Crime

The Sunday Express is at it again. It is outraged that Britain's prisons contain some inmates who were not born in this country. Of course, everyone is hopping aboard the immigrant-bashing bandwagon these days. Immigration, it sometimes seems, is something to be feared, not valued. I understand the political calculation behind all this. The restrictionists have carried the day and there are few votes in seeming "soft" on immigration these days. Which is a shame. But there you have it. Nevertheless, the immigration brouhaha increasingly bears more than a passing resemblance to a moral panic. As tends to be the case, such fears are not utterly groundless but they are hyped and exaggerated to a point at which they become irrational and, even, nonsensical.

Important work from Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University into the inherent racism of internet search engines. She carried out a study which demonstrated a clear difference between the sort of ads that appear on the page if you’re searching for either a “black” name or a “white” name. She used a bunch of names which had previously been identified as being associated with one race or another. For “black” names she used DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine; for “white”, stuff like James, Emily and The Rt Hon Nicholas Soames or something. When the white names were tapped in, up came adverts for nice sofas and dating agencies and holidays in agreeable places. When the black names were tapped in up came adverts for criminal record searches.

In the current issue of The Spectator, we put on the cover four words that sum up the coalition government's approach to crime: pretend not to notice. Today's Birmingham Mail offers a snapshot of what we mean: 'The data, released under the Freedom of Information Act, showed the crimes were committed by 11,422 lawbreakers – meaning on average each carried out three offences within 12 months of being released on licence or receiving a community sentence.' That's an astonishing 33,000 offences in West Midlands committed over two years by those on the alternatives to jail: suspended sentences or community sentences. Or by those released from jail early, in what's supposed to be a cost-saving strategy. The symbol of England's failure in the fight against crime is the tag.

What freedoms we have in Britain have not come as a rule from revolutions and thunderous declarations of the rights of man. More often than not, our liberties have come because bloody-minded and obstinate men and women have squared their shoulders and decided to fight an arbitrary decision, when others would have surrendered. Paul Chambers has the right to claim a good deal of credit for compelling the Director of Public Prosecutions to stop treating offensive but harmless remarks as crimes. I won’t go through his case in detail because I have told his story elsewhere. But in brief Paul was planning to fly to Belfast to visit a woman friend. He saw on the news that snow had closed Robin Hood Airport and tweeted to his friends, “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed.

These shootings. I think we need J G Ballard back. Looking back through previous such apparently random events, we might observe that: • The perpetrators are almost always white. • They are almost always lower middle class or middle class. • The areas in which the shootings take place are almost always comfortable, although not luxurious, suburbs, a good distance from the local metropolis. In demographic terms they tend to have a rather lower racial mix than is average for the state. • The median income is always bang on average for the state. They tend to be places with otherwise low crime figures. I don’t really know what this tells us.

The news coming out of Connecticut is just awful. 18 children have been gunned down at their school and, reports suggest, that another nine people—including the gunman—are also dead. The gunman’s mother apparently worked at the school, and is believed to be among those he murdered. If this death toll is accurate, it will be the second worst shooting in US history, behind the Virginia Tech incident in 2007. Early reports indicate that the weapon was legally purchased and licensed. It can seem tawdry to talk about politics at a time like this. But there’s no doubt that the gun control debate will now return to Washington. The White House has already indicated that it wants to see the assault weapon ban, which elapsed in 2004, renewed.

‘The body is a multitude of ways of coming apart’ writes Keith Ridgeway in his most recent novel Hawthorn & Child. He describes these ways. It can be beaten, broken or burnt. It can fall down stairs or in to deep water. The excoriation of adult skin differs to that of a child’s. Ridgeway begins with not a character but a body, and as the bodies amass – sometimes sexualised as well as pulverised – the novel itself begins to come apart, and everything in it. Hawthorn and Child are detectives in North London, tasked with finding a crime boss named Mishazzo and solving the shooting with which the novel opens.