Who are you calling a Euro, Blue Stater?

Back on topic, our police are indeed rather crap at their jobs.

It depends which crimes you're talking about.

We have a problem with mugging, but not with guns (yet).

Burglary is falling, apparently. That's nothing to do with the police though - it's because electrical goods are now so cheap to buy new that there's no market for second-hand TVs that 'fell off the back of a lorry'.

Burglary in Britain remains at about twice the rate of the US. Of course, the rate of burglary in France is about 3 times that of the US, and every French home has multiple locks and locked shutters. The whole country turns into little fortresses at night.

Rather than concentrating on improving law enforcement, a fool's errand at best given that the gendarmerie( real military training and discipline, good pay, honorable traditions) are probably about as good as it gets, the Brits and Euros would be better off allowing their public to re-arm and defend their own homes, a l'americaine.

England was 'remarkably free of crime and disorder' from the mid 19th to the mid 20th centuries despite truly horrific living conditions for most people and obscene and quite visible disparities of wealth(i.e. the things that the lefties blame for all the world's ills) because real crime received real punishment, including a liberal application of the death penalty. In France, where crime was similarly quite low for the same period, the promise of 7 years transportation and 7 years as a 'colonist' in the disease-ridden swamp of Guyane Francaise or ending up a head shorter courtesy of the guillotine was a pretty effective deterrent.

Survival rates in Guyane Francaise were about the same as in the Russian Gulag.

Brit:

No, it doesn't:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/266umtwb.asp

I don't know how much credence I'd give to crime figure from the nineteenth century.

Large parts of London's East End were pretty much no-go areas for the authorities into the 1890's.

When you actually study crime reports in this country, what is most striking is the fact that a very large number of crimes are committed by a very small number of people. The problem is repeat offence. A notorious character in current British society is the prolific criminal 'rat boy'.

It's being tackled, with the 'ASBO' programme.

Bart:

While I'm by no means uncritical of our ciminal justice system, and would like to see far tougher action against petty crime than is currently the case, I'm very grateful for two things:

1) rat boys don't have easy access to guns.

2) we don't now, and never will again, have the death penalty.

Brit:

Want to bet?

That we'll never have the death penalty again? Yes, ok.

Any country will eventually get rid of it once it grasps that there is one overriding, unanswerable objection to capital punishment. Know what it is? (It's easy).

Even Connery learned to "Never say 'Never."

It's the small stuff the government can't handle that makes people worry about the bigger stuff.

And paying an 80 pound fine if you steal under 500 pounds worth of stuff is just goofy. They come out ahead.

Brit,

I couldn't disagree more. Look at Singapore. They execute at least 100 people a year for offenses not limited to murder, but other repeat violent felonies and certain drug offenses. That would be like executing 10-15000 people a year in the States. There is little doubt that offing 10-15000 people a year in the US would make us all a lot safer.

There is no good argument against capital punishment, even if a mistake is made the person executed is someone who had a record of other violence so we are better off without him anyway.

If European voters had their choice, they would all have the death penalty as a punishment option.

Rude Boys with guns don't scare me as long as I can carry.

It'll be re-adopted because it will offer Anglos the opportunity to rid themselves of others.

From what I've read, one of the biggest differences in British crime v. American crime is the prevalence of so-called "Hot Burglary" in Britain.

"Hot Burglaries" are when the criminal enters a home while the residents are inside.

The logical reason for this is that Americans have guns, and even those that do not benefit from the fact that the criminal cannot discern who does and who does not, excepting those that have "meat is murder" bumber stickers on their late model Volvo wagons parked out front.

Moreover, in large part, the US still recognizes the old common law doctrine that there is no retreat from the home.

While criminals in the US and in Britain doubtlessly have not researched comparative international law, they are not stupid and understand intuitively the risks of their trade.

Robbing a house in the US when people are home is a good way to get dead. Robbing a house in Britain when people are home is a good way to get their walets as well as their goods.

AML:

Yes, you're right that there is not enough protection for the homeowner in cases where violence is used against burglars. And sadly we have an announcement today that that's not going to change.

There's no demand here for a proliferation of guns here, though.

Bart:

I've no doubt whatsoever that you'd like an extra few dozen thousand people slaughtered every year.

For those among us who are slightly more sane, there are three key words that tend to win the argument over capital punishment: miscarriage of justice.

In Britain we learned our lesson with Timothy Evans in the 1960s. The Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and Stephen Downing, to name just some of the most famous cases, didn't exactly change our minds.

Your faith in the US and Singapore police to always get the right man is touching. Call me cynical, but I don't quite share it.

And having a violent past isn't quite enough to warrant the gas chamber as far as I'm concerned.

Sorry, Brit, if someone is a convicted armed robber or violent felon and is then erroneously convicted of murder and executed, society wins. It's addition by subtraction and getting him out of the gene pool is reward enough. The DNA Project makes a 'miscarriage of justice' virtually a statistical impossibility.

The death penalty should be available for a whole raft of violent offenses, certainly attempted murder, rape and kidnapping. It should also be applied for recidivist violent felons.

This would merely be returning us to the 19th century when there was a lot less crime, and you could hang a man for horse theft. But if you'd rather have violent criminals running around loose, don't come crying to me.

Bart:

'Society wins'? I know you don't place any value on individual lives, but I didn't realise how much of a socialist you are.

And what about if he was erroneously convicted of the armed robbery too?

Wrongful conviction could happen to you, could happen to your kids. It did happen to Timothy Evans, and so he's dead.

Evans, who helped murder at least his daughter and helped cover up the murder of his wife, is a perfect example of how most deserve it even if not for the specific crime they're charged with.

There is a conclusion to be drawn when you murder someone as punishment for a crime they did not commit.

You've drawn the wrong one.

That humans are fallible is the one valid argument against capital punishment--unfortunately it's the argument against every punishment--but there's a reason someone is arrested for violent crime.

OJ:

We have a spoof dimwit chat-show character in the IK, played by Steve Coogan, called Alan Partridge. Don't know if he ever made it to US TV....

Anyway, in one interview with a Defence Lawyer, he has an exchange that goes something like this:

Alan: But how can you try to get someone off when they've committed a crime?
Lawyer: Well, they might be innocent, Alan.
Alan (scoffing): With all due respect, I hardly think the police are likely to arrest someone who's innocent!
(pause)
Lawyer: Um, with slightly less respect, Alan...

The IK is, of course, somewhere near the UK.

You just edited your comment, so I'll answer it again.

It's an argument specifically about capital punishment, not all punishment.

The Guildford 4 and the Birmingham 6 got compensation and at least a few years to try to make something of what was left of their largely wasted lives.

Not much, when you consider how unpleasant it must be to be banged up for years when you're innocent.

But still miles better than a posthumous pardon, which is what Evans got.

The Birmingham 6 likewise, being IRA they could hardly say they received injustice.

Evans only gotr a pardon because killed--had he been imprisoned even a Brit jury would likely have left an accomplice to murder and coverup there.

The thing is, OJ, the fallibility of the justice system is not just the 'only valid' argument against capital punishment, as you call it.

It is, if you'll pardon the expression, the 'killer' argument.

Britain had a fine and longstanding tradition of axing and hanging until one day, it suddenly dawned on us that there is no sane answer to that killer argument.

Even the reddest redneck states in the US will get it one day.

Brit;

Britain didn't realize anything--elites got rid of it for ideological reasons. If the Tories came out for it they'd gain at the polls.

Meanwhile, you "killer" argument is instead entirely fatuous. It depends on the notion of prison as a kind of knitting circle where the "innocent" await justice. Instead it's a grinding existence of violence, rape, AIDs, etc, where the 19 year old black from Brixton who's put away for murder--who isn't an Irish cause celebre--has essentially been sentenced to sixty years (if he's lucky) of state supervised torture.

Human fault is a reason for no punishment, not for preferring prison to execution.

Now this is nice. Naturally you hate anti-execution types because you associate them with bleeding-heart lefties and Sean Penn movies. I used to be the same, until I too saw the impossibility of answering this argument.

But you're rattled here because you know it is a killer argument. It just is so obvious that once you've realised that you've put even one innocent person to death, you can't take the risk again if you want to have a decent society.

Even bastard-hard Tory MPs don't want to bring back the noose any more.

Yes, straw polls show that perhaps a 60:40 majority want to hang 'em high, but that's because we don't bother debating any more. People forget the arguments, and why we got rid of it. But if you ran a referendum, it would only take one short film of a Guildford 4 member to swing the vote.

The Irish cause celebres are merely the most famous cases. God knows how many innocent people have been put to death prior to 1966, and are still being wrongfully chucked off this mortal coil in the US and Singapore even now.

Nobody said prison is nice. But while you're still alive and kicking, you can appeal, new evidence comes up. Hard to do that when you're six feet under. Go ask a young black in Broadmoor if he'd rather have fried.

Don't worry OJ, you'll get over it. It's called questioning your beliefs. Happens to the rest of us all the time.