The myth of Zero tolerance

What connects a Scout leader from Manchester with an American presidential candidate?

As strange as it may seem the case of Kathleen Jenkins, a student, scout leader and general model citizen who has received a criminal conviction for putting her feet up on the seat of a train carriage is symptomatic of the way that the wrong conclusions have been drawn from Rudy Giuliani’s battle against crime in the Big Apple. Too much emphasis has been placed on the importance of so called ‘zero tolerance policing,’ the result has been that many policy makers have started to see a focus on minor infractions as a panacea for reducing crime. This has spawned a rash of bad policy, not least Labour’s war on anti-social behaviour.

Zero tolerance policing has its roots in ‘the broken windows’ theory of James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. They sought to show that if police were to maintain order then they could not afford to ignore apparently minor crimes. The theory takes its name from a particularly persuasive example the authors produced: "Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.”

The problem with this theory is not so much that its wrong but that it doesn’t get you very far. It is one thing to say that the police should tackle minor crimes, it is quite another to do it. The experience of New York shows how making the decision to implement a zero tolerance policy is far less important than having the means to implement it.

The reduction in crime during Giuliani’s time as mayor is indeed startling. In 1993 there 2420 murders, by 2002 that number had fallen to 909. It is certainly worthy of examination and imitation. What is surprising is how little of the reduction was down to zero tolerance. The drop did not even begin in Giuliani’s term but in that of his predecessor, David Dinkins. Zero tolerance was the brainchild of Giuliani and his police chief William Bratton and was not implemented until they came to power and is therefore highly unlikely to be responsible for the drop in crime.

If not zero tolerance then what? The (in)famous economist and author of ‘Freakonomics’ Steven J. Levitt, examined the drop in crime in New York and concluded that the major factor behind it was a massive increase in the size of the NYPD, which had begun under Dinkins. Put simply having more cops meant that the police were able to catch more crooks.

My local police force is currently so understaffed and consequently overstretched that it often struggles to investigate even fairly serious crimes like theft and burglary. They would only be able to begin tracking down litterlouts by ignoring other more unpleasant crimes. As long as police are forced to prioritise they will never be able to implement zero tolerance effectively.

This is not something our present government seems to have understood. While not giving the police the funding to recruit the officers they need to do their job effectively they have launched endless ineffective crackdowns on anti-social behaviour. The problems with these crackdowns is that they have started from the basis that what was needed was to punish minor infractions rather than a police force that was able to effectively enforce the law.

Apart from leading the government down a blind alley in terms of reducing crime, it has also had an alarming impact on our civil liberties. The search for ever more minor crimes to punish has had lead to criminalisation of many activities such as putting your feet up on the seat of a train that are annoying or distasteful rather than genuinely harmful. This phenomenon is described by Kathryn Hughes in an article for the Guardian:

There is a grave misunderstanding at the heart of all the cross-party rhetoric about stamping down on "yob culture". (Blair may have started it, but Boris Johnson was frothing it up nicely at the launch of his mayoral bid on Monday with that stirring promise to stamp out "casual ... incivility".) Yobbery may seem like an absolute condition, an obvious sin, the kind of thing on which all right-thinking people can agree as they scuttle terrified past a group of hoodies at a bus stop. But the fact is that it is a relative state, dependent on context. One person's loutishness is another's idea of chilling. Or to put it another way, yobbery is what other people do.

The police should deal with low-level crime but not for the reason that the proponents of zero tolerance propose. Only a minority of us will be murdered, raped or maimed but almost all of us will be victims of low level. These crimes have a real impact on many people’s quality of life and their perpetrators have been encouraged by the knowledge that an overstretched police force will be able to do little to stop them. What we need to tackle this blight is not more laws but more police.

The murder kingdom

In an earlier post on Venezuela I mentioned something about Chavez's regime presiding over 'rising crime.' This turns out to be something of an understatement.

The murder rate has tripled under Hugo Chavez, so that now Venezuela has the highest murder rate in the world. So much for the socialist utopia.

Hat tip: Prospect magazine's fact and figures column.

Blinded by empathy

The strategy we are pursuing to protect children is flawed because we misunderstand the nature of the danger they face. A series of high profile but atypical cases have led us to give too great an emphasis to the threat posed to children by strangers and not enough to the threat from their own family.

When I was at primary school, we were constantly warned about 'stranger danger.' This campaign was inspired in part by the murder of Jamie Bulger which had happened a few years before hand. The problem with this is that children are far more likely to be at risk from people they know.

The Home offices figures on homicides amongst the under-16s show that nearly half of them were committed by the victims parents and that an individual is three times as likely to be murder by someone they know than by a stranger. Even these figures do not tell the whole story because if you were to take out teenagers then the portion killed by strangers would fall still further.

Yet it is not the stories of children suffering at the hands of their families that makes the headlines. The murders of the Sarah Payne, Holy Wells and Jessica Chapman and now presumably Madeline McCan are all examples of the minority of cases where the killer is a stranger. This is probably because these cases play to the fears: many parents worry that they will be unable to protect their children, few fear that they will themselves be the source of the danger. It is far easier to comprehend some twisted stranger murdering a child than someone is supposed to love and protect them doing so.

This may be an unavoidable part of life but media attention should not be allowed to dictate public policy or public perception in the way that it all too often does. The revulsion at the murder of Sarah Payne led to demands led to demands for a 'Sarah's law' that would give the public information on the whereabouts of registered sex offenders. Such a law is undesirable for a number of reasons: it encourages vigilante violence, it makes it harder to rehabilitate offenders but worst of all it encourages people to see pedophiles as the 'stranger danger' and consequently lowers our vigilance towards the danger from friends and family.

It is too easy to get pulled in by individual cases. The unfolding tragedy in Portugal is just the latest heart wrenching tale that can distort our view and lead us to make bad judgments about what we should be doing to protect children.

Update: This story has rather been overtaken by events. I think that my main point still stands even if the particular example may not.

The Banality of Evil

On the 11th April 1961, Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity. It could legitimately be described as the trial of the century. The man who organised the holocaust being put on trial by the people he had tried to destroy. The New Yorker magazine asked the philosopher, Hannah Ardent, to cover the trial. What she found was not a fanatic or a sadist or a psychopath but an ordinary, almost boring person playing by the rules of the society in which he lived. He was so apparently normal, that Ardent subtitled her classic account of the trial: 'report on the banality of evil.'

A similar feeling seems to have struck Observer columnist, Jasper Gerard while following the trial of Chris Langham. In todays Observer, he examines how it is possible that Langham 'is not the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang of red-top demonisation' but a man 'into carbon offsetting and charity fun runs.' He concludes that we need to comprehend as well as condemn, if we are to prevent people from turning into abusers.

The need to look into what causes people to commit unspeakable acts was underlined by an experiment conducted a few months after Eichmann's trial. A psychologist named Stanley Millgram wanted to find out if men like Eichmann could really have committed mass murder simply because they were following orders. A volunteer is presented with a 'teacher' asking questions of a 'student' (apparently another volunteer but in reality a member of the research team.) Every time the 'student' gets one of the questions wrong, the 'teacher' orders the volunteer to administer a large electronic shock to the 'student.' The results were startling; rather than as might be expected disobeying an order to cause another human being considerable pain, it appears that if an authority figure tells us to do something that in most cases we will obey.

This fundamentally altered our view of the perpetrators of the holocaust. It suggested that many, perhaps most of us, would in certain circumstances be willing to participate in an atrocity. This is not for a minute to excuse anybody. Just because we choose not to say no does not mean that we shouldn't. What it does do is force us to consider more complicated and more ambiguous explanations of how the holocaust came about. It forces us to examine how a situation came about, where mass murder was not only considered socially acceptable but to be civic duty.

To dismiss people like Eichmann and Langham as monsters is an understandable impulse, it allows us to avoid the uncomfortable truth that they are humans just like us. It is, however, a mistake because it allows us to forget that monsters are made not born and that the only way we can unmake them is to understand them. As distasteful a process as that may be.

Commander Crackpot for Mayor

It was an awfully nice idea. When Tony Blair created the office of mayor of London, he imagined that it would attract a new kind of politician, able to provide the city with visionary leadership. Instead the choice that Londoners will be presented with next year is between two distinctly unappealing examples of the old kind of politics. In the red corner, an apologist for Islamic extremism and in the blue, a reactionary buffoon who can barely read the autoque on have I got news for you.
I do not envy Londoners having to choose between them.

In these circumstances, the often asked question, what are the Liberal Democrats for? answers itself. The shear awfulness of the candidates from the major parties presents us with a unique opportunity to pull off a massive electoral upset. But this would require us to put forward a very strong candidate. This is something we have so far failed to do. We have already had to reopen to our selection once and the suggestions for candidates are getting odder and odder. So far only one candidate has been suggested who can really take on the gruesome twosome. That candidate is Deputy Assistant Commisioner Brian Paddick.

Paddick is one of Britain's most high profile police officers. As the Met's commander in the London Borough of Lambeth he oversaw a controversial but highly successful 'softly-softly' approach to possession of Cannabis, which paved the way for the reclassification of Cannabis as a Class C drug. He was a prominent figure in the response to the 21st July bombings. He is the most senior openly gay police officer. He is not a universally popular figure; the Daily Mail christened him Commander Crackpot for his comment that 'Anarchy held a certain appeal to him' and he was accused (and cleared) of taking drugs.

This background would help Paddick to overcome many of the problems that tend to afflict any Lib Dem. To the accusation that we are soft on crime, we could hit back with the fact that our candidate is a long serving and successful police officer. To the suggestion that we are a bunch of nice but woolly minded people who can't actually run anything, we could respond that our candidate had plenty of experience of management from his time in the police. Paddick's profile may not be as high as Ken and Boris's but it is still substantial and would go a long way to overcoming the perception that we can't win. He is certainly more recognisable than any of the other potential non-Lembit candidates.

The objections I would normally have to a police officer being a Lib Dem candidate, do not apply in Paddick's case. The stereotype of the authoritarian, socially conservative plod evidently does not apply to Paddick. I would also usually be concerned about how effective a communicator a police candidate would be but again this objection does not possibly apply. I do not think anyone could accuse Paddick of being camera shy and he has a reputation as a talented public speaker. A colleague said of him: "When he spoke at a meeting in the town hall in Brixton, it was the first time the community gave a senior police officer a standing ovation. He had them rolling around in peals of laughter with the borough commander rather than at the borough commander. He is a warm and friendly person, very human. He builds confidence, people trust him."

Paddick standing would pose serious problems for Boris Johnson because it would expose many of his weaknesses. I imagine that the targeted letter to Conservative supporters would have something like this: 'while Conservative candidate from Henley was being fired for lying by his own leader, Brian Paddick was working hard to make the streets safe for ordinary Londoners.' Boris's almost complete lack of management experience would be showed up by facing Paddick, who has held senior positions in the police force and Ken, who is already doing the job. Next to Paddick just how much of a featherweight Boris is would be painfully obvious.

Assuming they could get into second place, a Lib Dem candidate might find it easier to actually go on and win. Where as the second votes of Lib Dem supporters would be expected to split pretty evenly between the Tory and Labour candidates, the bulk of Tory second votes would probably to the Lib Dem. They would also take a much higher share of the transfers from Green and Respect voters than would a Conservative candidate.

Ken vs. Boris vs. DAC Paddick would certainly not be boring and at the end London might just have the mayor it deserves.