Passing the baton
Anastasia De Waal, 19 February 2010
New statistics on knife crime this week showed that children as young as 10, the minimum age of criminal responsibility, were taken to court last year accused of knife crime offences.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, all the youths involved are residents of areas with particularly high rates of violent crime and specifically knife crime.
Concurrently, The Sun ran a story about an 11-year-old with over 50 arrests under his belt. After plaguing his South London suburb with his joyriding, the boy has been relocated to a new children’s home: in an area notorious for vehicle crime. Croydon council, the boy’s former residence, had found itself ultimately powerless because in spite of the child being behind virtually every vehicle offence in the area, in view of his tender age sentencing laws did not allow courts to follow up his arrests.
While The Sun termed the decision to move the boy to a ‘car crime Mecca’ ‘daft’. Indeed, regardless of the type of crime, someone with a predilection to offend is more likely to acquiesce to impulses to do so in an environment where anti-social behaviour pervades.
Croydon council care officials, however, have opted to keep crime concentrated in specific areas in which the police force are already au fait (read=overloaded), rather than risk it spreading across lower-crime areas. In the words of Croydon Sergeant Paul Potter, “We wish Essex all the best in dealing with him”.
A telling statement: Croydon are happy to pass the baton onto Essex, ostensibly without much consideration for the boy in question’s future. Still pre-teen and already with a dismal record, he will now be exposed to even more opportunity to keep offending, with even less scope to move away from crime and improve his life prospects.
Might the offender in this case become as much a victim of the system as his resident communities? The Sun is not misguided in drawing attention to the discrepancy of a child being repeatedly arrested without being convicted. The Criminal Justice System is delivering a mixed message of zero-tolerance alongside tolerance by proxy of subjection. Only by deciding once and for all whether to pursue a zero-tolerance approach when dealing with youth offending, or advocating a more lenient ‘many cautions and arrests first’ tactic, will the implications of offending become clear, to perpetrators, police and victims alike. As ever, the crux of the problem is a lack of consistency in crime policy.
By Lara Natale