Crime

Thursday

Sam Leith

The true cost of the convenience economy

‘Where’s the car?’ said my wife Alice, interrupting my Zoom meeting on Saturday morning. ‘It’s where you left it,’ I said perhaps more pointedly than was kind. ‘When you drove it home last night. On the drive.’ ‘No it isn’t,’ she said. I left my Zoom meeting, shambled to the front of the house and looked out of the window. She was right. Half-full skip, yes. Wheelie bins, yes. The usual pizza boxes, empty vodka miniatures and crisp packets scattered outside our house by generous pedestrians? Present and correct. But no car. ‘It’s been stolen,’ I said gloomily and, of course, I was right. Much of the next couple of

Wednesday

Senay Boztas

The shooting of a journalist – and the dark world of Dutch organised crime

In an attack that has rocked the Netherlands, a leading Dutch crime reporter is fighting for his life in hospital after being shot in broad daylight. Last night, at around 7.30 p.m., the investigative crime journalist Peter R De Vries was shot five times on a busy street in central Amsterdam after leaving a television studio where he was recording a talk-show. The horror on the face of the Amsterdam mayor was visible at a hastily-organised 11 p.m. press conference to discuss the attack, while tributes for De Vries flooded in from everyone from Dutch king Willem-Alexander to caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Rutte called the shooting ‘an attack on

Wednesday

Camilla Swift

The UK is finally clamping down on hare coursing gangs

Once upon a time, hare coursing was a respectable sport, practised by Royals and other members of the gentry. The Forest Laws, imposed after the Norman Conquest, were introduced to ensure that only the nobility could own greyhounds which is why lurchers – crossbreeds between a sighthound and another working dog – became both popular, and known as ‘poachers’ dogs’. But in 2005 the Hunting Act arrived ­­– changing everything. In 2019, I wrote in these pages about the current illegal hare coursing occurring across the country: ‘It was the Hunting Act that drove coursing underground, and at that point the rules of the game changed. In formal coursing events, a pair

Thursday

Taki

Why night-clubbing in New York is a risky business

New York The acerbic writer Gore Vidal was once asked which period of history he would choose to have lived in. ‘The 17th century with penicillin,’ was his answer. It was a good sound bite but I don’t agree. Just the smells back then would be enough to kill me, and what about the people without teeth? And the plague of 1665 makes today’s virus seem like a slight head cold. Personally, I’d choose post-second world war New York City, as described in Jan Morris’s wondrous Manhattan ’45. I got there three years later, to Manhattan, that is, and the place was as fabulous as I had heard and imagined

Thursday

Taki

New York resembles a war zone

New York The Big Bagel is getting so bad that even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something. As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly the poor and minorities. Last week, a woman killed in a drive-by shooting had been attending a vigil for a friend who was shot dead after someone stepped on the gunman’s shoe. A man slashed on a Manhattan subway platform had recently been paroled for an attack on a Jewish woman and her mother. Brazen gunslingers are shooting the living daylights out of each other in the Bagel, and there was a shooting spree in the

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

Trans offenders are skewing crime statistics

Tonia Antoniazzi’s speech in the House of Commons this week was remarkable, not because of what she said – the need for accurate recording of crimes according to sex – but because she had the courage to actually say it. After the ongoing intimidation of Rosie Duffield, it is a brave Labour MP who stands up and defends the right of members of her sex not to be blamed for the crimes of the other sex. Antoniazzi pointed out that where particular offences are very rarely committed by women, the addition of just one or two people can have a significant impact on data. Antoniazzi alluded to the case of transgender fell-runner Lauren

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Seldom less than gripping: Banged Up podcast reviewed

Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its name suggests. It begins with the tacit assumption that, if you haven’t personally been incarcerated, you probably have at least a dozen questions you’d want to ask someone who had. Is the food really awful? How likely are you to be beaten up? Is there a lending library? (I’d start with the last.) Banged Up has the answers to plenty more besides. The podcast is hosted by a prison lawyer named Claire Salama and two ex-inmates, a former footballer, Mike Boateng, known as ‘Boats’, and university-educated Rob Morrison, who describes

Thursday

Matthew Parris

How to get a police record (without committing a crime)

I couldn’t quite believe it when first I read the newspaper subscriber’s letter. Columnists for the Times and Spectator do still get real letters, and this one from (shall we say?) Mr Jones had enclosed the copy of a letter he had written to a lady whom we shall call Mrs Smith. Mr Jones had read about the public protest she was leading last year against an Emmerdale episode in which a couple, after much agonising, choose to abort their Down’s syndrome baby. Mrs Smith has a Down’s syndrome child, whom she adores. Mr Jones’s letter to her defended the broadcaster’s right to show parents who make a different choice.

Thursday

Taki

My return to New York is a mixed blessing

New York Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took ten minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had fewer people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some. Mind you, the Upper East Side, where I live, is also as quiet as a grave, the only sound being the occasional ambulance with its siren on racing for a tea break. Central Park, now devoid of tourists, has never looked better, weeping willows with recently sprouted leaves, birds singing the length of an empty Park Avenue, long green lawns stretching out

Thursday

James Walton

Is Jed Mercurio bored with Line of Duty?

When a drama begins with news of a ‘Chis handler’ receiving ‘intel graded A1 on the matrix’ that causes a ‘conflab with the SFC’, it can mean only one thing: you’re watching a new series of Line of Duty. And just to confirm it, shortly afterwards a bunch of armed police carried out a raid that didn’t go to plan — possibly because it was being led by a bent copper. As ever, too, there’s a big name playing the potential wrong ’un, with Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, No Country for Old Men) guest-starring as DCI Jo Davidson, leader of the Murder Investigation Team. More unexpectedly, Jo’s underlings include Kate Fleming

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The politicisation of Sarah Everard’s death

A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for all men everywhere. This would prevent men from killing women on the streets. Mrs Moonbeam is a member of the Green party and presumably agrees with their manifesto which insists that men who identify as women are women and there’s an end to it. In which case all I would need to do is don a wig and take to the streets — and upon being apprehended by a policeman simply explain that my name was Loretta and I’d just popped out to do a spot

The Spectator

Has Neil Ferguson been proved right about Covid?

Calculated risk It is a year since Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team published the paper that inspired the government to call the first lockdown. How good were its scenarios? — It modelled four Covid-suppression measures: isolating cases for seven days, their household contacts for 14 days, social distancing to reduce household contacts by 75 per cent and the closure of schools and hospitals. It assumed these measures would be repeated for 12-18 months before a vaccine became available. — The model was run with different values for the basic reproduction number, which it estimated to lie within the range 2 to 2.6. If the government introduced none of these measures

Wednesday

Matthew Scott

Starmer’s prosecution campaign is misguided

On Monday evening Sir Keir Starmer tweeted an explanation for why Labour would not be supporting the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill. Coming from a former director of public prosecutions this was dire stuff. First, and perhaps least importantly, the word ‘statues’ does not appear in the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill. Sir Keir knows this. What the Bill proposes is that where criminal damage is caused to a ‘memorial’ there should be no minimum financial limit before the case can be tried in the Crown Court, where the maximum sentence is ten years imprisonment. In practice, such a sentence has never, so far as I am aware, been

Thursday

Toby Young

The conservative appeal of drug gangs

According to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, the easing of lock-down will be accompanied by a rise in crime in the capital, including the violent type associated with drug gangs. Just last week, the police recovered two zombie knives, two Rambo-style blades and a kitchen knife at the scene of an attack on a 16-year-old boy in Brixton. But it would be wrong to view this coming crimewave as a problem that just affects London’s underclass. According to Sheldon Thomas, the chief executive of an outreach organisation called Gangsline, a rising number of middle-class teenagers are being sucked into the gangster lifestyle in the wake of Covid. Thomas rather

Andrew Lycett

‘Britain’s Dreyfus Affair’: a very nasty village scandal

It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji in the Midlands and the refusal of the authorities to pay him compensation, even though he was later pardoned. In a case tainted by racism, class prejudice and plain stupidity, Edalji was accused of mutilating horses, sheep and cattle, and then forging letters to implicate others, thus creating mayhem in the village of Great Wyrley where he lived, in a mining district in Staffordshire. His cause was taken up by a home-grown Zola in the form of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was happy to replicate the investigatory skills of

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Beware the hobby bobby

‘Anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you have anything to say?’ I looked at the baby-faced police officer and tried to think of an appropriate response. I had been driving to Guildford station to meet a friend who every now and then comes from his nearby home on the train. I park in the station car park and together we walk to a kebab shop, order some food, eat it where we can perch, and cheer ourselves up. Running low on diesel, I pulled into a filling station on the way. After pulling back out, I noticed a police car close behind. I turned into the railway

Thursday

Robert Jackman

Is the hottest new podcast, The Apology Line, worth sticking with?

With the arts world still largely in hibernation, the launch of a big podcast is as close as we get to a big cultural event these days. Such is the case with The Apology Line, the latest serial podcast from Amazon-owned Wondery, which shot to the top of the ‘most downloaded’ charts last week and has sat there comfortably since. The Apology Line tells the story of a 1980s experimental art project in which a Manhattan-based provocateur, Allan Bridge, issued an open invitation to the city’s criminals (‘amateurs, professionals, white collar, blue collar’) to record their anonymised confessions to an unmanned phone line. He intended for the recordings to become

Thursday

Ali Bhutto

Cruelty and chaos in Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the award-winning journalist Samira Shackle writes that the city’s penchant for extremity and eccentricity kept luring her back from London for almost a decade. During these visits, made between 2012 and 2019, she navigates the darkest corners of the metropolis’s maze and documents some of the lives that exist on the peripheries of society. In a city where violence is constantly simmering beneath the surface and lines between law enforcement and crime are blurred, locals develop their own mechanisms for coping with trauma. For instance, Safdar, an ambulance driver who survived

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Is it time to reopen technology’s cold cases?

One of the staples of crime drama is the ‘cold-case squad’. This allows programme-makers to add period detail to the scenes set in the past, while the present-day scenes can show implausibly attractive forensic scientists hunting for clues in a creepy location such as a long-abandoned children’s home (an activity obviously best performed during the hours of darkness by two people who separate in mid-search for no apparent reason). I have often wondered whether it is worth establishing a cold-case squad for technology and science, to investigate those lines of inquiry that went cold 50 years ago but would now repay further investigation; or inventions that suffered from a miscarriage

Thursday

Adam Begley

Who killed Jane Britton in 1969?

The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories. So, for example, two thirds of the way through Becky Cooper’s long, ambitious book about the murder of a Harvard graduate student, the author explains that ‘we’ — those attempting to fashion a narrative about the gruesome fate of a 23-year-old woman bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge apartment in the late 1960s — ‘had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place’. This is a book that twists itself into a