What happens when the human instinct to hunt down wrongdoers is encouraged to bloom and spread beyond the bounds of an ordinary justice system – the sort with clear rules about right and wrong – and which crimes might be more serious than others?
You don’t have to look far for an example. The wild west of social media has produced exactly this sort of pseudo law and order system – now known as “cancel culture”. The experiment has not, to put it mildly, worked well.
It turns out that when the rules of policing get vague and diffuse, humans tend to focus mostly on small violations of the social contract, committed by those most vulnerable to their methods of punishment. People with real power mostly outlast Twitter storms and real criminals are brought down not by Twitter mob vigilantes but the law. (Harvey Weinstein was not cancelled, but found guilty of felonies.)
Instead, Twitter’s justice falls most heavily on its ordinary users, many of whom almost seem as though they overstepped the line by accident. Often these people – then sacked or shunned by “polite society” – seem to be chosen less for what they did than what they represent. They are symbols of a greater social ill, warning signs of a deeper rot somewhere. What you get, in short, is scapegoating.
With that in mind let us now examine Rishi Sunak’s new initiative to crack down on “antisocial behaviour” – or in other words, as he told journalists last week, those people who “break the golden rule: treat others as you would want to be treated”. Instead of merely dealing with suspected shoplifters, carjackers and the rest, police (and local authorities) will be granted wider powers over those they deem to be causing a “nuisance on the street”. A ban on laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, will be part of efforts, policing minister Chris Philp explained, to stop “people, young people, in particular, loitering in public places, like parks”. Yes, “loitering”. It will be easier, too, to evict “antisocial” tenants.
“What might appear to be small infringements turn in to a greater degree of lawlessness,” Michael Gove explained to Laura Kuenssberg. “There’s a theory, so-called broken windows theory, that if you tolerate low-level disorder then you lose the attractiveness and security that everyone has the right to expect in public places.”
Now, it is interesting that Gove mentioned broken windows theory – the idea that turning a blind eye to minor offences sets the scene for bigger ones – because that theory has been largely debunked. It sounds right, which is why it has influenced policing since the 1980s, but there is mounting evidence that it did little to bring down high-level crime. Instead, the increased work-load has tended to put a strain on police forces, meaning they actually have less time to deal with “proper” criminals.
In fact, broken windows theory may have made things a lot worse. It led, for example, to the proliferation of stop and search, in which people who had done nothing at all, disproportionately from black communities, were treated – and pushed around – like suspects. Classist and racist bias crept in, destroying the relationships between police and these citizens. And with an unmanageable horde of new “bad guys” to police, there is evidence too that officers started to focus on easy targets. In the US, for example, broken windows policing coincided with many more summonses for the elderly.
Here’s the problem with Sunak’s new initiative. It is vague, where justice should be specific. What is “antisocial behaviour”? What is “loitering”? What is “disorder”? What counts as breaking that diktat belov’d of Victorian children’s literature, “the golden rule”? What does it look like when “zero tolerance” is extended to the mildest of infringements? What, exactly, is this generalised sense of threat he is combating? Sunak acts as if these things are obvious, but they are not.
Take “loitering youths” in parks. What may look to some like pre-crime – hooded terrors plotting their next bout of bus-station vandalism – will to others look like teenagers enjoying the fresh air with their friends, exactly what the doctor ordered to fight this scourge of teen mental illness we hear so much about. Tenant behaviour that might strike some neighbours as merely sociable may appear to others as “antisocial”. What looks like an outdoor party to some will seem “disorderly” to others.
By “cracking down hard” on an unclear set of small infringements, Sunak is putting people at the mercy of subjective opinion, sometimes of their neighbours, and sometimes of the police. For a government that purports to dislike cancel culture, it seems to be all too keen to diffuse its worst elements into offline life: the fear you might break the social contract at any time. There are no rules but the opinion of those around you. Watch your back.
Broken windows policing, along with cancel culture, has given us a guide to the biggest dangers of this new scheme. Sunak has proposed, for example, widening the number of offences that require police to test for drug use.
It will not be a surprise if certain communities, as with stop and search, are now tested for drug use more than others.
And handing law enforcement a vastly greater number of people to keep in line is a short route to officers seeking out easy targets to hold up as an example. Levels of antisocial behaviour are going down, while there are record waits for prosecution for serious crimes. This is the wrong policy at the wrong time.
• Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent
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