Jacqui Smith’s comment about why she doesn’t walk around at night sums up what is wrong with the establishment attitude to crime. Here’s the exchange between the Home Secretary and Isabel Oakeshott:
IO: Would you feel safe, walking round, say, Hackney, at midnight on your own? JS: Well, no, but I don’t think I’d ever have done. You know, I would never have done that, at any point during my life. IO: Why not? JS: Well, I just don’t think that’s a thing that people do, is it, really?
Implicit in Smith’s answer is the belief that crime is inevitable and that if you don’t want to be mugged you don’t go out late at night. As the reduction in crime in New York shows, it doesn’t have to be this way.
As long as politicians and officials treat crime as an inevitable fact of modern urban life it will never be dealt with.
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