Quote:
| Originally Posted by ariel Jools,
With all due respect, I believe you are burying your head in the sand. The present levels of vicious crime are unacceptable.
Take it from me (a really old git) there was a time when England was much better and more crime free than it is now.
But there's one thing for sure there's NO hope of an improvement in the future if the views expressed on this board are anything to go by. |
I am also an old git (in my 50's) and I can't accept that there was a golden age when everything was better and crime free.
I can remember reading about people being robbed at knifepoint and about gangland razor fights when I was a kid. The likes of the Krays and 'Mad Frankie Frazer' were running around. When I was growing up there were regular fights going on between rival village gangs and these same people would regularly nick cars to travel to and from the latest rumble. Violence on football terraces was rife with people using bottles and coins as missiles and every ground had the end where the hard men went for a fight. In my teenage years two people were fatally stabbed (at seperate times and in seperate incidents) in the little market town where I live - both in fights after chucking out time. Gangs of skinheads made a religion out of using their Doc Martens. My dad also used to tell me stories of the street violence that went on in his day - it has always been the same, because human nature has always been the same.
What has changed is the technology available to the law enforcement agencies and the rigour with which they need to report incidents. I'm sure that rather than there being halcyon days of law and order as depicted in 'Heartbeat', the reality of the times was the local beat Bobby dealing out summary justice on the end of a truncheon with no need for tedious paperwork. Same crimes happened, just didn't get reported.
With the advent of greater levels of reporting (and being held to account for performance through the statistics thus produced) it fuels another phenomenon. There has never been more competition in the media. Hundreds of TV and local radio stations all vying with each other, millions of websites and internet based media plus the traditional newspaper press competing in a state of frenzy for their slice of a finite advertising cake. How do the proprietors and editors of these media outlets raise their profile above the clamour? By the time honoured methods of hype, exageration and downright lies, bending statistics to suit their particular editorial stance - the worst of them playing on the fears, prejudices and ignorance of the man in the street to whip up a frenzy of public opinion to suit their circulation figures or political leanings
06-Dec-2006, 16:34 
Jools
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