Crime

I have been a defence lawyer for more than 25 years. I have defended clients charged with almost every crime there is. I have argued against convictions for robbery, rape, sexual assault, murder, manslaughter, copyright theft, perverting the course of justice, perjury, serious fraud, international illegal fishing, money laundering, causing death by dangerous driving, grievous bodily harm, blackmail… and the list goes on. Of all the crimes and misdemeanours I have seen, all the improbable tales and shocking lies in the witness box, what sticks with me most about the criminal justice system is the utter simplicity of the one thing that lies behind almost all of it. People want to take drugs and nothing will stop them.

Next year the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) will offer one degree, in design, technology and the humanities, to teach students to solve ‘complex problems’ like (they suggest) knife crime. Really? The key to problem solving is the development of two essential faculties — the imaginative and the critical. Can LIS really teach for those — or just how to pass exams? The philosopher Seneca insisted that the search for what really counted (his example was virtue) ‘cannot be delegated to someone else’. He illustrated it by telling the story of Calvisius Sabinus, who had the brains and bank account of the Roman equivalent of Sir Philip Green.

Some years ago I was introduced to one notion of how to tackle dishonest and insincere accusations of racism. It was not just that there should be a social cost to making a dishonest claim, but that the cost should equal that borne by somebody who is accurately and correctly identified as a racist. Without such a disincentive there is no reason (other than decency and honesty, which may sometimes be in short supply) for people not to level such accusations insincerely in order to beat away any and all critics. Since Monday night I have been wondering, amid much else, whether some similar aspiration could be encouraged regarding hate crimes. In recent days and weeks there has been much comment on the case of Jussie Smollett.

The greatest criminal barrister of all time, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, who probably saved more men and women from the gallows than anyone in English history, was famous for his 'scales of justice' speech, in which, as described in Sally Smith's magnificent biography, he would stand for several long minutes with his arms outstretched at shoulder height and say: ‘It may appear that the scales of justice are first weighed on one side in favour of the prisoner and then on the other against the prisoner. As counsel on either side puts the evidence in the scales, I can call to my fancy a great statue of Justice holding the two scales with equally honest hands.

I’ve talked to Denise Horvath-Allan more than my own mother this year. Denise’s son Charles went missing while backpacking in Canada. I see his face — never ageing, entombed within his early twenties — every day on Facebook. Denise’s posts are more desperate each time I see them. Charles disappeared in 1989, on the eve of his 21st birthday. Denise and I believe he was murdered not long afterwards. But the case, like so many others, remains unsolved. As a journalist, I’ve been writing about true crime for years. True crime is a non-fiction genre that examines a crime and the people involved. It has never been more popular: just look at the success of Serial and Making a Murderer.

Rod Liddle was branded a 'national disgrace' when he wrote about how black boys are paying the price for growing up in households without their dads. But he's right. The disproportionate number of black boys held in youth offending centres, which I visited during my time as a member of the youth justice board, shocked me. Many of those I encountered had been involved in knife crime. So what was going wrong? I did what many sociologists have failed to do: I asked them. These boys knew I wouldn't stand for any spin about racism or the closure of the local youth club. Without such excuses, nearly all pointed to the absence of their fathers as a key problem in their lives.

London’s knife-crime epidemic is back in the news. Tomorrow the Damilola Taylor Trust is holding a lecture at which the founders of Glasgow’s Violence Reduction Unit will explain what lessons London might learn from their experience. Their distinctive ‘public health’ approach is widely held to have been successful and it is frequently contrasted with a strategy of law enforcement. Champions of the public-health approach can be identified by their predilection for referring to the problem of knife crime as ‘issues around’ knife crime and their enthusiasm for finding ‘reachable and teachable moments’ when dealing with offenders caught with a knife.