Theft at the Public Till
5. I was spoiled/neglected as a child at school/at work; 6. My parents got divorced too soon too late; 7. In my neighborhood there weren’t enough / there were too many leisure activities; 8. So there was nothing else for me to do but arson / robbery / mug- ging murder.
(Please delete whichever does not apply)
At a stroke we can rid the world of crime, since there are now no crimi- nals, only “poor dears”. Even Hitler and Goebbels, were they to appear today, would be regarded as victims in need of sympathy and, perhaps, psychother- apy paid for by the state. We need the law, the courts and the police, though you would never know it from reading a newspaper. The law and its enforcement agents do many worthwhile things. Many laws enhance public safety and individual security. The police sometimes protect life and limb, direct traffic, admin- ister first aid, assist in times of community emergency, and perform other services with commendable dedication and courage. The police confront dangers and social miseries of a kind most of us can only imagine. They deal with the waste products of an affluent, competitive corporate society: corpses in the street, back-alley muggers, pimps, child molesters, winos, heroin pushers, psychopaths, the ill-fed, the ill-housed, the desperate, and the defeated. Police keep order or used to keep order -- by relying on an array of time-honored prohibitions against loitering, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and obscenity. Under such laws, they can question suspicious characters and quiet the disorderly or move them along. But lawyers and judges came to feel that the order-keeping function of the police was yet one more instrument by which the authority of society was used to harass the have-nots. When does taking the air turn into loitering? When the person doing it, judges feared, is a poor black in a white neighborhood. So too might poverty and blackness transform sifting on a park bench into
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