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When police foot patrols stop, stabbings rise - it’s that simple

by Peter Hitchens Mail on Sunday, posted 29 12 2019

How quickly we get used to evil. Stabbings in the streets, once incredibly rare in this country, are now common in big cities and become more so every year. It is unwise to get involved if you see anyone behaving strangely in a public place, or on a train or a bus.

There are so many cases which show that even a polite attempt to call for calm can end with a knife in the guts that my intervening days are definitely over.

I have my own ideas about why this is, which have much to do with marijuana. But there is another element to it, which a new survey has uncovered. Plenty of people see these killings and know who did them. But in a lot of cases they will not give evidence in court.

A BBC survey has just found that youth workers, police and prosecutors believe witnesses are afraid for their own safety.

Julius Capon, head of the Homicide Unit of the Crown Prosecution Service in London, says: ‘In most of the gang violence that we prosecute, there are witnesses who have plainly seen something which would be relevant to the prosecution but are not prepared to give evidence.’

He wants people to stand up and be counted, but can’t he see what is happening? The police force has been largely absent from the streets of this country for decades now.

They may appear for brief raids or shows of force, or very temporary foot patrols restored for a few days to areas where something terrible has happened.

And how nostalgic they look, even though the officers involved plainly feel awkward out of their cars, like crabs forced to abandon their shells, and have little idea of the areas in which they find themselves.

But the old sense that they gave – that somebody was in charge and that it would never be long before authority showed its face – has quite simply gone. I’ll say it again in case someone, somewhere is listening in government.

This has nothing to do with the numbers of officers. It is caused by the police decision to react to crime after it has happened, rather than prevent it by a convincing public presence. A police officer may prevent stabbings, muggings and burglaries. But he or she cannot unstab, unmug or unburgle you. So simple, you’d think even an MP could grasp it. But they don’t. But this is about the separate question of deterrence and justice.

Where crimes have not been prevented, they must be detected and the culprits found, prosecuted, found guilty in fair trials and given deterrent sentences.

This will not happen in a country where people are more afraid of criminals than they are of the police. And this is the kind of country we are increasingly becoming, because the police, however many of them there are, are simply not there.

The secret BBC ad for cannabis

The BBC has been using drama to make propaganda since the 1960s, with films such as Up The Junction and like Cathy Come Home fuelling the sexual and moral revolution the Corporation had decided to support with all its might – and has supported ever since.

But it has now learned how to slip in its message without most people even noticing they are being manipulated. So I wonder who in New Broadcasting House decided it was OK to put a pro-marijuana segment in the Christmas special of Gavin & Stacey, watched by more than 11 million people?

The attractions of this show aren’t obvious to me. The scriptwriters’ nasty private joke, of naming several characters after serial killers, doesn’t seem to me to be especially funny. But that’s not the point. If you wanted to do product placement or subliminal advertising, then its vast audience would make it a great place to do it. About a third of the way in, the faintly ludicrous character Dawn Sutcliffe rushes round to her friends Pam and Mick Shipman, furious because she has found a marijuana joint in her husband’s car. She then acts hysterically, as if this makes him into a doomed addict.

And this unlikely event gives Pam and Mick the chance to run a lengthy commercial for cannabis. ‘It’s a bit of weed, hardly Breaking Bad,’ says Mick. (Subliminal message: Marijuana isn’t a serious drug.) And Pam says sunnily: ‘Me and Mick used to smoke it all the time before Gavin was born.’ (Subliminal message: Normal suburban people smoke dope all the time.) Not long afterwards, all four of them are depicted cavorting around the room to loud music, passing the lit joint from one to the other, while everybody’s favourite superstar James Corden looks on benevolently at these older people showing their funky side. (Subliminal message: Get your kids to love you, oldies! Smoke dope!)

Later, after they have somehow managed to drive from Essex to Wales without incident despite being drugged, Pam enthuses merrily in dope smokers’ jargon: ‘We were all so stoned… I’d do it more often if it wasn’t for the munchies.’ (Subliminal message: One more time: Marijuana is perfectly normal, people smoke it all the time. If it’s illegal you’d never know.) Well, you certainly wouldn’t know from any of this that so many people who use this drug become irreversibly mentally ill, as I hear so often from their despairing parents.

You also wouldn’t know that an alarming number of them commit terrible acts of violence after they have become mentally ill. Readers of The Mail on Sunday know because I so often report these cases.

But 11 million BBC viewers have been told at Christmas time that it’s hysterical and silly to worry about marijuana, that it’s a laugh, everybody smokes it and it’s just a bit of fun.

This is free advertising for the billionaire campaign to legalise it. I can’t tell you how sorry you’ll be if you have been fooled by this, when the consequences kick in.