Police have staged a 30-year ‘retreat from the streets’, allowing the ‘disease’ of anti-social behaviour to blight Britain, a devastating report reveals today.
Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Denis O’Connor said the basic task of keeping the peace had been relegated to a ‘second-order consideration’ for officers who were obsessed with meeting targets for actual crimes.
This had led to officers being pulled off the beat, handing control to yobs and allowing anti-social behaviour to ‘gather momentum’, he said.
Sir Denis added: ‘The public do not distinguish between anti-social behaviour and crime.
'For them it’s really a sliding scale of grief.’
Despite the scale of the problem, some officers don’t think dealing with it is ‘real policing’, Sir Denis said.
He called for early intervention to ‘nip in the bud’ problems so they did not spiral out of control, and an end to underestimating anti-social behaviour.
He added: ‘Make no mistake. It requires feet on the street.’
Oh, hell, we have just the man for nipping it in the bud:
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This is the "broken windows" school of policing. That basically says that if you spend resources on controlling things like casual vandalism, petty crime, hooliganism, and so on, you can prevent some people from going on to commit "real" crimes.
It's the basis for community (or neighborhood) policing.
The goal is to address "quality of life" issues as a crime prevention measure.
Formerly Great Britain is a nice laboratory to see what happens when you don't do this sort of thing and then strip your subjects of their right to self defense.
It's a cautionary tale for America.
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