Frogs in a Boiling Pot of Criminality, Part I

 Crime Inc. in New Zealand

Over the next little while we will be publishing some posts interacting with a book about crime and punishment in New Zealand, by David Fraser.  [Badlands--NZ: A Land Fit For Criminals (Kaukapakapa: Howling at the Moon Publishing Ltd, 2011.)]  The book is excellent in places, naive and one-dimensional in others.  But it begs some very important questions which need to be debated and discussed.

Firstly, a brief bio of the author, Britain David Fraser.  He has long experience in the UK penal system, having worked for the National Probation Service (and its pre-cursors) for 26 years.  He has worked for the Criminal Intelligence Analyst with the National Criminal Intelligence Service.  Thus, the author is no lightweight in these matters.  He has been in New Zealand on a national speaking tour as a guest of the Sensible Sentencing Trust--hence his interest in New Zealand as a comparison and contrast with his researches in crime and punishment in the UK.

The first section of the book seeks to establish a very important premise to the whole argument:
New Zealand has become a more criminal country (that is, more crime and more criminals) than it was fifty years ago.  Now, if Fraser were to  mean that in a mere absolute sense, we would say, "So what."  More people, more crime.  A country of fifty million people will of course have more crime than a country of one million.  New Zealand's population has increased substantially from the 1950's.  Therefore, more crime is to be expected.

But that is not Fraser's point.  He is demonstrating something far more serious and troubling.  New Zealand's relative crime rates have risen substantially over that period--which is a much more substantial point.  According to NZ Treasury long-run statistics, in 1950 New Zealand reported 15 crimes per 1,000 people.  In 2007, it was reporting 90 crimes per 1,000--a nigh on 900 percent increase.  Such a staggering societal change in just over one generation begs substantial questions: how, why, and what to do?

In an absolute sense things are even worse than reported crime statistics.  In 2008, the amount of crime recorded by the NZ Police for the year was just under half-a million incidents.  But two years earlier, in 2006 the Ministry of Justice Crime and Safety survey reported that the public were reporting three million crimes per year.  Laying aside for the moment how robust the three million figure is, at least it shows a substantial discrepancy between crime, as experienced by actual New Zealanders, and crime as recorded and prosecuted by police.  So, not only do we have a huge increase in crime rates in New Zealand over a generation, but also actual crime, as experienced by the proverbial "man in the street" is far higher yet again than what is being reported and recorded by police in 2008.  (In addition a lot of crime gets reported to NZ Police for insurance purposes, but details are so sketchy that no investigation is ever able to commence, let alone be completed.  Theft ex-car would be a common example. The complainant is not sure precisely when it happened; there were no witnesses; sometimes nothing was stolen--but a report is made to the police because the insurance company requires it.)

A question that is begged is, What are the causes of such a dramatic and drastic increase in crime?  Another question is, Why is the public not in an uproar, protesting in the streets, demanding that "something" be done?

Fraser does not address the latter question seeking explanations for the lassitude of the public. We suspect that in large measure it is a manifestation of the frog in the pot syndrome.  Human beings are remarkably skilful at adapting.  We get used to things, take measures, cope, adjust, change expectations.  We move on.  We have just got used to living with crime and its consequences, whereas our forebears would be shocked and dismayed at what we have to endure.

Moreover, New Zealanders long ago threw out a Christian world-view in favour of secularist doctrines.  And secularism views crime in conflicted and very confused ways, none of which actually address the issue, but end up deflecting from it to focus upon societal, and environmental factors as causes for increased criminality.  As one acerbic critic put it, most of the officials, bureaucracy, academics and the Commentariat in general think crime is a result of children not being breast fed as infants.  The point is well made.  Secularism's explanations for the astronomical increase in crime rates deflect to "environmental factors", most of which turn out to be non-sequiturs. Secularism struggles to deal with crime, and prefers to push it under the carpet in a hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil approach.  They would rather expatiate about the wonderful performance of the NZ Symphony Orchestra last evening.

We will endeavour to take up some of these issues as we interact with Fraser's thesis in future posts. 

One thing we will return to again and again, however.  Modern culture has no doctrine of evil.  Secularism excludes it from consideration, because true moral guilt, genuine evil does not exist in the secularist world-view.  What was once understood to be evil is now perceived as inadequate development.  In other words, more evolution and progress needed.  In that sense, crime tends to be categorised as childish, inappropriate behaviour to be corrected and trained out.

Modern criminology is riddled with such stupid nostrums.