As the Mirror unhelpfully doesn't link to the report I tried finding it myself, and either my google-fu is failing or the report isn't out yet. All I could find was
this which says the survey is being conducted differently this year due to covid.
But let's accept the data are accurate. We have statements like,
"Nearly 1.2m people had seen abandoned or burnt-out cars in their areas, according to the survey"
Ok, but that tells us nothing about the number of abandoned or burnt-out cars. Abandoned and burnt-out are quite different too, and conflating them seems designed to make the situation seem worse than it may be. And why are cars being abandoned more? People don't normally just abandon expensive things without a reason. Or are we supposed to assume they're cars that have been nicked and then dumped?
"Six million (13%) had spotted yobs being drunk or rowdy in public"
Not just people being drunk but "yobs". Nice editorialising there. And again, these aren't people who have been bothered by drunk or rowdy people, merely that they've "spotted" them.
"almost seven million (14%) experienced teens handing around on streets"
Not simply seen but "experienced". So scary!
This feels like Labour are trying to repeat Blair's "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", but somehow ignoring the "causes" bit beyond the cuts to policing budgets. From the
Mirror article,
Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds, a former criminal barrister, said: ...“Labour will work to put more police on our streets and would act where the Conservatives have failed and introduce a new Victims’ Law that would give victims of antisocial behaviour the same rights as victims of crimes.”
I found
this piece written by Blair in 1993 (reproduced in 2015) where he says,
any sensible society acting in its own interests as well as those of its citizens will understand and recognise that poor education and housing, inadequate or cruel family backgrounds, low employment prospects and drug abuse will affect the likelihood of young people turning to crime. If they are placed outside mainstream culture, offered no hope or continuity, shown no respect by others and unable to develop respect for themselves, there is a greater chance of their going wrong. This cannot be challenged other than through active community intervention. To see this requires not a PhD in sociology, but a small experience of life. Yet the Tories are destroying hope for young people, slashing training programmes, closing youth clubs. They are inert in the face of rising youth unemployment.
I'm not really in a position to judge the effectiveness of Blair's ambitions in this regard as I was a teenager when he came into power and wasn't interested in politics, but it's clear we have a repeat of the circumstances that led to his next and most famous line "We should be tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime". The fact Starmer appears to be focusing on policing without considering any of the causal factors is deeply disappointing.