Murderous London is like old New York
By Janet Daley
(Filed: 01/12/2004)
What is happening to London? Where is the cheerful, relaxed, "swinging" city that I found when I arrived in the 1960s? That was when Chelsea meant the King's Road scene and "debs" (as they were called then) living in what everybody regarded as an enclave of sheltered privilege.
Now there has been a murderous attack, at an early hour of the evening, inside one of those very homes that would be regarded as almost ethereally superior. In Notting Hill, they have grown accustomed to being mugged. That is a neighbourhood which, for all its status, is euphemistically described as "mixed". You have your good restaurants and your local dinner-party circuit, but you pay for your chic address by avoiding the Tube station at night.
Up the road in Holland Park, some friends of mine have installed electronic security gates outside their house, but that did not prevent a laptop computer - containing irreplaceable research - from being stolen from their car in the drive. Over in Islington, they pretty much expect to be burgled.
It goes with the cool urban territory. But somehow Cheyne Row in Chelsea still seemed like another league. If that kind of wealth and influence can't buy you protection from a bestial attack, then who is safe? What chance for the poor on their sink estates who are being terrorised by the local drug gangs, or the middle-class suburban homeowners trying to avoid the routine loss of their possessions in opportunistic break-ins?
There was a time, not so long ago, when the wealthy inhabitants of New York's Upper East Side used to walk out of their Fifth Avenue apartment buildings with a dog on a lead on one arm and a bodyguard on the other. On the Upper West Side, one Columbia University professor told me, they did not lock their cars at night because the homeless used them to sleep in: if vagrants had to go to the trouble of breaking into your car, they would take their revenge by urinating (or worse) on the upholstery. You were better off just accommodating their wishes.
Crack cocaine was openly sold on the street in Harlem, and the subway was so dangerous that an army of vigilantes with red berets had taken it upon themselves to try to restore order where the police had given up. Property values, even in this fabulously prosperous city, were in free-fall. Well, we all know what happened next. Somebody had a brilliant idea that turned the old theory about how to deal with a major crime epidemic on its head.
Paradoxically, the way you confronted big crime was by dealing persistently and rigorously with little crime. It was James Q Wilson's now legendary "broken windows" hypothesis which stated that when a neighbourhood, or a city, had become rundown and uncared-for - when its buildings and trains were covered in graffiti, its streets strewn with rubbish, and its youth allowed to indulge in flagrant displays of delinquent bravado - a climate was created in which serious crimes such as murder and robbery could run amok.
And so, as William Bratton, the now deified ex-police chief of New York, says, they "took the city back block by block". They power-hosed the graffiti and banged up the street-corner drug pushers. They arrested the young hoodlums who regularly jumped over the subway turnstiles without paying a fare (and who turned out, as often as not, to be big operators carrying illegal weapons).
They speeded up the prosecutions of everybody they caught with all-night court sittings (some of them held on travelling courts bused around the city at night). They got uniformed police on to the streets as a visible deterrent, and undercover ones into the trouble spots to gain intelligence and take criminals by surprise. (If you are, by some remote chance, approached by an unsavoury character in New York now, you are likely to find yourself quickly surrounded by plain-clothes police who will seem to have materialised from nowhere.)
They got a grip. And they succeeded because somebody had a counter-intuitive idea (crack down on the small offences even though you are worried about the big ones). Then some other people - the Manhattan Institute think tank - had the foresight and the intellectual initiative to sell the idea.
Then a mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, had the courage to endorse the idea and stake his political credibility on it. Then a tirelessly dedicated police chief put the idea into practice, even though it meant flying in the face of all the liberal received wisdom about softly-softly justice and not "criminalising" people who had committed minor offences, blah-blah-blah.
You will have noticed that this is precisely the opposite of what is happening here. Try ringing the police to tell them about an act of vandalism that is going on before your eyes and you will be treated with scarcely concealed ridicule: we've got more important things to worry about than some kids smashing up a building site. Never mind that the kids who have got away with that are likely to conclude that they can get away with pretty much anything.
Now New Yorkers have their city back and we are losing ours. And yesterday's horrific news showed the extent to which we are all in this together, from the derelict council estates in Tower Hamlets to millionaires' row in Chelsea. When I spoke to Bratton a couple of years ago, his proudest boast was that they had brought normal social life back to Harlem.
Most of the population used to stay in at night up there, he said. They just left the streets to the bad guys with their guns and their drug turf wars. But now, there were restaurants and night clubs and movie theatres where ordinary decent people went for a good time in the evening. They have been freed from fear all the way from the Battery to the top of Park Avenue. When is it our turn?
By Janet Daley
(Filed: 01/12/2004)
What is happening to London? Where is the cheerful, relaxed, "swinging" city that I found when I arrived in the 1960s? That was when Chelsea meant the King's Road scene and "debs" (as they were called then) living in what everybody regarded as an enclave of sheltered privilege.
Now there has been a murderous attack, at an early hour of the evening, inside one of those very homes that would be regarded as almost ethereally superior. In Notting Hill, they have grown accustomed to being mugged. That is a neighbourhood which, for all its status, is euphemistically described as "mixed". You have your good restaurants and your local dinner-party circuit, but you pay for your chic address by avoiding the Tube station at night.
Up the road in Holland Park, some friends of mine have installed electronic security gates outside their house, but that did not prevent a laptop computer - containing irreplaceable research - from being stolen from their car in the drive. Over in Islington, they pretty much expect to be burgled.
It goes with the cool urban territory. But somehow Cheyne Row in Chelsea still seemed like another league. If that kind of wealth and influence can't buy you protection from a bestial attack, then who is safe? What chance for the poor on their sink estates who are being terrorised by the local drug gangs, or the middle-class suburban homeowners trying to avoid the routine loss of their possessions in opportunistic break-ins?
There was a time, not so long ago, when the wealthy inhabitants of New York's Upper East Side used to walk out of their Fifth Avenue apartment buildings with a dog on a lead on one arm and a bodyguard on the other. On the Upper West Side, one Columbia University professor told me, they did not lock their cars at night because the homeless used them to sleep in: if vagrants had to go to the trouble of breaking into your car, they would take their revenge by urinating (or worse) on the upholstery. You were better off just accommodating their wishes.
Crack cocaine was openly sold on the street in Harlem, and the subway was so dangerous that an army of vigilantes with red berets had taken it upon themselves to try to restore order where the police had given up. Property values, even in this fabulously prosperous city, were in free-fall. Well, we all know what happened next. Somebody had a brilliant idea that turned the old theory about how to deal with a major crime epidemic on its head.
Paradoxically, the way you confronted big crime was by dealing persistently and rigorously with little crime. It was James Q Wilson's now legendary "broken windows" hypothesis which stated that when a neighbourhood, or a city, had become rundown and uncared-for - when its buildings and trains were covered in graffiti, its streets strewn with rubbish, and its youth allowed to indulge in flagrant displays of delinquent bravado - a climate was created in which serious crimes such as murder and robbery could run amok.
And so, as William Bratton, the now deified ex-police chief of New York, says, they "took the city back block by block". They power-hosed the graffiti and banged up the street-corner drug pushers. They arrested the young hoodlums who regularly jumped over the subway turnstiles without paying a fare (and who turned out, as often as not, to be big operators carrying illegal weapons).
They speeded up the prosecutions of everybody they caught with all-night court sittings (some of them held on travelling courts bused around the city at night). They got uniformed police on to the streets as a visible deterrent, and undercover ones into the trouble spots to gain intelligence and take criminals by surprise. (If you are, by some remote chance, approached by an unsavoury character in New York now, you are likely to find yourself quickly surrounded by plain-clothes police who will seem to have materialised from nowhere.)
They got a grip. And they succeeded because somebody had a counter-intuitive idea (crack down on the small offences even though you are worried about the big ones). Then some other people - the Manhattan Institute think tank - had the foresight and the intellectual initiative to sell the idea.
Then a mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, had the courage to endorse the idea and stake his political credibility on it. Then a tirelessly dedicated police chief put the idea into practice, even though it meant flying in the face of all the liberal received wisdom about softly-softly justice and not "criminalising" people who had committed minor offences, blah-blah-blah.
You will have noticed that this is precisely the opposite of what is happening here. Try ringing the police to tell them about an act of vandalism that is going on before your eyes and you will be treated with scarcely concealed ridicule: we've got more important things to worry about than some kids smashing up a building site. Never mind that the kids who have got away with that are likely to conclude that they can get away with pretty much anything.
Now New Yorkers have their city back and we are losing ours. And yesterday's horrific news showed the extent to which we are all in this together, from the derelict council estates in Tower Hamlets to millionaires' row in Chelsea. When I spoke to Bratton a couple of years ago, his proudest boast was that they had brought normal social life back to Harlem.
Most of the population used to stay in at night up there, he said. They just left the streets to the bad guys with their guns and their drug turf wars. But now, there were restaurants and night clubs and movie theatres where ordinary decent people went for a good time in the evening. They have been freed from fear all the way from the Battery to the top of Park Avenue. When is it our turn?
Source: the Weekly Telegraph, London.
Strangely, the rise in crime in England — as well as Janet Daley's lamented London — coincides with the implementation of strict gun control laws.
Strangely, the rise in crime in England — as well as Janet Daley's lamented London — coincides with the implementation of strict gun control laws.
by Sorry, but it's the truth. January 07, 2005
Taking away guns won't reduce murders. Shit, you can kill someone with your bare hands if you really wanted him dead!
by Paul Thundergod June 27, 2003
1. A term often misunderstood as to meaning the control the appropriation, selling and accquisition of firearms.
2. Applying proper use to a firearm, as to be able to accurately accquire and dispatch hostile targets.
2. Applying proper use to a firearm, as to be able to accurately accquire and dispatch hostile targets.
Some people say gun control is the only thing keeping the nation safe from crimes. I say that *MY* gun control is the only thing preventing people from committing acts of crime on me.
by Gunslave April 30, 2003
1. The generic term for the overarching set of laws in a given locality setting limits and/or restrictions on individual gun ownership.
2. The NRA's pet cause, and the reason most toothless rural inbreds hate liberals in addition to their tolerance of gays and belief in science.
3. A cornerstone of progressive liberal social policy, ostensibly to reduce violent gun crimes. Unfortunately founded on the premises that inanimate objects bear responsibility for the actions of the people who obtain and use them, and that criminals would simply just obey laws forbidding them to own guns.
2. The NRA's pet cause, and the reason most toothless rural inbreds hate liberals in addition to their tolerance of gays and belief in science.
3. A cornerstone of progressive liberal social policy, ostensibly to reduce violent gun crimes. Unfortunately founded on the premises that inanimate objects bear responsibility for the actions of the people who obtain and use them, and that criminals would simply just obey laws forbidding them to own guns.
In European countries with strict gun control, both the assault and homicide rate from gun related violence is significantly lower than countries with more relaxed policies.
"Liberals want to take your guns away so terrorists can attack you in your homes and churches without you being able to fight back."
Liberals want gun buyers to be checked against a terrorist watch list. The NRA opposes this proposal.
"Liberals want to take your guns away so terrorists can attack you in your homes and churches without you being able to fight back."
Liberals want gun buyers to be checked against a terrorist watch list. The NRA opposes this proposal.
by Elias Creed May 11, 2007
Limiting access to firearms or outright banning firearms is an extremely foolish idea. I understand that such acts are intended to prevent violent crimes, but they do not. Such acts only limits a law-abiding citizen's ability to protect himself, his family, and his property. A criminal, WHO INTENDS TO BREAK THE LAW ANYWAY, will not have any compunction about illegally obtaining firearms or obtaining illegal firearms.
Keep in mind that when the second amendment refers to "a well-regulated militia" it means "a group of citizens formed to defend its community" not "the United States military." This is confirmed by the fact that the second part of the second amendment begins "the right of the people..." not "the right of the military!"
Furthermore, Federal gun control laws are inherently unconstitutional because they violate a state's rights. Remember the Tenth Amendment? The Federal government does not!
Keep in mind that when the second amendment refers to "a well-regulated militia" it means "a group of citizens formed to defend its community" not "the United States military." This is confirmed by the fact that the second part of the second amendment begins "the right of the people..." not "the right of the military!"
Furthermore, Federal gun control laws are inherently unconstitutional because they violate a state's rights. Remember the Tenth Amendment? The Federal government does not!
All citizens should be allowed easy access to firearms. Furthermore, every state in the U.S.A. should pass "shoot the burglar" laws. Would you break into someone's house if you knew there was a good possibility the owner would shoot you? i wouldn't!
Of course, I will not attempt to argue with you gun control advocates who disagree with the facts. Your disregard for reason and factual information is enough of an argument against you. While you cannot help forming an opinion, that does not mean your opinion is right.
Of course, I will not attempt to argue with you gun control advocates who disagree with the facts. Your disregard for reason and factual information is enough of an argument against you. While you cannot help forming an opinion, that does not mean your opinion is right.
by Terra Imperator May 26, 2004
Also, maintaining control of your gun (i.e. muzzle control) as to ensure the barrel is not pointed in anybody's direction, ever, even when it's unloaded; and yet you can still manuever it to hit game when the opportunity arises. Excercising proper gun control is important because when you're out in the field, you need to be able to remain safe because that is the most important part of using any firearm. That and it's usually a good 50 miles to the nearest hospital and nobody needs a bellyfull of #7 steel shot.
Proper muzzle control is accomplished by making sure you are always 100% in control of where you aim your gun's muzzle and that it isn't pointed at any human, road, vehicle, or house (with rifles, do not point it at a house even miles away). The safest place to point a gun is down, at the ground, or up and away from anyone. Also, don't put your finger on the trigger until you are literally going to shoot the game in the next instant. This saves lives.
Proper muzzle control is accomplished by making sure you are always 100% in control of where you aim your gun's muzzle and that it isn't pointed at any human, road, vehicle, or house (with rifles, do not point it at a house even miles away). The safest place to point a gun is down, at the ground, or up and away from anyone. Also, don't put your finger on the trigger until you are literally going to shoot the game in the next instant. This saves lives.
Bob exercised poor gun control. He got two pheasants, a grouse, and a quail. And his buddy Ted's GMC Yukon Denali XL.
Ted exercised good gun control. He got three pheasants and a sparrow that got in the way. And $6000 to repair his SUV.
Ted exercised good gun control. He got three pheasants and a sparrow that got in the way. And $6000 to repair his SUV.
by Demon Phoenix 1337... again... December 14, 2004
One of the stupidest things the liberals are trying to force on this country. They say they want to do it to stop violent crime but it's stop law-abiding citizens from protecting themselves. Plus even if guns are banned it's not going to stop violent crimes. I mean a criminal does things illegally so if guns are banned they're just going to get them illegally from the black market. So there that puts citizens at an even bigger risk.
Gun control is just going to end up making law-abiding citizens defenseless against violent criminals.
by nathan676 March 09, 2008