I have only just caught up with the book recently published by Civitas*, 'Policing in Four Nations' by Norman Dennis and George Erdos. It caused a bit of a stir in the press, which highlighted its criticisms of British policing for being pretty useless and its startling figures about the real rise in crime during the past century, conclusions which have been sourly contested by the Home Office, the police and assorted criminologists.

This does not do this book justice. It is sociology at its best. It does far more than criticise the police. It is an intellectual evisceration of the corrupted thinking — the orthodoxy in the Home Office — which has pretended for decades that the problem we face is not crime but the idiocy of the public in gullibly falling for the 'moral panic' peddled by the media that crime is going up; and a trenchant analysis of the cultural collapse that has produced the 'urban savages' condemned by Judge Charles Harris yesterday, which he said had turned town centres into 'revolting and dangerous places' at night as a result of the culture of drink and drugs.

The authors cover much ground in this book. They show that, contrary to the accepted wisdom of criminologists, violent crime has risen astronomically since the late 19th century and particularly exploded upwards after the 1960s. They utterly demolish the argument put forward by Geoffrey Pearson in his all-too influential book 'Hooligan' that every generation falsely believes crime is rising to record levels. Pointing out the absence of adequate records which makes such statistical extrapolations into the past unreliable, to say the least, they nevertheless draw upon historical and literary sources to suggest that in the latter half of the 19th century, England became generally safe and civilised. Writer after writer in that period commented on England's moral advances, its temperance, orderly behaviour and kindliness; while Engels wrote with rueful admiration of its low and falling crime rate, which he put down to the role of religion in bringing about the 'signal triumph of respectability'.

No longer. Pointing out that crime has risen as society has become more prosperous, they argue that the reason for this explosion of criminality is the progressive dismantling of all the processes by which children were once socialised into the community — religion, education and the family. They tear into the Home Office for trotting out misleading statistics based on the inadequate British Crime Survey, on the basis of which the Home Office makes the preposterous claim that crime rates are at an 'historic low' when as the authors point out, in 1955 there were 462,300 recorded crimes in England and Wales and in 2002/3 there were 5,899,400 (and even adjusting for things like rises in population, difficulties in comparison and so forth this is still a massive rise).

The authors conclude:

'Any version of either the moral panic theory or the theory of the exaggerated fear of crime is serviceable to people who for one reason or another want to deceive the public, and perhaps themselves, into believing that crime is no more of a problem today than it was in the past — politicians and pressure groups, for example, who will deny or will not face the fact that their family, policing, educational, drugs, religious, planning or welfare policies have caused an upsurge in crime. If there has been no upsurge in crime, there is no case for them to answer. They denigrate the cultural achievements of previous generations in order to conceal the cultural disasters of their own.

'The error and the folly have not lain, therefore, with a benighted public that has succumbed to unrealistic fears of crime, or has been stampeded into a moral panic by a sensationalising gutter press. The error and folly has lain with ideologically driven academics, and the broadsheet, radio and television journalists who depended on their “findings”. Together they propagated the morally complacent falsehood that crime was not rising — and they thus blocked for more than a generation any effective policing response to the problems of law and order. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.'

Majestic. Read it all.

*info@civitas.org.uk;
www.civitas.org.uk