous enough to step forward—can experience any semblance of justice.”
Some may be quick to tell us that the statistics show there’s no such crimewave hitting Britain. But when foreign nations like France, Canada, Australia, and Mexico (yes, really) are advising its citizens to take extra care when visiting the UK, it might be worth taking this problem seriously. There’s no point reassuring people that knife crime is down, when phone-snatching and shoplifting (crimes that the average person is far more likely to be exposed to than gang-fuelled stabbings) are allowed to proliferate without consequence.
The fact remains that many people don’t feel safe. The increased visibility of crime combined with the lack of police response means that Britain feels far more lawless than it used to, even if the statistics don’t technically bear that out. If police are unwilling to do anything about a stolen car or a hit and run, how can you be sure they’ll do anything about far more serious crimes? In one recent case, a police worker in Norfolk failed to respond to a 999 call by a man who said he had “lost the plot” and had a knife, before killing his two daughters and their aunt. The operator advised him to seek medical help, but did not dispatch officers. Police were only notified an hour later when a concerned dogwalker called.
With all this in mind, how can we be surprised when people start to take the law into their own hands? The vigilante passengers who wrestled the Tube flasher to the ground probably did a more effective job than the British Transport Police, who are infamously flakey when it comes to dealing with fare-dodgers and even outright assaults. In the UK (and especially London), it seems you’re more likely to be punished for hitting back against crime than actually committing it.
Crime Pays in Modern Britain
Image for illustration purposes only
Ganossi on Pixabay
You may also like
Hungary: Scapegoat for Western European Failure
When ‘liberal democracy’ becomes a suicide pact for one’s nation, you should not be surprised when people living in that nation prefer something different.
Owens vs. Macron: The French Side of an American War
In France, as in the United States, the anger of the ‘conspiracy theorists’ shows us the way.
The Soft Return of Blasphemy Laws
A teacher has been sacked for reminding his pupils that Britain is a Christian country.
In the UK today, it’s sometimes safer to be the criminal than the victim of crime.
Take the perplexing case of Rob Davies. In Wrexham, north Wales, the frustrated shopkeeper was told off by police for complaining about the scourge of thieves in the area. Davies, who runs a vintage clothing store, had resorted to displaying a sign in the shop window that read: “Due to scumbags shoplifting, please ask for assistance to open cabinets.” He explained to the Telegraph that, due to an increasing number of thefts, he was forced to lock away some of his goods. “Over the past year,” he said, “I have caught five people shoplifting. The first one I called the police and they handed the shirt back to me and let him go. Now I don’t bother reporting them and I have had to put locks on my cabinets.”
You might think the fact that local business owners are publicly lamenting growing lawlessness would prompt police into action. But Davies instead received a visit from North Wales Police, who told him to take his sign down in case branding shoplifters “scumbags” caused offence. Offence to who, exactly? Criminals? Davies said officers told him it was a member of the public who reported the sign. North Wales Police would later be forced to admit that calling criminals nasty names isn’t actually against the law.
Though it might not be a crime, Prime Minister Keir Starmer took umbrage with the wording used by Davies, too. When asked what the PM made of the situation, a spokesman at No.10 Downing Street said: “It is not the language I would directly use but we have been very clear through our actions we take shoplifting seriously, we understand the blight that shoplifting has on our high streets and local businesses.”
The Telegraph on Sunday also revealed that the Information Commissioner’s Office warned shop owners against putting up pictures of local thieves, in case it breaches data-protection rules. Apparently, the common practice of pasting wanted-style posters of particularly prolific shoplifters could be “inappropriate,” according to the data watchdog.
How seriously is the British state really taking shoplifting, or crime in general? Not very, it would seem. The UK feels plagued by low-level crime.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the nation’s capital. Also last week, a video went viral of a man exposing himself on a busy London Underground train last Thursday. In the footage, the man can be seen dropping his trousers in front of a carriage full of stunned passengers, including children. A group of male commuters stepped in, shouting at him to cover up. The flasher responded by repeatedly telling them to “fuck off” and began waving his belt around his head, still trouserless. The group of vigilante passengers proceeded to tackle him to the floor and a fight broke out, until the flasher was bundled off the train at the next station. He was reportedly put under arrest by an off-duty officer and was later detained under the Mental Health Act.
This is all bad enough. But the truly shocking part is that the passengers who tried to stop the erratic man are now wanted by the police and may face arrest. British Transport Police announced yesterday that they are officially investigating the passengers for assault.
This is a perverse moral inversion. Had I been on that train, I would have been relieved someone had stepped in. We’ve all seen far too many videos of lunatics ranting and raving on packed Tube carriages, sometimes even harassing or assaulting women, while fellow passengers either look on in horror or pretend not to see at all. The truth is, you have no idea what’s going to happen when someone who is clearly mentally ill exposes himself or threatens someone, especially in an enclosed space. Similarly, when a gang of masked men burst into a shop, shouting, looting the shelves and smashing bottles on the floor (a scenario I witnessed firsthand not that long ago), you have no idea if the situation is going to turn violent. In most cases, thankfully, no one is physically harmed. But there is never any guarantee that people like this won’t become aggressive and attack someone. Thank God there are still some out there who feel a sense of duty to step in when they see something potentially dangerous.
The same can’t be said for our actual police, who seem more interested in policing our tweets than our streets. Phone-snatching, for example, has become quasi-legalised in Britain. Despite practically everyone in the country now possessing a glorified tracking device in their pocket at all times, a pathetic 2% of mobile phone thefts in London are followed up by police. And given that one phone is stolen every 15 minutes in the nation’s capital, that’s a lot of lost banking data, payment methods, emails, passwords, and personal info. Around 80,000 every year, in fact.
The police have made it very clear that this kind of ‘petty’ crime is nowhere near their priority, and police are highly unlikely to respond to ‘low-value’ thefts. Even when cases are considerably higher stakes and there is clear evidence of the crime, it’s a lottery whether or not police will actually attend. One woman had £17,000 worth of handbags stolen from two of her shops in Surrey and Wimbledon and, although the perpetrators were caught on CCTV, police were entirely uninterested until she made a fuss on social media. Similarly, a couple had their Jaguar SUV stolen from outside their West London home, only to be told by Metropolitan Police that they were busy and didn’t know when they could investigate. Luckily, the couple had an AirTag inside their car that showed them the location, and they were able to ‘steal’ it back. One man who tracked his stolen bicycle to the building it was being kept in was told by police that they couldn’t possibly retrieve it, because they couldn’t go up stairs. He, too, was forced to go there and get the bike back himself.
This is far more serious than just fare-dodging, phone-snatching, and shoplifting. One writer in The Times this Monday described how a relative of a family friend was left hospitalised in a hit and run that the Met refused to properly investigate. This is despite another driver’s dashcam having captured the entire incident, number plate and all. Months after being handed the footage, police are yet to charge the driver or even interview any witnesses.
The result of police indifference is plummeting levels of trust. In London, just 40% of crimes are recorded. And of those, 40% of victims withdraw from the process altogether, largely because they just don’t believe anything will come of it. Why should they? Zak Asgard writes in the Telegraph: “Right now, there are 77,000 cases waiting to be heard. One hundred cases won’t go to trial until 2029. That’s four years until a victim—a person courageous enough to step forward—can experience any semblance of justice.”
Some may be quick to tell us that the statistics show there’s no such crimewave hitting Britain. But when foreign nations like France, Canada, Australia, and Mexico (yes, really) are advising its citizens to take extra care when visiting the UK, it might be worth taking this problem seriously. There’s no point reassuring people that knife crime is down, when phone-snatching and shoplifting (crimes that the average person is far more likely to be exposed to than gang-fuelled stabbings) are allowed to proliferate without consequence.
The fact remains that many people don’t feel safe. The increased visibility of crime combined with the lack of police response means that Britain feels far more lawless than it used to, even if the statistics don’t technically bear that out. If police are unwilling to do anything about a stolen car or a hit and run, how can you be sure they’ll do anything about far more serious crimes? In one recent case, a police worker in Norfolk failed to respond to a 999 call by a man who said he had “lost the plot” and had a knife, before killing his two daughters and their aunt. The operator advised him to seek medical help, but did not dispatch officers. Police were only notified an hour later when a concerned dogwalker called.
With all this in mind, how can we be surprised when people start to take the law into their own hands? The vigilante passengers who wrestled the Tube flasher to the ground probably did a more effective job than the British Transport Police, who are infamously flakey when it comes to dealing with fare-dodgers and even outright assaults. In the UK (and especially London), it seems you’re more likely to be punished for hitting back against crime than actually committing it.
Our community starts with you
READ NEXT
This British Government is Anti-British
A Confused Strasbourg Footballer Scores Globalism’s Own Goal
There’s Something Big Happening on the Brazilian Right