Petty Crime

Petty Crime
We are often told that despite the public feeling that crime is rising the true facts are that in many respects crime is falling.  This jars with what most of us experience day-to-day and thereby creates scepticism of the official figures.  Still, we are told that our perception does not represent the facts - that the illusion has other roots than genuine crime.  Fear.  The Media.  Moral Panic.  Whatever.
  
Last night somebody stole a fern out of a pot in my front garden.  They didn’t steal the pot - it was probably too heavy and therefore might qualify as ‘real work’.  They literally stuck their hands into the earth, whipped the plant from its moorings and then - presumably -took it home and planted it.  Or possibly just threw it into a hedge somewhere.  I doubt they tried to resell it in the local pub or ‘thrift’ store, there not being a likely massive market for loose second-hand shrubbery.
     
So now the quandary.  Do I report it? 
 
If I phone the police and tell them I’ve had a plant stolen from a plant pot I doubt I am going to receive a visit from the serious crime office.  CSI (or the British equivalent) are not going to swarm into my street, cordon off the road and ticker-tape my yard with colourful orange and yellow bands.  No specialist analytical team will arrive and take dirt samples from the pot to look for DNA left therein.  A plant-shape, drawn in chalk, will not adorn the footpath outside my house.
 
The problem is, it is precisely this sort of thing which leads to our perception of crime rising. 
 
Last night I had drunks screaming and shouting at 2AM outside my door.  One of them stood in the middle of the road flagging down cars and asking for a ride.  I have neighbours opposite me for whom a weekend is not complete without an hour or so of hammering on the front door in the small hours demanding “let me in” (actually they say “Pozwalane ja” or something, but I digress) to some faceless resident who appears to very much not want to. 

Cars park up and down along my street, engines running, during any sort of show at the Angles Theatre - the double yellow lines do not deter them and of course there are no PCOs to issue tickets because they prefer to discharge the traffic warden-esque portion of their duties at more sociable hours.  People smash glass in the road.  Kick down the decorative brick walls of nearby buildings.  Break open the electrical box and turn off half the lights on the car park.  I could go on…
  
In the last month alone I suspect I have experienced or noticed in excess of twenty individual small crimes of this nature.  Often after-the-fact of course, since I do not stalk the streets at night dressed in a body stocking, cape and mask.  How many have I reported?  None.  It hardly seems worth it, so conditioned am I to the idea that nobody will come if I call, that the police will have “better things to do” or that I don’t want to be a bother with my “silly little” crime reports.
  
There is a reason people perceive crime is rising and it has nothing to do with our overactive imaginations.   The “official figures” are all well and good but they do not represent the true picture.  I put it to you, dear reader, that our towns are awash with petty crime, antisocial behaviour, vandalism and old fashioned rudeness.  Anybody who lives in a town that isn’t fed from a silver spoon knows this to be true.  Our solutions?  Massage the figures, invent colourful ‘initiatives’, tell people they don’t know the ‘truth’. 

Now I’ll be the first to admit that a stolen potplant, though annoying and not inexpensive, is hardly Crime Of The Century.  No movies will be made about it starring George Clooney or Brad Pitt.  But I wouldn’t steal something from someone’s yard.  Would you?  With that in mind we must accept that thieves like this have a different mindset to you and I.  A pot plant today - a bike next week - a car the week after that?  It’s not an impossible progression to imagine.

What would happen if each and every one of us reported each and every crime we saw?  Every piece of new graffiti we passed.  Every smashed bottle?  Every leery fistfight?  Every time some mindless oik woke us or our children up by the simple expedient of not being able to hold a few pints, or thinking that the fun way to spend an evening is breaking other people’s stuff?  Every broken car window?  Every stolen potplant?  What would the “official figures” look like then?
 

This entry was posted on 23/08/2009 at 03:45 pm and is filed under Wisbech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.