"Ever since the Romans, dull social-conservative farts have been saying that society is going to hell whether it has been or not"

you summarised it as

"have been complaining about society going downhill since the Ancient Greeks, therefore at no time have any of these complaints ever had any validity’"

since we’re playing that game, I will summarise your

"Thanks d2 for joining the dots"

as

"I’ve just farted".

Good gracious "Laban" how on earth are we to take your live-action crime reports seriously if you pretend that this : – " they shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously if they ignore the facts"

is actually this : – "at no time have any of these complaints ever had any validity"

I mean, even *I* can see it.

PS – bollocks – I forgot the ‘people have been complaining about society going downhill since the Ancient Greeks, therefore at no time have any of these complaints ever had any validity’. Thanks d2 for joining the dots.

1. Crime has gone down since 1995, largely for economic and demographic reasons

2. The police have reorganised their reporting systems a couple of times to do their job better, and these reorganisations have had the effect of increasing the reported crime statistics.

3. It is hard to say how worthwhile these reorganisations have been, but the fact that crime has, in fact, fallen, means that they can’t exactly have been disastrous.

4. Ever since the Romans, dull social-conservative farts have been saying that society is going to hell whether it has been or not.

5. And they shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously if they ignore the facts.

2/ The police inflate the figures to justify increased resources and more repressive powers.

3/ they’re aided in this by dishonest tabloid campaigns from the Sun and Mail (who supported Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 30s)

4/ people report crimes nowadays which they’d have accepted in the past, because they have more phones and more insurance

5/ especially domestic violence, child abuse and homophobic hate crime, which were an everyday psrt of life in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ (that never was) of the 1950s

6/ anyway, if crime has gone up, it’s because of inequality

7/ and Thatcher saying ‘there’s no such thing as society’

8/ and anyway, it’s good that the dispossessed re-appropriate goods from the better off

Yrs

Laban Tall

Stanley Cohen Professor of Moral Panic
University of South-West Scotland (formerly Annan Working Men’s Club)

Analysis by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has found that police recorded violence against the person increased by 8.6 per cent overall in 2004/05 compared with 2003/04. This increase was largely made up of a rise in low-level and alcohol-related violent crime, and over half of the increase was due to proactive policing (MPS, 2005).

My guess is that this is the normal confusion between amount of crime and amount of crime reported. Since the change in reporting rules the number of "less serious" violent crimes recorded has gone from ~200,000/year to ~1,000,000/year (figure 5.2 in the PDF above), so it wouldn’t be at all difficult for somebody a bit dim or with an axe to grind to infer that the total number of "drink-fuelled" assaults has risen by a similar factor.