Who goes unarmed these days?

The Graun says that a third of young people living in cities thinks it's acceptable to carry a knife for self-defence.

One in three young people living in cities thinks it is acceptable to carry a knife in self-defence because violence is so rife, according to research revealed today. Teenagers and twenty-somethings have lost faith in politicians, the police or schools to protect them and increasingly believe they need to be armed to defend themselves against people of their own age. Nearly half said they knew someone who had been a victim of knife crime.

And with depressing predictability they wheel out the old fallacy about carrying a knife making you more at risk of being a victim of crime - it's far more likely that people at risk of being a victim of crime decide to arm themselves with knives, which is the point of the article in the first place. 

It's odd to think that we seem to be approaching the situation where criminals go armed and chidren go armed but law-abiding adults don't. Isn't this the wrong way round?   

Figure fiddling

The British Crime Survey is widely held to be the most reliable representation of the incidence of crime in this country. It's all relative though. Think tankers Civitas have just put out a press release which says that the BCS might be leaving three million crimes per year out of the figures. Probably par for the course for government statistics.

It reveals that, ever since its inception in 1981, the British Crime Survey (BCS) has omitted many crimes committed against people who have been repeat victims. If people are victimised in the same way by the same perpetrators more than five times in a year, the number of crimes is put down as five. The justification for this was ‘to avoid extreme cases distorting the rates’, but, as Farrell and Pease point out, ‘if the people who say they suffered ten incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate’.

So please remember people. Once you've been mugged five times, don't even bother telling the police, cause they'll just throw the report in the bin. 

Law on self-defence

So the law on self-defence is going to be clarified (again), says the BBC. "Have a go" Jack Straw reckons that citizens need to know that the law is on their side, and that they can use "reasonable force". Nick Clegg for the Lib Dems says everyone knows that "proportionate, reasonable force" can be used.

I wonder if either of these two gentlemen would care to let us all know what force it would be "proportionate" and "reasonable" for a pensioner to use when confronted with a drug-crazed twenty-something in the dark in the middle of the night?

Also could they let us know if such pensioners can keep weapons by their beds for purposes of self-defence?

And must these aged homeowners ascertain the identity and/or intentions of the intruder before acting, or can they strike first and ask questions later?  

Or must we consider the aged as dispensable? 

The good old days

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, this is a database of the records of the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1834. It's extremely nifty in that it has a graphing tool so you can easily analyse crimes, verdicts and punishments. I used it to generate a graph of crimes involving killing by decade (all verdicts).

Click for full size image The results are quite interesting. Apparently the Old Bailey saw between 10 and 15 cases involving killing each year during this period. Call it one per month. I wonder how many it is now?

To get a handle on the answer to this question, I've searched the Google News archive for pleas to charges of murder in 2006 and come up with 27 stories. Some, however, are duplicates and others are not actually Old Bailey cases at all. The edited list looks like this:

1. the Monkton murder
2. Mohammed Ali & his brother
3. Tom ap Rhys Price
4. Damilola Taylor
5. Billie Jo Jenkins
6. Trial of Daniel Gonzalez who killed four
7. Samantha Renfrew
8. Anne Mendel
9. John Curran (reduced to manslaughter)
10. Samaira Nazir
11. Rochelle Holness
12. Peter Woodhams
13. Sally Anne Bowman

I think it's fair to say that by the time you've added in the manslaughter charges (and possibly the attempted murder charges too - the definition used is not clear) the current figure will be well in excess of what we saw in previous centuries.

This all deeply unscientific of course, but interesting nevertheless. 

Why you should carry a truncheon and why it's legal to do so

Firstly a caveat. I'm no sort of a lawyer and I'm not qualified to comment on this kind of thing. The wise course of action would probably be to shut up, but I'm a blogger so wise courses are not par for the course. I'm relaying something I came across on a forum for criminal solicitors called, um, criminalsolicitor.net, which must rank as one of the most interesting threads I've read.

It was started by a solicitor whose client was accused of carrying an ASP - apparently a kind of extending truncheon. He had been seen with it by police, who had responded when he telephoned them after a bin had been thrown through his window and he had been verbally threatened. While he was acquitted, the exposition of the relevant law was fascinating. (Of course, whether it is a correct exposition is another matter).

Some of the positions made on the thread are:

• Common Law, and its declaration in the Bill of Rights of 1689 allowed ordinary citizens to carry weapons.
• For the law-abiding citizen at least, this position was not changed by the Prevention of Crime Act 1953, which was only intended to prevent criminals from carrying weapons. This is confirmed by the Hansard record on the Parliamentary debate of the time.  There is also a clue in the title of the Act.
• The PCA 1953 did not repeal the Bill of Rights explicitly. Subsequent case law has shown that the BoR, as a constitutional act, cannot be repealed implicitly.
• PCA 1953 did, however, reverse the burden on proof, requiring the accused to show prove their innocence using one of the available defences of "lawful authority" or "reasonable excuse". It is argued that "lawful authority" refers to the common law right to carry a weapon which is declared in the Bill of Rights.
  
• Most defences under PCA 1953 have used "reasonable excuse". Case law has shown that carrying a weapon on the offchance of attack is not reasonable. If you are threatened, however, it is.
• The "lawful authority" argument has been untested by the courts, apart from some non-binding comments in a "reasonable excuse" case which argued that it referred to police and military carrying of weapons.
  
• The term "lawful authority" is not defined in the act. This being the case, the question is asked "Where does a policeman derive his lawful authority to carry a truncheon?". There is no legislation conferring this authority. It is argued that the only place it can come from is the Bill of Rights/common law and the duty to preserve the peace - ie the same place as everyone else. Again this seems to be confirmed by the Hansard record in which it is explained that it refers to the common law duty to preserve the peace.
  

So, if they are right, ordinary citizens are allowed to carry arms. Indeed one of the commenters claimed to do so as a matter of course. He said that he'd never had any trouble with the police either.

I can't help but think back to the guidance on self-defence issued by the Home Office a couple of years ago which was a masterpiece of obfuscation. If they'd said it's alright to carry a truncheon for your defence, all would have been clear. 

But is it right? 

Shall we try something different?

Another day, another murder.

And another. There's more too. We are beset by violence. I've listed a few of the other headlines from the BBC England page below:

Woman quizzed over stab death
Two held after woman stabbed
Man charged over fatal stabbing
Gunshots fired at car and house
Woman stabbed by intruder
Body of man found in garden
Man arrested after fire at flats
Man suffers serious head injuries 

Anyone would think it was a good day to bury bad news.

If anyone from the metropolitan elite can rouse themselves sufficiently, we'll probably get the calls for tighter laws and fiercer punishments (these just days after announcing that we were going to have to put fewer people in prison). Lots of handwringing too, if experience is anything to go by, and if they get out of bed the right side, the powers that be might even declare knife or firearms amnesties which are at least good for a photocall.

The level of violent crime is now getting to the stage where anyone who is really thinking about the policy implications has to be asking themselves if we are barking up the right tree. We have had progressively tighter controls over arms for nearly a hundred years. It would be nice if we could point at any significant falls in violent crime to accompany these, but we can't. At every step of the way the numbers have just kept rising.

Can anyone really conclude from this that further laws will work? Where is the evidence? Of course there isn't any. Believing in legislation as the answer to violent crime is a matter of convenience for politicians, who find it gives them the appearance of activity. For others it's a religious belief engendered by the "yuk" factor they feel for weaponry. They have no choice but to back the politicians.

These are not rational approaches to the issue.

How about something completely different? How about repealing all the firearms laws, and take us back to the situation at the start of the twentieth century, when firearms were available to anyone who wanted them? We can exclude convicted criminals and minors from this, of course, but in essence everyone can have a gun.

Why should this work in theory? The answer is that the economic incentives for the criminal are dramatically changed. Attempting to steal someone's wallet changes from a "dead cert" option for the bad guy armed with a knife, into one of potential death. He can no longer know that he has the "military" advantage over his intended victim. And his attempted mugging could lead to his being killed, which fundamentally alters the risk/reward calculation he makes before his attack. Would he still mug someone if he risked death to do so? 

What then would be the practical implications? Would we end up with a bloodbath, as so many people argue? The evidence from America is strongly against this. Most US states now have laws allowing, and in many cases, requiring issue of concealed carry firearms permits. As each state has liberalised its laws, a little experiment has been performed to allow us to test the theory.

The results are hotly disputed, but in some ways it's actually rather surprising that this is the case. According to this page (which I've chosen because it looks reasonably neutral) the major study on this issue by Lott & Mustard, which found that relaxing the firearms laws reduced crime. Their study was critiqued by Black & Nagin who argued that Lott & Mustard couldn't support their findings. What Black and Nagin didn't say, however,  was that Lott & Mustard's figures indicated that looser laws raised crime.

So it looks as if at worst, liberalised firearms laws make little difference. Certainly, they don't seem to lead inexorably to bloodbaths and carnage.

This being the case, our worst fears about what would happen if our neighbours started to carry guns appear to be unfounded. We have made an inanimate object into a bogeyman and we torture ourselves about what might happen if things were to change. We should recognise this as irrational, and try to deal with the question purely by reason. We shoudn't fear trying something different.

It might just work. 

EU crime survey

This map is from an official study comparing crime and safety across the EU (warning 1.3Mb pdf file). The darker the colour, the higher the probability of being a victim of crime.

A few highlights:

• Only the Irish are more likely to be victims of crime than the British
• We are twice as likely to be victims of crime than the Spanish
• Britain has the worst burglary rate in the EU
• Our rates for assault and theft are at the top end
• Our rates for fraud and theft are good

It's also worth noting that crime rates are falling across the continent. So next time a NuLab clone parrots the party line that they are winning the fight against crime, you can point out to them that the EU reckons its more to do with demographics and security rather than policy.