Crime

The greatest criminal barrister of all time, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, who probably saved more men and women from the gallows than anyone in English history, was famous for his ‘scales of justice’ speech, in which, as described in Sally Smith’s magnificent biography, he would stand for several long minutes with his arms outstretched at shoulder height and say: ‘It may appear that the scales of justice are first weighed on one side in favour of the prisoner and then on the other against the prisoner. As counsel on either side puts the evidence in the scales, I can call to my fancy a great statue of Justice holding

I’ve talked to Denise Horvath-Allan more than my own mother this year. Denise’s son Charles went missing while backpacking in Canada. I see his face — never ageing, entombed within his early twenties — every day on Facebook. Denise’s posts are more desperate each time I see them. Charles disappeared in 1989, on the eve of his 21st birthday. Denise and I believe he was murdered not long afterwards. But the case, like so many others, remains unsolved. As a journalist, I’ve been writing about true crime for years. True crime is a non-fiction genre that examines a crime and the people involved. It has never been more popular: just

Rod Liddle was branded a ‘national disgrace’ when he wrote about how black boys are paying the price for growing up in households without their dads. But he’s right. The disproportionate number of black boys held in youth offending centres, which I visited during my time as a member of the youth justice board, shocked me. Many of those I encountered had been involved in knife crime. So what was going wrong? I did what many sociologists have failed to do: I asked them. These boys knew I wouldn’t stand for any spin about racism or the closure of the local youth club. Without such excuses, nearly all pointed to the absence

London’s knife-crime epidemic is back in the news. Tomorrow the Damilola Taylor Trust is holding a lecture at which the founders of Glasgow’s Violence Reduction Unit will explain what lessons London might learn from their experience. Their distinctive ‘public health’ approach is widely held to have been successful and it is frequently contrasted with a strategy of law enforcement. Champions of the public-health approach can be identified by their predilection for referring to the problem of knife crime as ‘issues around’ knife crime and their enthusiasm for finding ‘reachable and teachable moments’ when dealing with offenders caught with a knife. They oppose a pure criminal-justice approach but do not seem

When I was working as a speech writer in the Home Office, under Theresa May, one of her special advisers told me that she wanted to give a statement to parliament on the police’s use of stop and search. Part of the motive for doing this, he explained, was political: stop and search is a policy which consistently alienates members of the black community. I was told that it would help the home secretary’s standing with Afro-Caribbeans if she made a statement that was critical of the police’s use of stop and search. The grounds would essentially be that the tool was racist, or at least used by the police in

The heatwave is on and reports of London’s crime wave are widespread, with crime up dramatically in the last year: could a repeat of the 2011 riots be on the cards? Predicting riots is tricky but sometimes there are clues: the weather plays a part; and so too does the economy, community cohesion, social morals and other factors that can combine to lead to outbreaks of widespread disorder, just as they did seven years ago on the streets of the capital. Of course, 2011 wasn’t the only time people intent on violence have taken to the streets of Britain in recent years. The 1958 race riots, the ‘summer of 1968’, further race riots in

Nearly six years ago, in The Spectator, I explained how and why the gang culture that exploded in the 2011 riots was a ‘taste of the Britain to come.’ I also explained how the left-liberal establishment had allowed the conditions for gang crime to flourish while ignoring the solutions. Sadly, this wasn’t difficult to predict and with the 2018 killing toll in London passing 50, the same questions need to be asked again. The good news is that we can stop the carnage on our streets within a week. But firstly it is important to draw a clearer picture of the causes. In working with gang members in Tottenham during