I'm British, living in the UK. Is this an argument to say that we need more police on the streets all the time? Completely at odds with the Defund The Police movement.
In the UK we have a rapidly rising problem with shop lifting especially in London and the cities. The police here do nothing. There are even some politicians who say that Shop Lifting is not really a crime. But I think you ignore it at your peril.
On a slightly different slant, you've probably read about our issue with free speech especially on social media. People are being arrested for what many people call hurty-words crime. If you offend someone by a tweet and they complain to the police you might expect a knock on the door. It is sometimes recorded by the police as what they call a non-crime hate incident. The argument for it, they say, is that such 'hate speech' is a forerunner of actual crime and should be controlled and recorded.
Oh, Yookay, motherland of common law and constitutionalism.
The torrential stream of developments, day to day, in Britain is a lot to keep up with.
I do keep up with commentaries from various sources including Spiked!, UnHerd and (sometimes) The Critic. On X I track some Guardian-adjacent content providers (the Observer, the Guardian itself, others). I enjoy Katie Hopkins's daily updates, the often-bawdy "Batsh** Bonkers Britain" sketches, and I ponder the fates of Russell Brand and the "Yax".
Meanwhile, one thing I am getting out of my exploration in the Trump experiement in DC is that maybe we do not so much need more personnel (maybe we do), but we need to deal with people who distinguish themselves as very antisocial. And these very antisocial people tend to commit a lot of petty crime in addition to committing most of the really bad crime. So, these kinds of people will likely be "known to police." My policy suggestion would be: Once these people make themselves "known," then find ways to keep them off the streets. The "three-strikes laws" in the United States in the early 1990's likely achieved just that.
Now, folks might worry that the three-strikes may be too harsh. They may ensnare too many people who really shouldn't be in prison. So, how about a six-strikes law? Would that virtually erase the "false positives" that critics of "three-strikes laws" worry about?
I'm British, living in the UK. Is this an argument to say that we need more police on the streets all the time? Completely at odds with the Defund The Police movement.
In the UK we have a rapidly rising problem with shop lifting especially in London and the cities. The police here do nothing. There are even some politicians who say that Shop Lifting is not really a crime. But I think you ignore it at your peril.
On a slightly different slant, you've probably read about our issue with free speech especially on social media. People are being arrested for what many people call hurty-words crime. If you offend someone by a tweet and they complain to the police you might expect a knock on the door. It is sometimes recorded by the police as what they call a non-crime hate incident. The argument for it, they say, is that such 'hate speech' is a forerunner of actual crime and should be controlled and recorded.
Oh, Yookay, motherland of common law and constitutionalism.
The torrential stream of developments, day to day, in Britain is a lot to keep up with.
I do keep up with commentaries from various sources including Spiked!, UnHerd and (sometimes) The Critic. On X I track some Guardian-adjacent content providers (the Observer, the Guardian itself, others). I enjoy Katie Hopkins's daily updates, the often-bawdy "Batsh** Bonkers Britain" sketches, and I ponder the fates of Russell Brand and the "Yax".
Meanwhile, one thing I am getting out of my exploration in the Trump experiement in DC is that maybe we do not so much need more personnel (maybe we do), but we need to deal with people who distinguish themselves as very antisocial. And these very antisocial people tend to commit a lot of petty crime in addition to committing most of the really bad crime. So, these kinds of people will likely be "known to police." My policy suggestion would be: Once these people make themselves "known," then find ways to keep them off the streets. The "three-strikes laws" in the United States in the early 1990's likely achieved just that.
Now, folks might worry that the three-strikes may be too harsh. They may ensnare too many people who really shouldn't be in prison. So, how about a six-strikes law? Would that virtually erase the "false positives" that critics of "three-strikes laws" worry about?