Tories: Soft on Crime - Soft in the head

As a sitting magistrate, I generally do not like to comment on "Crime and Punishment" issues.
I do not want in anyway to compromise (or give the impression) my impartiality and independence.

However, figures put out by the Tory Shadow Home Secretary alleging that violent crime had risen sharply under Labour, and their subsequent rebuttal by Sir Michael Scholar (chair of the UK Statistics Authority), I feel, needs a comment.

I don't mind when politicians get it wrong, we all do, but by giving an exaggerated picture of the "growth" of violent crime up and down the country, they are playing fast and loose with the public's feeling of security and safety, and indeed wrongly worsening their perception of "broken Britain", for party political gain.

Which brings me to a story about BoJo (Mayor of London, Court Jester to the Court of King Cameron) wanting to cut the number of police officers by 500-ish in the capital, despite him campaigning for election on making crime-fighting his top priority.

This would be the first major cut in police numbers in London since policing was devolved a decade ago.

You simply cannot have the wannabe Tory Home Secretary stoking up people's fears about violent crime on the one hand, and the most powerful elected Tory reducing police numbers on the other.

They are a shambles, and should not be allowed to to ru(i)n the country after the next general election.

Britain has more CCTV cameras than China

A recent report shows the absolutely mind-bogglingly frightening statistic that Britain has "half as many more CCTV cameras again as the whole of China".

We have a population of 60 million and theirs is twenty times that.
We have more than 4.2 million cameras. That works out as 1 camera for every 14 people, or two for each infant school class.
Whereas China has the equivalent of one camera for the whole of Bradford.
This shows New Labour's worrying obsession with surveillance, and we have created the model "Big Brother" state that the Chinese government, or any 21st century non-democratic regime, would love to have.

Although I am convinced of the argument that CCTV has a role to play in the fight against crime, it is still unclear how well it does this.
An argument against is that it merely moves criminal behaviour from one area that has CCTV to another area that doesn’t.

However, I believe that the money spent on cameras could be better spent on police to solve crimes and patrol the streets.