The Questions
The first question was whether Essex County Council should turn our street lights back on at night.The second question concerned the two horrific murders in Colchester last year.
- James Attfield, a 33-year old father-of-five, was stabbed 102 times and found dead in Castle Park in the early hours of Saturday 29 March 2014, after last being seen at the River Lodge pub on the night before.
- Nahid Almanea, a 33-year old student from Saudi Arabia, studying English at the University, died after being stabbed 16 times as she walked along Salary Brook Trail footpath in the middle of the morning on 17 June 2014.
Reactions to the questions about crime
Take the reaction to these questions from John Pitts, the UKIP candidate, for example. He is a fit (if a bit overweight, as he said himself), healthy, middle-aged white male. He said that ever since Essex CC turned the lights off at night he no longer feels safe to take a walk (to reduce weight) round the block at 11.30 at night in his home village of Layer. (Layer is an affluent, leafy, genteel dormitory village on the outskirts of Colchester.) This is because he no longer feels safe in the dark. I’d suggest for a start that he should get a watch because the lights only used to go off at midnight and now go off at one in the morning. Details of the ‘part-night lighting’ scheme state that, as of 30 March 2015, the hours of darkness have been reduced by one hour so they are now 1am to 5am.Reactions to the questions about violent crime from other prospective MPs were similar and show how the whole debate has been skewed by false and ill-informed impressions. The impressions are largely created by the mass media, led by the Daily Mail and the Sun, as well as the Tory-led government. They would like to persuade us that violent crime is on the rise and that knife-wielding strangers pose a great threat to everyone’s personal safety and freedom.
This is a convenient weapon of mass distraction that helps to divert our attention away from far more relevant risks to our health and safety and life and death.
Death rates in the UK and in Colchester
To explain, I need to refer to statistics and, before that, to mention a bit of intuitive common sense.
The death rate in the UK is roughly one in a hundred a year. We know this intuitively. Hardly anyone lives to a hundred years old and, assuming that there is one person in each year group from age one to a hundred, that implies that, for every hundred people, one baby arrives in the world and one old person departs every year.2
The death rate in the UK also turns out to be roughly one in a hundred a year according to the latest information from the Office for National Statistics, which is that the UK population in 2014 was 64.1 million and 580,300 people died in the year to June 2013.
That means that, in the case of Colchester town with a population of roughly 100,000, roughly 1,000 people die every year.3
The death rate in the UK also turns out to be roughly one in a hundred a year according to the latest information from the Office for National Statistics, which is that the UK population in 2014 was 64.1 million and 580,300 people died in the year to June 2013.
That means that, in the case of Colchester town with a population of roughly 100,000, roughly 1,000 people die every year.3
What do people in Colchester die of?
Let’s look at some of the reasons why people in Colchester die in order to put the two recent horrific murders in context.Air pollution
In 2014 Public Health England found that 5.5% of deaths in Colchester were attributable to poor air quality. That is at least 55 people a year in our town. Actually, Public Health England say it is 75 ‘attributable’ deaths per year (based on their Colchester population figure of 121,000) plus an incredible 811 ‘life-years lost’.The air quality issue, while having a long history in Colchester, has just shot into the news due to the Supreme Court decision on 29 April that has scuppered airport expansion plans – hurrah! As reported by The Guardian:
London and several other British cities have failed to meet EU standards on nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels since 2010, running the risk of fines from Brussels and prompting a legal challenge by NGO ClientEarth.(See also the Huffington Post and London Standard.)
The cold homes scandal
Speaking on 14 April 2015, just ahead of the launch of the Green Party manifesto, Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion, saidWho wouldn't want to live in a home that was warm and dry? Who wouldn't want to not worry each month about whether they can afford their heating bills? Around 9000 people die prematurely in the UK each year because they can't afford to keep their homes warm. More than are killed on roads or through alcohol. In the sixth richest country in the world, it’s a national scandal.That figure of 9,000 premature deaths a year, which is 1.5% of the UK total, translates in Colchester terms to 15 people a year.
Other leading causes of death
I don’t wish to go through the entire list looking for other examples of preventable deaths. Just look at the adjacent ONS infographic to see that death at the hands of violent strangers is statistically negligible (but do note the shocking stat for 'homicide' if you are aged 1-4). To recap then, so far we have the following statistics for deaths in Colchester per year:- death by violent murder by strangers: 2
- premature death in cold homes due to fuel poverty: 15
- deaths attributable to poor air quality: 55
- other preventable deaths: ??? ( a lot more than 2, anyway)
So why don't politicians act on this?
It appalls me that most of our prospective MPs just wring their hands and make a fuss about something which none of us can really do anything about - the apparently mindless and horrific aberrations of extremely rare knife-wielding murderers. But on the other hand they will barely talk about the very things that public funds, community action and political will could do something about - like death and disease due to cold homes and poor air quality. These are the very issues over which politicians do have some control and where they could make a difference.Fear of crime
The reason why most of our politicians, media and our prospective MPs in Colchester focus on the odd knife-wielding murderer is because he (or, possibly but improbably, she) is a convenient scapegoat. The tragedy is that, in so doing, they increase the general public’s fear of crime, as can be seen from the two following findings of the ONS Crime Survey for England and WalesCrime Survey for England and Wales for Year Ending December 2014 (published 23 April 2015):
Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) showed that, for the offences it covers, there were an estimated 6.9 million incidents of crime against households and resident adults (aged 16 and over) in England and Wales. This is a 7% decrease compared with the previous year’s survey, and the lowest estimate since the CSEW began in 1981. The CSEW covers a broad range of victim based crimes and includes crimes which do not come to the attention of the police.Public Perceptions of Crime as found by the 2013/14 Crime Survey for England and Wales (published 26 March 2015):
Around 6 in 10 adults (61%) perceived crime in the country as a whole to have risen over the past few years. Fewer people, however, perceived that crime had risen in their local area (32%).
The real risk of death and injury by violence
You may have spotted that I haven’t included all violent crime when I’ve compared violent crime with other causes of death or disease and injury. I’ve only focused on the two incidents of knife-wielding strangers.That is because they form part of the media’s relentless narrative that these are what we need to be worried about. Remember for example the Soham murders in August 2002, when Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both aged 10, were killed by Ian Huntley, a caretaker at their local secondary school, and Sarah Payne, eight years old when she was killed by convicted paedophile Roy Whiting, aged 51, in 2000.
In fact, violent death, rape and injury are far more likely to arise within the family or with the perpetrator being someone well-known to the victim. But this doesn’t get talked about much because it is mainly women and children who suffer and it doesn’t play to the narrative that the perpetrators are bogey men hiding in the woods - or maybe the local mosque, if the story teller wants to add a bit of racist spice to the mix.
Solutions?
The discourse about deterring crime was equally depressing. John Pitts of Ukip, for example, wanted more Bobbies on the beat. Does he watch too much Heartbeat or Dixon of Dock Green? Doesn’t he know that the police now rely on sophisticated surveillance (the Orwellian nightmare of 1984 come true) to catch criminals rather than randomly walking about the local streets?Will Quince castigated Sir Bob for not supporting mandatory sentences for knife crime (which Sir Bob deftly defended by saying, let the judges do the judging). Doesn’t Quince realise that simply upping the tally does not deter the crime? Ok , so a bit of tinkering can make one crime slightly less attractive than another to wrong-doers: for example, criminalising alcohol consumption in the town centre might deter people to do it elsewhere (big deal). But raising tariffs in general is pointless, however macho and tough on crime it makes you feel. Just look at the USA and compare the states with and without the death penalty to see how little difference the ultimate sanction of state murder makes to the murder rates in the respective states.
So what can be done to tackle crime? I’d suggest more understanding and awareness-raising about violence and, above all, about structural violence in our society: who does it, why they do it, what early interventions can be made to nip it in the bud? To turn the ghastly John Major on his head, we need to understand more and condemn less. We need more services and support for women and children (and the odd man, I suppose) who are trapped in violent relationships. All of this, I’m sorry to say, points to having social services that are actually social and really do provide a service. That is, not like the cash-strapped, under-resourced, emergency-only, fire-fighting services that child protection and adult social care seem to have become.
The reason why I’m sorry to say that it all points to a need for better social services is because there is one group of people that the Daily Mail and the Sun get more worked up about than knife-wielding strangers and that is social workers.
1. The Gazette’s General Election Hustings were held on Tuesday 14 April 2015 at Colchester FC’s Weston Homes Community Stadium and featured:
- Sir Bob Russell (Liberal Democrats)
- Will Quince (Conservative)
- Jordan Newell (Labour)
- John Pitts (Ukip)
- Mark Goacher (Green party and at markgoachergreen.blogspot.co.uk)
2. This is an over-simplification. The fact is that people are, as it were, not dying, rather than being born. While birth rates are declining throughout the western world, death rates are declining even more, which is why it looks like we have what some people call a population ‘threat’ or ‘time bomb’. This is an area where I don’t really agree with the pressure group, Population Matters, and I’ll have to come back to this bone of contention another time.↩
3. Colchester’s population is actually more than 100,000 and it is the fastest rising population in the UK. According to the Colchester Council’s handy guide to the 2011 census, the number of people in the Colchester Local Authority area on Census Day 2011 was 173,100 – but that includes all the outer ring of districts and villages that most of us (in the town) don’t regard as part of the town itself. So let’s stick with the round number of 100,000. Also by the way, we have a problem with our rising population mainly because central government won’t fund the necessary extra infrastructure – roads, schools, health services, etc – that we need just in order to keep pace. This is graphically recounted by Mark Goacher in his YouTube film for the 2015 election.↩
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