Wednesday, October 15, 2008

If everyone's a victim, who's committing the crimes?

Just reading the blog of a Metropolitan Police "problem solver", who was talking about his job of looking at the problems (drunks sleeping in parks) in new ways. He says:

We've changed the design of the benches. This doesn't disadvantage the lawful park users (victims) and the visual effect on the location in minimal. A lot of people probably wouldn't even notice the substitution. But the drunks will. Oh yes. Now they can't sleep on the benches any more, there's a good chance that they'll move on elsewhere. But solving a problem doesn't mean just pushing it elsewhere. If we think of these people as victims too, maybe we can work in partnership (I warned you about that word) with families, outreach workers, social services etc. to offer these unfortunates a way off of the Hellish merry-go-round that is their life.


I normally read the blogs of the, well, real policemen. The ones who don't work in an office. And they say that British policing is being utterly buggered up by this kind of thinking.

I have one question for the guy who gets paid to come up with new solutions for perennial problems:

What if the drunks don't want to be cured? What if the drunks are drunks because this is what they've chosen?

What if, in other words, they're not victims?

What is it with the left and being incapable of understanding human sin? The will, as I've said many times, is the one unbreakable lock in the universe.

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