BOLD AS BRASS (Crime in the U.K.)

[Snowden]

BOLD AS BRASS

Steyn on Britain and Europe

Wednesday, 28 November 2007

HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review

The other week, in Wednesbury in the English Midlands, an unusual crime occurred. A thief passed down a residential street and methodically stole every single front door handle and house number. The victims discovered the burglary when they tried to leave their homes and found the door no longer opened. An Englishman’s home may be his castle but if you can’t let down the drawbridge it’s indistinguishable from a dungeon.

Trying to get a, er, handle on property crime in the United Kingdom is a problematic business. Why would anyone steal door knockers? Well, there’s a construction boom in India and China. Demand for lead is higher than at any time since 1980 and the price of copper has quadrupled in two years. And in a globalized market place that hasn’t escaped the attention of Britain’s criminal gangs, for whom “scrap metal” has become a far more lucrative proposition than it might once have been. According to The Times of London, this summer 19 schools had their roofs stolen. What’s the point of locking your valuables when the lock itself – and the handle and the hinges – is suddenly valuable? Eighty manhole covers were recently stolen from the streets of Gloucester. And don’t bother warning the criminals that if they carry on like this they’ll wind up in court, because they’ve already been there: The magistrates’ court in West Bromwich now leaks because metal thieves stole the lead from the courthouse roof.

An element of organization is required to steal, say, a schoolhouse roof. But not the brass street number on a front door. So naturally junkies and other ne’er-do-wells in need of a few quid are happy to half-inch (Cockney rhyming slang for “pinch”) any brass doorbell they happen to pass by, and shop it to illegal metal dealers. Social decay is not without its moments of innovation, if only in its pioneering of crimes one had hitherto never imagined. You could get a guard dog, but he’ll only attract the attention of the dog thieves who’ve created an epidemic of canine crime in Britain. The lethargic constabulary are forming the usual task forces and whatnot to examine the problem of metal crime, and perhaps some enterprising fellow even now is developing retinal-scan technology that will render the handsome brass door knocker obsolete.

But that won’t solve the problem so much as divert it down other creative avenues. Americans who’ve taken a job for a year or two in Britain often express to me – after the usual appreciation for the castles and the Royal Shakespeare Company - their amazement at the relentlessness of the criminal assault. You rent a home in a leafy upscale suburb, have a pleasant supper on the patio your first evening, and wake up the following morning to find your garden furniture’s missing. The coppers are unsympathetic: they’ll sigh at your naivete for leaving your lawn furniture on the lawn. Likewise, if your car radio’s stolen, it’s your fault for leaving it in the car: you should remove it and take it with you, and then put it back in the vehicle when you want to listen to it, like folks did way back when they propped the prototype transistor radios on the dashboard. As for all the cellphone crime, well, it wouldn’t happen if people were sensible and just kept their mobile telephones at home – say, on a table in the hall or kitchen or some other central location where it could be answered without having to move it around all the time.

But “crime prevention” measures cannot in and of themselves prevent crime. When I lived in England, not so long ago, one of the minor pleasures of rural life was walking across a couple of fields, along a public footpath through a copse, discovering a small medieval country church, and going inside to contemplate the divine for a few minutes. In those days, the churches were unlocked. They’re not anymore. Presumably there were local lads who would steal from the Lord even then, but not a significant segment of the population who targeted houses of worship. So today there’s wire mesh over the beautiful (one assumes) stained glass to stop thieves pinching the lead from the windows. It’s a small loss, but a telling one. The police have no leads, and the buildings have no lead. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it was stolen last Thursday.

Back in the Seventies, it was discovered that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were illegally burning the barns of Quebec separatists. And the then Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, remarked with his customary glibness that if people were upset by the illegal barn-burning perhaps he’d make it legal for the Mounties to burn barns. As George Jonas observed, M. Trudeau had missed the point: barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong. Once that distinction is lost, civil society becomes all but impossible – because a broadly agreed morality plays a big role in social cohesion. Today in the western world, more and more things are illegal but we’re less and less clear what’s wrong. And everywhere but America, where any metal thief who attempts to steal your doorknob risks staggering away with at least as much metal lodged in his vital organs as in his swag bag, the state doesn’t trust its citizens to defend their property and in doing so uphold what’s right.

Britain’s metal crime is a poignant image of social disintegration: The very infrastructure of society – the manhole covers, the pipes, the cables on the transportation system, the fittings of the courthouse – is being cannibalized and melted down. When there’s no longer a sufficiently strong moral consensus and when the state actively disapproves of a self-reliant citizenry, what’s left is the law. And law detached from any other social pillars is not enough, and never can be.

from National Review



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