Right on cue

norman dennis, 2 January 2005

On New Year’s Eve I posted an essay in which I predicted what the academic reaction to Cultures and Crimes would be.
Right on cue, Professor Mike Hough, the Director of Criminal Policy Research at King’s College, London, is quoted in the Observer this morning as saying that “This is nonsense. Academics mostly [sic]agree that crime in the UK rose in the early 1990s”.
He only goes so far as to say that academics “mostly” agree that crime was rising in the early 1990s. As I say it was, he can only think that the book is nonsense on that point if he is not among the academics who are now willing to concede that crime was rising, even if only “in the early 1990s”. He doesn’t tell us.
The book makes clear that from the early 1990s that the criminological and social policy establishment tended to drop the rhetoric of “moral panic” and admit that crime was then rising.
It had dawned on them that the rise in crime could be blamed on the harm that Mrs Thatcher did to 1980s’ Britain. But what Professor Hough elides is a core issue: the long period of denial that crime was rising rapidly before (and long before) the 1980s and 1990s.
Is the book nonsense when it says that crime did surge from 1955? Again, Professor Hough is silent.
Professor Hough says that crime peaked around 1995 and has been falling ever since. The book makes quite clear that general crime did fall from the mid-1990s. Professor Hough can’t think that bit of the book is nonsense, either, then.
Crimes that were most capable of being controlled by the security measures of householders and manufacturers themselves did peak around 1995 and have been falling ever since. The book gives the statistics that confirm this.
But one of the main points of the book is that crimes the control of which depended largely upon the effectiveness of the police soared away, until the robbery figure of 121,000 in 2001/02 at long last acted as Britain’s wake-up call. Professor Hough ignores this crucial fact. It is a fact that is at the very heart of the book’s argument.
The spokesperson of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), following no doubt his or her careful study of the book, provides what I called in my essay “contentless” criticism in its purest form. The book, according to the spokesperson, uses conflicting evidence to draw simplistic conclusions. What conflicting evidence? What simplistic conclusions?
The Association of Chief Police Officers, the Observer blandly reports, has reacted “with fury”. The Observer, usually alert to such things, makes no comment on the fact that “criticism” of this sort from the most senior police officers in the country is a little unsettling.
The book is “a criticism of the police” only in sense that it argues that the deterioration of the ratio of police officers to crimes, and the diminution of the rights protecting victims as compared with the rights protecting perpetrators, has made it sociologically impossible for the police to engage in effective crime prevention on the old Peelite model.
Police officers are bound to be stuck at their desks for long periods filling out forms, and talk about “beat policing” anything remotely as dense as it was up to the later 1960s, on present “record” police numbers (they are at a record) cannot be anything but moonshine.
As for the Home Office … “The risk of being a victim is the lowest since records began.” Well, who could have possibly worked that one out from the Home Office’s figures?