Community, innit?

Nick Ferrari was at his berating best yesterday, when doing battle with the phone-in public commenting on his suggestion that stop and search should be reinstituted. His reasoning? That the surge in London knife crime coincided exactly with the scaling back of stop and search. He stayed behind the line that most of us would have hovered over – that the ethnic make-up of London has a significant influence over these statistics. This view, common among the type of dreadful racists who no longer call parts of London home, is of course verboten these days.

Various callers chipped in, many taking him to task for expressing his thesis and blaming it instead on gang mentality and/or the reduction in police resources, oblivious to the blindingly simple observation that the gangs in question invariably shared certain characteristics. Easily targeted and very recognisable characteristics; the kind of characteristics that make stop and search pretty straightforward. Almost all of the callers that were against his proposition referred to their ‘community’.

As a white British person – one for whom a sense of community has long since been a troublesome thing to espouse – that word means only one thing; it means people who are ‘not like us’. Community used to imply cooperating, rubbing along and contributing. But the word today evokes antagonistic, segregated colonies of largely non-indigenous people, largely living on benefits and absorbing a disproportionate chunk of what are euphemistically referred to as ‘resources’. Money, is what that means; follow the welfare cheques and there is where you’ll find your communities.

Amid all this is the fantastic (literally) rise in the reporting of hate crimes. Well what would you expect when even the police themselves, normally timid about prosecuting property crime, are actively encouraging such reporting. Breitbart reports that they are visiting mosques to better increase such reporting. Oh, Breitbart you may cry, that’s even worse than the Daily Mail, but there is no smoke without fire.

So, even as we are as good as told that middle class victims are not worthy of assistance, with hate against minorities taking priority, the police ‘service’ is going out of its way to antagonise the people who pay the taxes which pay their wages in favour of people who invariably don’t. For what other conclusion can be drawn from the idiocy of rainbow-flagged new police cars, gay pride police events and yesterday the embarrassing ‘paint your nails against slavery’ idiocy.  

Twitter reacted in robust form, ridiculing Avon & Somerset Police in particular, whose officers were to be seen sporting garish colours with glee and an apparent lack of self-awareness. As community outreach it was ill-considered and aimless – what the hell had one to do with the other? It wasn’t a great stretch that they classified some responses as hate crimes in themselves.

You're nicked; that colour, with your complexion?

With such visible pursuit of those who post hurty words on social media - the word normal has become the most hateful word you can use – together with the regular insistence that they cannot afford to challenge more physical crime and the regular jolly japes that usually backfire on them, it is little wonder that crime is on the up. Given that it appears you are more likely to go to jail for word crimes than for burglary, or stabbing, or rape or assault, your regular crims must think all their birthdays have come at once. May I suggest that a return to proactive physical policing would be welcome and there must be some dinosaurs in the force who are longing for a good old dust up with the bad guys. Once they’ve removed their make up, obviously.