Fear in Britain
They have no guns ? so they have a lot of crime.

Dr. Paul Gallant practices optometry in Wesley Hills, NY. Dr. Joanne Eisen
practices dentistry in Old Bethpage, NY. Both are Research Associates at
the Independence Institute, where Dave Kopel is Research Director.

he furor over the Philadelphia police encounter with a
would-be carjacker and cop-killer isn’t the only public-relations
nightmare facing the city’s police department. Two thousand
reported sex crimes went “uninvestigated” by Philadelphia police
between 1995 and 1997 because of “pressure to keep the
department’s crime numbers low,” reported ABC News on July
11. Earlier this year, the department admitted “misreporting”
thousands of sexual assaults during the past decade “to make the
city appear safer than it was.”

Actually, Philadelphia is not the only city to underreport crime in
recent years. The 1994 Clinton/Schumer crime bill has resulted in
lots of federal dollars for local police departments ? and also lots
of pressure to get crime statistics down so that the federal
government can announce the success of its policy of federalizing
crime control.

But when it comes to fudging crime statistics, even the finest
Philadelphia number-rearranger can’t compare to our British
cousins.

During the nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth, Britain
enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as an unusually safe and
crime-free nation, compared to the United States or continental
Europe. No longer.

To the great consternation of British authorities concerned about
tourism revenue, a June CBS News report proclaimed Great
Britain “one of the most violent urban societies in the Western
world.” Declared Dan Rather: “This summer, thousands of
Americans will travel to Britain expecting a civilized island free
from crime and ugliness…[But now] the U.K. has a crime
problem….worse than ours.”

A headline in the London Daily Telegraph back on April 1, 1996,
said it all: “Crime Figures a Sham, Say Police.” The story noted
that “pressure to convince the public that police were winning the
fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to ‘massage’
statistics,” and “the recorded crime level bore no resemblance to
the actual amount of crime being committed.”

For example, where a series of homes was burgled, they were
regularly recorded as one crime. If a burglar hit 15 or 20 flats, only
one crime was added to the statistics.

A brand-new report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary
charges Britain’s 43 police departments with systemic
under-classification of crime?for example, by recording burglary
as “vandalism.” The report lays much of the blame on the police’s
desire to avoid the extra paperwork associated with more serious
crimes.

Britain’s justice officials have also kept crime totals down by being
careful about what to count. American homicide data are based on
arrests, but British data are based on final dispositions. Suppose
that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They
are arrested for murder, but because of problems with
identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually
dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a
three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing
at all.

Another “common practice,” according to one retired Scotland
Yard senior officer, is “falsifying clear-up rates by gaining false
confessions from criminals already in prison.” (Britain has far fewer
protections against abusive police interrogations than does the
United States.) As a result, thousands of crimes in Great Britain
have been “solved” by bribing or coercing prisoners to confess to
crimes they never committed.

Explaining away the disparity between crime reported by victims
and the official figures became so difficult that, in April 1998, the
British Home Office was forced to change its method of reporting
crime, and a somewhat more accurate picture began to emerge.

This past January, official street-crime rates in London were more
than double the official rate from the year before.

So what’s a British politician to do when elections coincide with an
out-of control crime wave? Calling for “reasonable” gun laws is no
longer an option. Handguns have been confiscated, and long guns
are very tightly restricted. So anti-gun demagoguery, while still
popular, can’t carry the whole load.

Conversely, the government would not find it acceptable to allow
its subjects to possess any type of gun (even a licensed, registered
.22 rifle) for home protection. Defensive gun ownership is entirely
illegal, and considered an insult to the government, since it implies
that the government cannot keep the peace. Thus, in one recent
notorious case, an elderly man who had been repeatedly
burglarized, and had received no meaningful assistance from the
police, shot a pair of career burglars who had broken into the
man’s home. The man was sentenced to life in prison.

The British authorities warn the public incessantly about the
dangers of following the American path on gun policy. But the
Daily Telegraph (June 29, 2000) points out that “the main reason
for a much lower burglary rate in America is householders’
propensity to shoot intruders. They do so without fear of being
dragged before courts and jailed for life.”

So what’s the government going to do to make voters safer? One
solution came from the Home Office in April 1999 in the form of
“Anti-Social Behaviour Orders” ? special court orders intended
to deal with people who cannot be proven to have committed a
crime, but whom the police want to restrict anyway. Behaviour
Orders can, among other things, prohibit a person from visiting a
particular street or premises, set a curfew, or lead to a person’s
eviction from his home.

Violation of a Behaviour Order can carry a prison sentence of up
to five years.

Prime Minister Tony Blair is now proposing that the government be
allowed to confine people proactively, based on fears of their
potential dangerousness.

American anti-gun lobbyists have long argued that if America
followed Britain’s lead in severely restricting firearms possession
and self-defense, then American crime rates would eventually
match Britain’s. The lobbyists have also argued that if guns were
restricted in America, civil liberties in the U.S. would have the
same degree of protection that they have in Britain. The lobbyists
are absolutely right.