Via Whiteboard Technician, this story:
Smith and his colleagues at Shirley Street Watch have become the scourge of low-level criminals in their little corner of Solihull in the West Midlands since they started patrols in January. Police credit them with effectively forcing drug dealers away from parts of the suburb and significantly reducing antisocial behaviour.
While Smith bristles at the term “vigilante”, the volunteers are one of a rising number of groups springing up across Britain as crime surges and police officer numbers hit a record low. Added into the mix is the very low and falling detection rate – 75% of thefts unsolved. Victims of crime are willing to take matters into their own hands.
Regular readers of my blog won’t be tremendously surprised by this. As I’ve said before, the role of the police is to protect suspected criminals from the mob by helping to dispense justice; if the police opt out of that role, the mob will take its place. Now this bunch in yellow jackets in Solihull thankfully don’t look like an African mob who suspect a young woman of being a witch, but we’re heading in that direction. And these groups are sprouting up everywhere:
This week Hartlepool was called the town “where the police don’t come out” in reports about a neighbourhood group formed to try to fill the void left by police. On one recent Saturday not a single officer was on duty in the town of 92,000 as all were called to another job.
Perhaps the police were checking Twitter for racism? Or were they busy putting LGBTQ decals on their patrol cars?
A new Midlands-based group, We Stand Determined, has amassed nearly 3,000 members on Facebook in the past week, with splinter groups already forming in Manchester and elsewhere.
I rather like this development, mainly because it’s focusing minds. Unsurprisingly, Plod doesn’t:
The emergence of these unofficial groups, formed on social media, has led to fears among the police that a new breed of “have-a-go heroes” are putting themselves at risk and jeopardising investigations.
I rather think it’s the lack of investigations which are the problem.
Insp Iftekhar Ahmed, of West Midlands police, told the Guardian he was concerned that well-meaning citizens were “hindering the situation” by taking matters into their own hands.
Ah yes, mustn’t do that now, must we Inspector Iftekhar Ahmed? Far better the British people just meekly tolerate criminals running rampage while the police do nothing. What they’re really afraid of is their own irrelevance.
Ahmed runs the force’s Street Watch scheme of 350 volunteers who patrol neighbourhoods under the supervision of the police, who pay for their insurance and provide a basic training course on safety.
I know nothing about these groups, but if they’re subject to the same SJW doctrines as the regular police, they’ll be useless.
He said: “Citizenship is what they’re doing: look, see, report, don’t have a go – that’s the ethos. They’re a vigilant group, not a vigilante group.”
Spy, snitch, tell…but don’t do anything. Ah, modern policing.
Smith said residents were “majorly disappointed” when Shirley police station shut down two years ago – one of 27 West Midlands police buildings closed as a cost-cutting measure.
…
“We have had a couple of people say: ‘You’re just policing on the cheap.’ But things aren’t going to change any time soon. If you want to make a difference you’ve got to get boots on the ground, you’ve got to get off your arse and do something for your community.”
The fact these groups are being given a sympathetic hearing in The Guardian of all places is illuminating.
Police credit them with effectively forcing drug dealers away from parts of the suburb and significantly reducing antisocial behaviour.
Plod must be desperate if he’s crediting these guys rather than arresting them.
My faith and trust in the British police has plummeted over the years, to the point where I would actively avoid getting them involved in my life if at all possible.
“Citizenship is what they’re doing: look, see, report, don’t have a go – ”
I’m confused. Last week we were told that if criminals were attacking the police then the public needed to get involved. Now we are being told that if criminals are attacking the public then we mustn’t get involved.
Police credit them with effectively forcing drug dealers away from parts of the suburb and significantly reducing antisocial behaviour.
But remember, foot patrols are an ineffective use of police resources…
If they are getting a sympathetic hearing in The Graun it’s a sure sign that a Graun journalist (I use the word advisedly) has been burgled/mugged & come up against the modern day wall of indifference that is the UK police farce.
I live in a large village in East Surrey, part of the commuter belt, it’s by no means sleepy Ye Olde England, but it’s traditionally more sedate than neighbouring outer South London. Crime and disorder is the worst I’ve known it in the 15 years I’ve lived in vicinity. Surrey County Council decided to save money by switching off the street lights between midnight and 5am, it said it wouldn’t increase crime or disorder, utter bollocks (worth noting the street lighting has been replaced in the last 8 years, but crucially not with low cost LEDs). Where are Surrey Police in all this? Well not here, that’s for sure! The village once had it’s own police station, long gone, but we could console ourselves with a part-time police station in neighbouring Caterham, but that’s now unmanned and little more than a storage depot. There is no working police station in the entire district; a population of 86k, and a surface area of c.250 square km, and our nearest working police station is 12 miles away in another borough. I find it incredulous that the taxation from a relatively affluent area this size cannot support a proper full time police presence. Burglary and car crime is now a nightly occurrence, a lot of it ‘criminal tourism’ from South London who know the police have left the building. Last week a resident scared away some chavs breaking into her car, she called the police who weren’t too fussed, half an hour later they came back and this time they told her to fuck off when she tried to scare them off again. The local parks have been colonised by ferals after dark resulting in serious damage to children’s play areas. My wife called the police a few months ago when a nearby birthday party ejected underage drunks into the street, prompting several hours of skirmishing including one teenager so inebriated she had to be dragged unconscious from the middle of the road into the gutter. The response from Surrey Police: ‘As nobody’s been seriously injured yet we’ll try and send a patrol round in a few hours’. Surrey Police and Surrey County Council pin a lot on austerity, but if they were abolished and their statutory functions absorbed by other bodies I reckon it would shake out a lot of non-statutory spending and force a focus on core obligations. Some people may think abolishment is extreme, but if an organisation is incapable of delivering its core remit then I don’t see it as outlandish at all.
So we contracted out policing and paid for professionals instead with our taxes. Now we find the contractor is f**ing useless so we bring the job back in house.
This will probably work OK in Edgbaston or Wokingham. I wonder how well it’ll do in the ZCEs?
* ZCE = zone of cultural enrichment.
MJW,
The state will always consume what it is given and claim is not enough. No one in government ever says their budget is too high.
I did some work for a local authority a few years ago and they were talking about cuts but what it meant was that they got on and delivered, with some seriousness, efficiency savings. And I don’t mean they delivered less. I mean they improved processes. This is just how businesses always run.
I’m anti giving any more money to the NHS because I’ve seen how it’s run. Management are worse than useless. If you let the district nurses run themselves they’d do better.
So anyone who can create a little platoon that means people kiss goodbye to the state is ok by me. I know they’ll run it better.
MJM, If the lighting scheme in your bit of Surrey is the same as mine then, rather than just replacing the business end, they replaced each and every entire lamp post and did so under a PFI arrangement. This will cost the rate payers a fortune! Just one more benefit of Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act, the same legislation that I suspect drove the authorities to clad Grenfell Tower in Celotex.
zut alors’ point about how this would play out in “Zones of Cultural Enrichment” is an interesting one. In fact, any group who police their own patch becomes a terrifying prospect when their values differ significantly from our own.
Were this situation to become more common, you had better move yourself to an area where the dominant group is able-bodied family men who are reasonably intelligent and have the muscle to eject or neutralise undesirables. Consider the alternatives – young lads looking for money, status, sex and thrills; religious people wanting to impose morality; idealistic impractical types wanting to impose their ideology; or dippy wimmin focused on their children – all these will compete to create and maintain the peace, according to their own lights.
Here in Japan there are police boxes (a tiny station with one or two officers inside) everywhere and crime is very low. Coincidence? I think not.
My village Police station ‘temporarily’ closed down due to budget restraints, but we were assured that the service received from the nearby town Police station would not affect the quality of service. Then the town Police station ‘temporarily’ closed down for the same reason. The nearest Police station is now in the next county!
The village Police station is now a council run local historical centre and the town Police station is being demolished to make way for luxury flats which no one in a proper job can afford to buy.
Meanwhile, reports from a family friend in a midlands town suggest that local thugs and petty thieves, rightly or wrongly, are being advised to consider moving away unless their behaviour changes as their personal safety cannot be guaranteed. Some, unwilling to change, have apparently experienced the delights of the nearest A&E department – itself 2 towns away – and some have moved away, either before or after visiting A&E.
Local crime and anti-social behaviour have both gone down. Responses to criticism of this vigilantism is on the basis of “Why don’t you get many muggers in Singapore?”
This may be wrong, but the elderly men and women who frequent the community centre are said to feel a lot safer, especially when it’s dark.
@JohnRM
Indeed all the lamp posts (columns and baskets) across Surrey were replaced between 2010 and 2015 by Skanska, but instead of going with low energy LED lamps they went with older technology, which although cheaper than old sodium lamps are still significantly more expensive to run and maintain than LED. The obvious problem of not using LEDs was noted very early on in the replacement project but by then a big fat contract had been awarded to install the older technology so they carried on installing it despite knowing it was a fuck up, then they decided to turn them off for half the night. If they’d have switched to LED based baskets from when the mistake was noted they would have saved lots of money and could have left the lights on for the whole night (dimmed if necessary). Now there’ll be another big fat contract awarded in the next few years to swap out the newly installed baskets with LED based baskets.
@BoM4 “The state will always consume what it is given and claim is not enough. No one in government ever says their budget is too high.”
Oh yes. Up until very recently I had a friend living with me temporarily who works at mid-level in civil service (central, London, core stuff – working from home at my place).
With regard to budget they have to come in within x% – but this includes undershooting target as well as overshooting it. So if some genius came up with a way of saving, say, 10% on a project somehow – it just couldn’t be implemented. There are (from memory) monthly meetings to make sure the spend is staying within that range. Flipping nuts (and my friend agreed it was nuts).
isp100 got there before me.
But basically they’ve lost the plot totally.
The Guardian claiming ‘police officer numbers hit a record low’ is nonsense for starters. According to latest govt. figures, total f/t plods in England & Wales is 125,651, which is lower than their 2009 height of 141,647 but still provides a police to population ratio of 214 per 100,000—over twice as many as we had in 1861. Some figures:
YearRecorded Crimes/100,000Police/100,000
1861:253.21106.71
1901:248.9130.61
1951:1,199.01144.28
2001:10,064.42235.82
2011:7,397.68247.65
2017:9,567.10214.92
And note that police of yore did not have the veritable army of ‘support staff’ that exist now (77,348 as of 31 Mar 2018).
(Police strength from ‘Police Service Strength’, Briefing Paper No.634, 16 Oct 2018, downloaded from here; population estimates from here.)
A Staffordshire policeman (now with the RCMP in Canada), was the first police blogger back in the day, writing under the pseudonym of David Copperfield, and a collection of his posts was published as Wasting Police Time (2006). A recommended read, he has a good sense of humour—nice to be able to smile while one reads about one’s country dying. He had a passage on police numbers:
Peter Hitchens once headlined a column, ‘If all the police in Britain were abducted by aliens, would anyone notice?’. Copperfield ‘responded by asking if the police would notice if all the criminals in Britain were abducted by aliens’.
Article by PC ‘Copperfield’ here.
That table looks a mess; here it is without the html tags:
Year··Recorded Crimes/100,000··Police/100,000
1861:·····253.21·······················106.71
1901:·····248.9························130.61
1951:··1,199.01·······················144.28
2001:·10,064.42······················235.82
2011:···7,397.68······················247.65
2017:···9,567.1·······················214.92
And while I’m here, vigilantes in our multicultural paradi, Sam@3.32pm? ‘Maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events’ but we’ve already got them. (Continuing the film line, we—as in Britain, as in Western Civ.—are getting ‘our asses kicked’.)
@ScotchedEarth
The police in 1861 also did not have the veritable army of regulations which hampered their function. PC Copperfield and writers like him state that nowadays every arrest requires a ridiculous number of forms to be filled – 40 or 60 or something like that, consuming hours of police time, and making coppers reluctant to arrest petty criminals.
And in 1861 police statistics had not become the touchstone by which careers are made or ruined, so pressure did not exist to make the numbers look good by tweaking regulations – or by simply declining to register a complaint when there was little chance of solving .
” Iftekhar Ahmed, of West Midlands police”
I may be alone here, but sometimes I weep quietly for the England I used to call my own country.
@Lockers on November 26, 2018 at 5:22 pm
Nothing changed then. Way back in 1970s my mother was a teacher. Towards end of financial year there was often mass purchases of tat to add to unused tat pile purely to use budget allocation.
If school underspent, no “well done congrats” or maybe “have a pay bonus of 20% of saved”. No, next year budget reduced by underspend.
My firm are always willing and able to assist our council clients in achieving their hard fought for year end budget targets. We are very flexible and nimble in adjusting our cash flows and bringing forward progress payments and submitting variation claims earlier such that they are in strict alignment with their departmental spend targets, we pride ourselves in rising to this difficult challenge of satisfying our clients immediate needs and ensuring that they achieve their forecasted spend for the year.
The only tricky part is that you need to be awarded the contract such that it is near completion just before the financial year end, that is the strategic bit and is far harder than it first appears.
Reflecting on it councils are the best of all clients, they pay early and have lots of repeat contracts, we have never had a council default on payment. In fact you cannot get credit insurance for a council. State Govt’s are pretty good clients as well, just as long as your statutory declaration accompanying your monthly progress claim is submitted properly, then they will pay you your asking price and ask questions later.
OT
Brexit & EU Aims To Be An Empire – Bruno La Maire in Handelsblatt “EU use power to become an Empire of Peace” from 2m6s
Hmm, “Empire of Peace” reminds me of….
Hmm, reminds me of….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1Xk2UcQpY
On reading the article it’s clear that they are talking about two seperate groups. The first being a Police organised group, the second, this “We Stand Determined” appear to be the real deal. This will ratchet up real quick I’d think. One of these guys gets killed (likely) or they kill some ethnic(riots)
Had to laugh at MJWs post. Not at you mate and the last thing I want to do is come off like Billy Bragg. However…
I’d like to make the analogy that our country is somewhat like a swimming pool and social and moral decay are somewhat like piss.
Most people won’t piss in the pool but occasionally somebody does.
If you don’t have a highly vigilant attitude towards pissing in the pool very soon parts of the pool start to get a bit, pissy.
Once its already a bit pissy more people, people who may not before have thought to piss in the pool, but now they can smell the piss and disillusioned at the blatant disregard for the rules think fuck it, I may as well piss in the pool too, next thing you know we’re all swimming in a big pool of thick stinking yellow piss.
Now it sounds like you some of you guys are in awesome parts of the pool, maybe you pushed in the queue, maybe you got up earlier and swam harder and faster than the others to get there. This is not important to our story.
Myself, I’m in a little corner behind the slide that over the last few years has begun to reek of piss. I’m aware of my shortcomings, I’m a bit lazy and like to sleep in(I’m a Geordie, we are the Mexicans of white people) so you understand, I’m not complaining about my position in the pool as such, just the piss. Why not swim away you may ask and good question but I like this part, it’s where my family has swam as far back as anyone remembers, I just don’t like piss. Well it sounds like the water round some of you is turning yellow and starting to smell. I can relate.
Although round here has always been the kind of place someone may have a sly slash it has never reeked of piss, but to leave the analogy behind for a second, last week young men were fighting with swords in our street again and there was no police response. That was a new low. The lack of respnse. No one was left injured this time but didn’t see any patrols and no canvassing for statements, after a sword fight.
Last year, two streets over, 3 masked men dragged another man out of his house and tried to hack his arms off with machetes. The parents of a classmate of my son saved the guys arms, he’s a first aider at Nissan car plant.
The problem with delaing with the low level stuff yourself is it escalates due to everyone getting used to the smell of piss.
Now I predict that soon no amount of chlorine will mask that pissy smell drifting up your nostrils and pretty soon you are going to be able to taste it everywhere in the pool
There are parts of our pool that are now akin to open sewers.
Now, I’ve read some comments on this blog that suggest some of you erroneously beleive that you can buy yourself out of the piss filled pool with all your filthy lucre. Good luck with that. What we’re talking about is corruption, you can’t stay one step ahead of a beast you are helping to feed, not forever, this isn’t Zeno’s paradox it’s Iain’s Piss filled Pool and you heard it here first.
As for the Gaurdians angle, budget cuts. In order to attack the government on budget they will let slide a multitude of sins. They may have a point but as John mentioned, I think the PFI chickens are coming home to roost.
Jonathan on November 26, 2018 at 10:56 pm said:
PC Copperfield and writers like him state that nowadays every arrest requires a ridiculous number of forms to be filled – 40 or 60 or something like that, consuming hours of police time, and making coppers reluctant to arrest petty criminals.
———————————–
I’m prepared to bet folding money that almost all those forms require information that is exactly the same as on multiple other forms – names, addresses, phone numbers, dates, ages, etc but still has to be entered repeatedly.
Software containing a consolidated questionnaire which is then split and printed out as necessary for different purposes shouldn’t be too difficult to create. Multiple form filling with much of the same information is rife in the public sector and largely unnecessary.
One of the things we do better in South Africa is the private armed response company. Cost about thirty quid a month. Your house has an alarm radio-linked to the control room of the armed response company. Response times are of the order of a couple of minutes. “Panic buttons” mounted on the wall next to the front and back doors and carried on your key fob allow you to tell the AR company that a duress situation is in progress. Additional perimeter defence comes from high walls topped with electric fences linked to the alarm. Yes it’s a tragedy but after your house has been cleaned out a few times, and you have been attacked at home, your lofty principles on siege mentality will fly out the window. AR is outlawed in the UK but that won’t be for much longer.
If the government will not provide, either the marketplace or the citizen will.
The thing that ought to concern the ever-loving out of the various jobsworthies in the UK law enforcement realm is this: What happens when the citizenry realizes and recognizes that they’re a.) Doing for themselves, and b.) Paying for a service through taxation that they don’t actually receive?
How’s that going to play out for “legitimacy of government”? If I had to guess, I’d say “Badly. Very badly.”.
You have similar problems here in the US, though not quite as bad. There’s also the fact that many jurisdictions here in the US do not restrict arms, very much, so the odds are that the usual run of criminal stands an excellent chance of meeting with fatal misadventure. “Shoot, shovel, and shut up…” is the advice, and God alone knows where that will end, once enough Americans are convinced that the criminal justice system we’ve built up offers no true justice to the victims of crime.
I’m waiting for someone to make an affirmative defense for murder, after being charged with the killing of a dangerous criminal, and that defense being “Well, all the cops and prosecutors were going to do was let him go, so… I killed him before he could come after me again. Self-defense, based on the fact that the responsible parties ain’t doing their jobs…”.
I imagine that there will be many juries seated who will be nodding their heads along with that line of thought, and likely acquitting. Results for the criminal population will likely instructive, at least for those who survive.
A fundamental fact is that the criminal justice system doesn’t really exist to protect the law-abiding; it exists to protect the criminal from the law-abiding, such that unjust vigilante actions won’t take place. Trouble is, once the law-abiding start to become convinced that they were fools to entrust institutional law enforcement to deliver justice and dissuasion to the criminal, well… They’re gonna do for themselves, and you ain’t gonna like what they do. The bleeding-heart do-gooder types have stored up a vast harvest, and there are a bunch of criminally-minded sorts who are going to reap the whirlwind from that. To include some politicians, I imagine–Wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t wind up with a bunch of Congress-creatures decorating those lovely Japanese Cherry trees along the mall in Washington, DC.
One of the things we do better in South Africa is the private armed response company. Cost about thirty quid a month. Your house has an alarm radio-linked to the control room of the armed response company. Response times are of the order of a couple of minutes. “Panic buttons” mounted on the wall next to the front and back doors and carried on your key fob allow you to tell the AR company that a duress situation is in progress.
Lots of companies offer that service in Russia, too. It was compulsory for all oil company employees not living in the compound. Forget your alarm code one night and three minutes later there are men in balaclavas with AK-47s in your foyer.
AR is outlawed in the UK
Of course. The police insist on a monopoly of force, even when they withdraw from their obligation to protect the public. Nothing terrifies the British police more than people taking care of themselves without them.
@Michael van der Riet
I wonder if I might ask, Michael, have you seen Lauren Southern’s film Farmlands? I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because I have little knowledge of South Africa, and would not be able to distinguish between hard truths and blatant propaganda. If you have watched it, I would be very interested in hearing your opinion of it.
The gist is…Most people are nice. Very few are scumbags. If the nice people decide not to tolerate the scumbags the scumbags are in serious trouble. We had the police to deal with them but if they don’t nice people will.
Singapore is nice as the police deal with scumbags, the schools deal with scumbags, Parents deal with scumbags, the army deals with scumbags as everyone has to do national service. Oh and the scumbags get hit with a cane when sentenced. And they are sentenced as they are almost always caught.
Forget your alarm code one night and three minutes later there are men in balaclavas with AK-47s in your foyer.
I’ve had the fun experience of that. Went out for a meal, then back to a friends house. The alarm had a fault and wouldn’t turn off. A couple of minutes later man shows up armed and asking questions. In Russian. And this was back before I could speak even a lick of Russian. Luckily my friend came in from the other room where they were on the phone to the company before I got perforated.
The experience definitely put into perspective the response of our police, who might show up in a few hours, if you’re lucky…
@JS on November 27, 2018 at 3:14 am
Me too. Exactly what Boss found in Moss Bros. Undercover Boss UK S06E01
It’s same in NHS and all over public sector.
Undercover Boss UK S06E01 HDTV x264-BARGE
Good analogy Iain (12.31pm). That is really an interpretation of the ‘Broken Windows’ policing strategy that William Bratton implemented with such success in New York under Mayor Giuliani and outlined by its authors in The Atlantic here. ‘Broken Windows’ is just a fancy name for old-fashioned policing:
(Harris, Jose. Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914. Penguin, 1994. 209.)
‘Broken Windows’, aka traditional policing, operates on two levels. (1) Cracking down on the small stuff sends a message that Society will royally ream someone for the hard stuff. (2) Surprise, criminals rarely restrict themselves to one crime: the rapist/mugger/etc. will often also dodge subway fares or other small stuff—arrest him for jumping the turnstile and run his DNA and fingerprints through the system, and the fare-dodger will often be found to be also a suspect in a burglary, assault, etc. That’s what happened in New York under Bratton.
Other articles:
Sahm, C.U. (2007) Broken Windows Turns 25. City Journal.
Magnet, M. (2014) De Blasio’s Dilemma. City Journal.
Kelling. G.L. & Bratton, W.J. (2015) Why We Need Broken Windows Policing. City Journal.
MJW (26th, 1pm) ponders simply abolishing the increasingly invisible and utterly useless police, closing with, ‘Some people may think abolishment is extreme, but if an organisation is incapable of delivering its core remit then I don’t see it as outlandish at all.’
‘Extreme’? I’ve reached the point where not only do I want the police abolished, I want public executions—literally (and I mean literally literally) hanging, drawing and quartering—of the most egregious offenders of our police farce (sic), who turned what was once the finest police in the world into the Enemy Occupation Force they now are. Pour encourages les autres, bien sûr.
Fahrenheit 211 has posted on the man behind the ‘Crimebodge’ website recently being arrested, video on the page (and on Crimebodge’s YT channel). FFS. Btw, the latter incident is small beer compared to some of the things the Occupation Forces get up to; but we have no video of the two Rotherham fathers being arrested while trying to rescue their daughters nor—perhaps thankfully—video of what the cops were getting up to here.