How the iPod broke Britain
Wales Business — By Adam Higgitt on March 26, 2010 11:00 am
Apple's iPod: victim or cause of street crime?
YOU don’t have to be a seasoned political observer to predict that “broken Britain” will figure prominently in the forthcoming General Election campaign. The Conservative leader David Cameron is credited with popularising the term, and it remains a key Tory theme. So who’s to blame? Labour neglect? Thatcher’s legacy? How about a new culprit – the iPod?
Listen to this Radio 4 interview with James Treadwell, of Leicester University’s Department of Criminology. He points out that burglary has declined by over 58% since the mid 1990s, along with a big fall in car theft. The reasons, he suggests, are a fall in the profitability of these crimes. The old pattern of stealing VCRs and flogging them down the pub has been undermined by a fall in prices for such items purchased legitimately. Breaking into someone’s home and pinching a DVD player becomes too high a risk if you’re only going to get a tenner for it because someone can purchase one new for £25 in Tesco. Similarly, the ease with which other items, most notably TVs, can be nicked has been transformed by their increase in size, and thus portability. The other side of the coin is the the items that are worth stealing have gone mobile. Laptops, cashpoint cards, cameras and MP3 players are things we now tend to carry on our person and hence aren’t at home when we’re not. And that in turn makes street theft a much more sensible career for your average low-level villain.
The upshot is that we feel less safe on the streets, which in turn makes us less sociable, while we don’t notice the relative absence of crime in our home, which in turn feels more like a fortress. Relations break down, we feel more atomised, less communal. Little wonder the signs of social breakdown appear much more pressing and real.
So there we are. Broken Britain: nothing to do with the banks, inequality, Thatcher or Blair. Instead it’s the mass produced DVD player and the decision it forced upon our nation’s burglars to retrain as muggers.
Tags: crime, equality, inequality, social mobility, technology
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5 Comments
no, social breakdown is down to them banning the cane in school. When kids got the idea that they are above the law, without sanction, all hell broke loose. It’s Lord Of The Flies out there….
“The upshot is that we feel less safe on the streets, which in turn makes us less sociable, while we don’t notice the relative absence of crime in our home, which in turn feels more like a fortress. Relations break down, we feel more atomised, less communal. Little wonder the signs of social breakdown appear much more pressing and real.”
Indeed. It is a cause of frustration for me, and I mean in this in a non-partisan way, that the reduction in crime (for which causes of this are numerous IMHO) has not been accompanied by at least some sense of lowering of fear of crime. I suppose the problem is inherently personal, in that if you have been the victim of crime, it is a game changer.
I say this on a personal level, my grandparents feel less safe today, or at least think in the big bad world that it is getting worse. That is not a nice feeling in my view. To me we live in such a hyper reality at times, with velocity shovelled on for effect by the media/consumerism and sometimes dog whistle politics, that I believe it gives the impression of things spinning out of control crime wise.
To make a party political point to end with. The Conservatives are trying to paint that narrative, despite the relatively strong case that crime has reduced while Labour has been in office (which is not the same as saying Labour should take the credit). I believe the tory narrative is flawed in terms of actually helping reduce crime and as a political strategy. For start they are saying the same stats dodgy that they will surely cling to if they were in office?
If they admitted crime had gone down, they could at least then say their focus is now on the crimes that annoy the hell out of people on their streets. This whole narrative of some feral society whereby muggers and crack addicts line every corner, and that crime is actually going up, merely takes away the attention on things such as drugs, poverty and low level anti social crime that are actually root causes.
To be honest, the whole Blairite ASBO culture was dire – it criminalised our youth with ineffective Daily Mail slogans. But what it did achieve was to identify that it is the low level annoying crimes that happen in your street that matter to people in their every day lives, not the (still awful) more serious crimes that may never happen to you, particularly outside major cities.
Al, you blame the absence of a cane.
The cane is only a deterrent (a stick if you will) to stop a child behaving in an anti-social way. But surely a child’s behaviour is quite simply the manifestation of an attitude that he/she has learned – and any deterrent to curb behaviour in no changes his/her underlying attitude to the act.
…and it is the parents’ job to instill the correct attitude into a child. If they did their job correctly, then discussion of any deterrent would become mute.
With a decent upbringing, we think it is wrong to mug old grannies. Our behaviour is based on that attitude, and has nothing to do with the deterrent of being caught – be it a slap on the wrist or life imprisonment.
Maybe it’s spring filling me with undue optimism but maybe Britain’s not broken. At least to no greater or lesser extent than it has ever been. I know full well that if I walk into town with white head phones showing and talking on my iPhone that I run the risk of getting mugged, but 20 years ago I would never have done the same walk with one of those little brown envelopes full of cash we used to get on pay day (I miss them) dangling from my pocket. I’m really not that daft. People do bad things, always have done.
Tell us we’re going to be mugged and we’ll hide in doors never making eye contact never saying hello, tell us the current terrorism threat level is severe and we will all look twice at strangers on the train with rucksacks. It also means we never talk to each other, barriers go up between us and then yes you win we really do have broken Britain.
I’m not expecting street parties but if politicians focused on the positive and not the negative, we may at least start to smile at strangers again and maybe even start to breakdown some of those barriers, and maybe there is such a thing as society after all.
Words of sense from Mal. Just because people feel Britain is broken doesn’t mean it actually is.