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LUDOVIC/REA
ON PATROL:
French plainclothes police check a suspect's identity card after an altercation, above; an officer cradles a special gun
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| A Shock To The System |
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The public is scared and angry about crime. So politicians are cracking down with tough new laws that take a bite out of precious civil liberties
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By J.F.O. McALLISTER/London |
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Posted Sunday, Nov. 24, 2002; 2.02 p.m.
GMT
A specter is haunting Europe — crime. Voters are mad
as hell about it, and they've made it clear to their elected
officals that they're not going to take it anymore. It was
disgust with insécurité that helped sweep rightists
to power in France last June. In Germany, a spate of lurid
sex crimes against children provoked Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
to say "Lock them away — forever." Anger at
juvenile thugs has Italian authorities weighing whether to
send 16- and 17-year-old convicts to adult prisons. And last
week, the British government, which has already passed 11
crime bills and launched nearly a hundred crime-fighting initiatives
in the past five years, introduced a criminal-justice overhaul
it described as "radical," full of controversial
measures to squeeze more convictions out of the courts and
more miscreants into prison. Civil libertarians railed against
measures that diluted defendants' rights, but the government
was unapologetic. "Yes, the system is failing,"
said Home Secretary David Blunkett — and he's the man
in charge of it.
Herein lies a paradox, or maybe it's just politics: people
are up in arms about crime, but actual crime rates are mostly
falling or stable. Statisticians see only a vague correlation
between changes in actual crime and the level of public agitation
about it. In Britain, for example, the "failing system"
has produced a drop in violent crime of 22% since 1997. In
Hamburg, the murder rate dropped 45% between 1993 and 2001
and robbery dropped 11% between 2000 and 2001, yet in September
2001 public disgust with crime swept to office a new hard-line
Interior Minister, Ronald Schill, nicknamed "Judge Merciless."
He has advocated the castration of persistent sex offenders
and approved the use of forced emetics on drug dealers in
Hamburg to recover swallowed evidence.
It's true that Europe is a more dangerous and violent place
than a generation ago: between 1975 and 2000, crime rose 97%
in France, 145% in England, 410% in Spain. But why, when in
the last decade crime has stabilized or dropped in many countries,
has it now become such a big issue? Here we enter the fickle
zone of mass psychology, where inflammatory headlines and
neighborhood gossip can cause anxiety wholly out of sync with
a person's true chance of becoming a victim. Blunkett acknowledged
as much when he said that the hard-won drop in crime under
his Labour government "means nothing if it is not felt
on the ground." He might have added, "where people
cast their ballots" — because cutting crime (which
is immensely hard) and managing people's perceptions of it
(easier, though no cakewalk) have become the central preoccupations
of some of Europe's top politicians.
Take Nicolas Sarkozy, who revels in his Robocop image as
France's new Interior Minister. During the campaign he played
expertly on public disgust with crime, which was spurred by
a 20% rise in criminal activity between 1997 and mid-2002,
especially among young people. Critics found anti-immigrant
overtones in his appeals, but he tapped into a wellspring
of anger that the ruling Socialist government had too casually
dismissed. "We mustn't scorn those who suffer daily insecurity
by accusing them of having become authoritarian and intolerant,"
Sarkozy said earlier this month, trashing the left as out
of touch with grassroots France. "Let's stop excusing
everything in an attempt to explain everything, including
things that are inexcusable and inexplicable."
Sarkozy has redeployed uniformed cops to where they will
be most visible — mostly to where relatively affluent
city-dwellers live — and staged a series of well-publicized
operations in poor neighborhoods, where voters are few. In
October he presented a vast new crime bill that promises to
fund another 18,000 police and 10,000 Justice Ministry posts,
mostly judges and officials to speed up court cases. Cops
and security guards will be given new powers to search individuals,
packages and cars — not just for terror-related reasons
as they already can, but to catch any type of criminal. dna
samples will be taken not only from convicted sex offenders,
but anyone whose criminal record or behavior suggests a capacity
to commit "heinous crimes" in the future.
Critics call this liberticide, and deride his plan to ban
"aggressive" begging and punish itinerant groups
who camp on abandoned public lands as an attempt to criminalize
those who are merely unfortunate or unpopular. But many of
his initiatives build on measures Socialists had already introduced,
and Sarkozy clearly enjoys his politically incorrect image.
Referring to a recent string of unsolved murders, Sarkozy
told Le Monde, "I don't have enough bravery to tell [the
victims' families] that our [DNA] files contain the genetic
fingerprints of just 1,000 criminals, while in Britain they've
got over 1.6 million. Being more efficient in finding guilty
people, and preventing future tragedies, seems to me more
useful than screaming about the threat to our civil liberties."
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