commentators

John Stevens: Police Killers Deserve The Death Penalty

Lord Stevens - former Metropolitan Police Commissioner - has used his column in the News of the World (not online) to call for police murderers to face the death penalty.  His intervention comes after Friday's killing of a Bradford WPC.

Lord Stevens begins his article by admitting that he used to oppose the death penalty because society should not take life that has been given by God and shouldn't reduce itself to the level of murderers.  But Lord Stevens has changed his mind:

"For the first time in my life, despite 40 years at the sharp end of policing, I finally see no alternative.  Such an extreme act of pure evil can only be met by the most extreme of responses - and that can only be death."

He says that the growing inadequacy of sentences has fuelled his change of heart.  Life no longer means life, he complains, and that imprisonment is an inadequate disincentive "to the creatures who inhabit the deepest depths of our society today". 

He continues:

"There must be massive safeguards to ensure the wrong people don't go to the gallows.  But those who can incontrovertibly be proved to have murdered a police officer should be killed... I now know that capital punishment is the only major way left for the majority of right-thinking people to fight against the minority of monsters in our midst."

Lord 'When he speaks, Britain listens' Stevens says that police killing is different from other killing:

"A police officer is someone you and I have chosen to defend and uphold the very basics of our society, our state.  We appoint them guardians of what we have decided is right and wrong."

Charles Murray: The Hallmark of The Underclass

In recent weeks this blog has featured articles by US-based commentators which have recorded America's recent social progress (see here and here) but, in the wake of Katrina, sociologist Charles Murray uses a column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) to paint a picture of a problem controlled, not solved.

Murray argues that crime may be down, for example, but criminality is up.  America hasn't transformed its social injustices it has excluded them from mainstream society.  It has separated itself from the underclass by putting them in prison or housing them in ghettoes.

Here are three extracts from the article:

INCARCERATION OF CRIMINALITY: "When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.  This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million. If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons..."

UNWORK: "Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job..."

ILLEGITIMACY: "Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly? In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here is the illegitimacy ratio -- the percentage of live births that occur to single women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25% milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure was 35% -- of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio in 2003 was 68%."

Nicole Gelinas: A Perfect Storm Of Lawlessness

It's been a devastating week for New Orleans and a bad week for George W Bush.   It hasn't been as bad as the BBC had clearly hoped, however.  Bush-hatred at the BBC (and the Michael Mooreish Daily Mail) knows no bounds.  The Corporation's coverage has been truly abysmal in recent days but the American people have been less cruel.  The latest opinion poll showed that 46% approved of Bush's performance and 47% disapproved.  44% blamed Bush; 55% didn't.  Those aren't great numbers but they're not damning.  People understand that last week was a massive natural disaster.  I wonder how Britain would have coped in comparable circumstances?  If Bristol, say, had been engulfed with water?  'Not well' is my guess.  Britain's roads are unusable after a light snowfall.  Trains stop running when a few leaves litter a line.  Under Labour our armies - professional and territorial -  are close-to-emaciated.   

America's federal government was inadequate in its early response to Katrina - certainly.  Flood defences might have been better - probably.  But initial efforts were badly hampered by lawlessness.  And who is to blame for that?

An article for City Journal by Nicole Gelinas offers some answers to that question.  The looting and general lawlessness that so shamed New Orleans via the world's media is rooted in very weak criminal justice policies.  Ms Gelinas argues that New Orleans' "fragile civil infrastructure can’t control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime... failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster."  "Katrina," she writes, "didn’t turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week’s looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans’ murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times."  Ms Gelinas compares New Orleans' murder rate of around 330 (a projection for 2005) with Boston's murder rate of 65 (a city of comparable size).

New Orleans briefly experimented with New York-style zero tolerance policing but didn't keep it up.  It failed because of corruption in the police force and an inadequate tax base for the necessary "professional police or prosecution force it needs".  Gelinas:

"Crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs."        

George W Bush has taken the flak for the disorder of last week but the seeds of that disorder were sown over many years by liberal crime policies.  One of the best gifts that America can give the new New Orleans is the resources to break the cycle of crime described by Ms Gelinas.

PS David Frum's Diary of 2nd September collects some bloggers' rebuttals of the most unfair attacks on the Bush administration.