Seconds Out

‘IF you have not been sprayed with graffiti, mugged, verbally assaulted, sold an illegal drug or been approached by a kerb crawler in the past two seconds you can consider yourself fortunate.

‘Has Celine Dion been singing again?’

The Independent has learned that in a single day last month (September 10), police and town halls received 66,107 complaints about disorder.

That, apparently, equates to one antisocial crime every two seconds.

So if you haven’t yet been a victim today, most likely you soon will be. It follows that you should prepare yourself. But what to do?

Helpfully, David Blunkett has some ideas, something more than Tony Blair’s famous perversion of another of his timeless soundbites: “Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement.”

Indeed, Blunkett has two dozen ideas contained in his new Anti-Social Behaviour Bill, among which are plans to make begging a recordable offence, and remove housing benefits from council tenants who make their neighbours’ lives a misery.

There will also be a hotline for people to tell tales on graffiti artists. Backing this up will be a database containing the “tags” of all known spray-can felons.

And, vitally, there will be “alternative giving” schemes, intended to persuade citizens to donate their cash to charity rather than lay silver in the palms of vagrants and beggars.

Or course none of this is much good if you are currently being victimised by some hooligan element. If you are, best call Tony Martin.

Or count to two, after which time the nasty will have moved onto someone else. Or you’ll be unconscious. One…two…’

Posted: 15th, October 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink