Could there be such a thing a ‘Legal Laffer Curve’? What I mean is, a point where there are so many laws that the State cannot possibly enforce them and their agents start to wilt under the pressure of trying to do so. From then on the whole thing starts to go downhill and the lawlessness begins to grow uncontrollably.
Has that point been reached?
A chief Constable admitted yesterday that his officers are being forced to ignore thousands of burglaries, thefts and car crimes because they are swamped by increasing drug and gun violence.
The public’s perception that the police were not interested in low-level and non-violent crime was underlined when Steve Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire police, said there was not enough money or officers available to investigate all crime.
The emergence of Britain’s drug and gun culture had impacted on his force to such an extent that “something had to give”.
A very telling admission from a man who is clearly under pressure. However my sympathy-meter is stuck at nought. The police have spent decades campaigning vigourously to abolish just about every right of the citizens to preserve their own security and, of course, the means to do so. The natural consequence is that they have arrogated that burden onto themselves and it is a burden the can neither cope with nor discharge. Truly that is a zero-sum game.
Yes, I think something will have to ‘give’ but knowing this country as I do, I doubt very much that it will be the pathology of total control that has caused the problem in the first place.
I don’t know if a Laffer curve is the right analogy, but it does seem interesting.
More significantly, though, is the undermining of the very foundation of the rule of law. To live under the rule of law there is a contract between the citizen and the state that all people are equal, and that laws will be enforced equally.
Once we have been overrun with laws such that it is not practical to live a law-abiding life, and the police overrun with law-breakers, all enforcement necessarily becomes arbitrary. The very foundation of a rule-of-law society is eroded. I dare say we are very near to the point where people no longer respect the myriad laws of the nanny-state, nor really expect police to much about property crimes. One has to wonder about the long term stability of this state of affairs.
I just read that item. The bit that struck me was “Mr Green was cool on the idea of arming police…”
Who asked? Who cares? How did he feel about arming citizens, since he admits the police are in no position to defend them.
Yes, I realize exactly how he would feel about that. I realize, too, it would strike an almost equally harsh note with most of the British public. But if journalists began to ask the question, if it wormed its way into the public conversation, it would cease to sound so jarring and might even begin to sound plausible.
“One has to wonder about the long term stability of this state of affairs.”
Stability? Now just what makes you expect stability? If you substitute sanity for stability in your statement, I’ll accept the statement.
S. Weasel captures the essence of the early stages of the meme warfare in which we are engaged:
if it wormed its way into the public conversation, it would cease to sound so jarring and might even begin to sound plausible.
As I recall the last time that Englishmen got fed up this way a new country was born.
I hope and trust that as people wised up across the pond that England will do the right thing in the end.
A ‘Legal Laffer Curve’ is concept well worth investigation. I believe it does exist, although you are the first person to give it a name. Although un-named, Sheriff Bill Masters described it in his book Drug War Addiction.
“they are swamped by increasing drug and gun violence”
Are the “drug and gun” criminals being locked up and kept locked up in the UK?
Two of the responses to high crime rates in the U.S. were mandatory minimum sentences and “three strikes and you’re out” laws as a means of combating lenient judges.
The idea being that keeping criminals locked up longer reduces crime.
S. Weasel asks how the police would feel about the idea of arming citizens.
Actually, the UK police themselves (as opposed to the government) have very strong reservations about imposing Draconian sentences on persons found in the possession of firearms. Why? Because if a bad guy knows that if he’s caught with a gun he’ll end up with ten years in prison, he’ll be more likely to shoot an approaching policeman than to surrender. And policemen have a strong aversion at being shot at.
There’s an interesting editorial on this issue in the February 2003 edition of Police Federation Magazine. You’ll find it here.
The police may not actually be in favour of the policy ‘that every man be armed’. But they are certainly opposed to criminalising the possession of firearms to such a degree that their own lives are jeopardised.
It depends what you mean by “draconian” Charles: I thought by now the minimum sentence of five years for unlawful possession of a handgun had come into effect, and this seems pretty draconian to me.
Actually I read the same article yesterday, and similar thoughts (with the exception of “Laffer Curve” which in my ignorance I’d never heard of) occurred to me. Shortly after reading this Telegraph piece on the train, I stood on a tube station platform contemplating a very large poster positioned by the Metropolitan Police; it threatened wife-beaters with being found out now that a spouse’s personal complaint was no longer necessary (it appears) and concerned neighbours (or malicious informers?) could lodge a complaint instead.
No matter how distressing domestic violence is, one has to ask where on the scale of police priorities this sort of pre-emptive social intervention (and highly expensive advertising) should come, compared with catching criminals on the street. Seems to me a classic instance of the police as people controllers, a role which diminishes their ability to perform the traditional function that surely most people prefer.
And observe the police response whenever the subject arises of firearms regulation being taken from individual forces, and placed with a civilian administration: although the police are forever complaining about the enormous cost of firearms admin, and its drain on their resources, they perversely resist any suggested rationalisation of the system.
The point at which enforcement became arbitrary was reached long ago. But note that arbitrary is not the same as random.
The enforcement that has been dropped is disproportionately that which is difficult and presents no threat to the authority of the police or the state.
Whatever their personal feelings, the police are institutionally obliged to support other officials in the execution of their powers over the populace at the expense of dealing with real crime. Statutory offenses with minimal requirement (if any) for proof of guilt, are also easier to pursue successfully.
And non-job beware: The “sus” laws as a means of dealing with those who don’t show sufficient obsequiousness in the face of a bolshy police officer have been replaced with a vast range of sanctions.
One strongly suspects that a meek middle-class person who will cooperate or be cowed by the process is relatively far more likely to find themselves charged and punished in minor matters than an aggressive serial offender, or the wealthy, or the influential, who can afford to fight in their different ways.
The interesting thing will be to see if this does start affecting police deaths. They are actually amazingly low in the UK.
Its one of the reasons the police have held out about being armed.
The following may be tangential to David Carr’s original point, but I sense a relationship.
Yesterday, threading my way home through the inevitably dense Friday traffic, I was astounded to hear an anti-speed camera piece on BBC R4’s PM programme. True, it was milksop weak compared with what should have been said, but it did start to prize open the lid of secrecy, moral corruption, blatant lies and political correctness which has resulted in a bunch of quangos being allowed to install and enforce this new method of taxation.
The connection with Mr. Carr’s argument came when a police officer admitted discomfort at the way the system was being implemented and the damage it was causing to the public’s relationship with the police. This brought to mind a conversation I recently had with a young CID sergeant, whose general opinions on law and order and why it seems to the public that the police are ineffective, would have won him a round of applause from those denizens of Samizdata who, like me, think Tony Martin is, on the whole, a bit of a liberal.
What we have here, I suspect, is tension between the ‘common sense’ view held by the majority of Britons (including serving police officers in the lower-middle ranks) and the elite view of a self-satisfied, “liberal” intellectual class which has usurped power.
In other words, it may be less that there are too many laws to enforce (though, clearly, that is also true), but that the uberplods and their commissars dictate which ones receive the full truncheon.
G. Cooper makes an interesting point on what he calls the “tension between the ‘common sense’ view held by the majority of Britons (including serving police officers in the lower-middle ranks) and the elite view of a self-satisfied, “liberal” intellectual class which has usurped power. “.
This is also my impression from browsing through a number of editorials of the Police Federation Magazine — notably this brilliant critique of the ‘Police Performance Monitoring’ brainchild published in last April’s edition.
It’s not the fuzz who are to blame. It’s their socialist Gauleiters who should be strung from the lampposts.
Of course the police don’t enforce all laws. They never have done. There are all sorts of silly ancient laws on such things as where to tether one’s neighbour’s goat outside Cambridge colleges etc, which nobody either bothers enforcing or removing from the statute books. Marijuana. Speeding. Taping CDs.
This is part of how the law works; it is not written on tablets of stone, and cannot be treated as such. It is an evolving social process whereby certain elected or voluntarily employed individuals are responsible for enforcing certain moral ideas in the absence of their being consensually agreed. There are continuums from maximum to non-existent enforcement, and from serious to trivial laws.
When laws stop having any meaning, they are eventually lost if not repealed. Eventually.
So yes, something is “giving”, has always been giving, and this is a good thing and a part of the process, not a terrible crack that will result in bloody revolution.
While reaquianting myself with the ideas behind the Laffer Curve, I ran across this article on the potential social applications of the theory.
Steve Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire police, makes these comments just as a way of avoiding having to take responsibility for his force’s disgusting failure to intervene in last week’s shooting, which resulted in poor Marian Bates’ murder.
If they really had given up investigation of “low-level” crimes then surely they would have had the resources to be in attendance quickly at the crime scene, instead of the appalling response delay that resulted?
Sorry Green, I just don’t believe you.
One concer I have with blanket drug legalization and that speed. I was married to a tweaker for 6 years and prohibition was not why she broke the law (aside from buying/selling) – she just did insane crap because she was spun for days, out of her gourd, and irate most of the time.
As an American who has visited Britain many times, it seems like the society is still operating on the assumption that most people are well behaved. Hence the idea that citizens don’t need guns and neither do police.
But times have changed. The politically correct amoral school systems, the influx of non-integrating immigrants, and the natural escalation of the drug war have led Britain to a crime rate significantly higher than the US.
Perhaps its time to take a few of our approaches (except on the drug war): lock up the real bad guys, and even execute the worst (you do still have a death penalty on the books, although it is obscure – it is a capital offense to interfere with the Royal Navy; arm the citizenry (here in Arizona, where we have a “make my day” law, burglary of occupied residences is very rare, and hence violent confrontations with burglars is also very rare. When it does happen, frequently the burglar loses, and never offends anyone again, since losing usually means ventilation by high velocity lead. We also have licensed concealed carry of firearms.
We have a jail which is located (our climate is virtually identical to that of Baghdad, except we have an additional very hot rainy season). We have a large Sheriff’s posse, with many civilian members armed and trained in weapons use to law enforcement standards.
Of course, our society is still different from Britain, but many of the pathologies we have long dealt with are rapidly rising there.
Alice writes:
This is indeed how things should work but relies on the general public and the police having the same view as to which laws are ‘trivial’ and which are not – which is not the case at the moment, and really hasn’t been the case for quite a while: q.v. speeding, drugs and ‘victimless’ offences.
In part I can understand why the police go for the ‘easy’ crimes – I think it is to do with the nature of today’s offender. No matter how many times you arrest a drug addict for burglary, as long as they’re still an addict they will continue to burgle, and with no actual working rehabilitiation programs (because they don’t go down well with the public, the problem won’t go away. It’s the same for anyone that’s outside ‘society’ – the the moral penalties (of having been to jail, etcetra) don’t matter to them.
I think it’s just an attitude problem. For as long as people think they have the right to regulate what people do that doesn’t harm other people (drugs, ‘victimless crimes’, etc.) then you will have resentment of the police and with that will come lawlessness.
America is perhaps the best example of this. You can pretend to solve crime by building gigantic jails, but it’s hardly a complete solution. Quite why we are so desperate to follow their examples of criminal justice (in all areas apart from self-defence) I do not know.
Give people some space and freedom and they’ll be civilized. It’s not really that hard.
H
you do still have a death penalty on the books
Actually this was officially removed in 1999, there is now no death penalty allowed across the EU.