Crime and punishment, when not about politicians trying to hold onto power, is supposed to be about carrots and sticks.
Whether making the victims of knife crime put up with yobs gawping at them is some kind of clever ruse to stop them blocking beds in the NHS I don't know, but every instinct (and I am a wishy-washy do-goody liberal who actually does know what is in the Human Rights Act and thinks that most of it ought to be there) tells me that this kind of response to knife crime can not possible be described as a 'stick' to discourage the perpetrators. Nor is it much of a carrot for anybody. It ain't going to work.
Having been to our over-stretched Whipp's Cross accident and emergency in the early hours of the morning a few times, which is probably when most of the fresher knife wounds are on display of a weekend, the last thing I can imagine the staff will want will be even more feral young wannabe hardmen wandering around while they are trying to ignore the smell of vomited alcohol in the waiting room and conduct triage in a calm professional environment. Knowing that these yobbos' presence is going to keep Gordon Brown in power not a day longer will be no incentive to make them want to go along with this pantomime of justice at the expense of patient care.
The best news on the local crime front today is not the nonsense that the Home Secretary came up with over the weekend. (This, as I predicted, was clearly cobbled together in some hurried desperation. Someone, I am willing to bet, will soon be transfered to count sheep in the Orkneys, for having looked in the wrong filing cabinet.)
No, the best news was the arrest of the man who allegedly murdered Adnan Patel, along with three other men allegedly connected with this killing. Given this, the unusual sight of police vans in the neighbourhood, and the amount of helicopter activity we have had to put up with over the weekend (the police always do this when they want us to know they are busy), it is not surprising that the High Street was strangely empty this morning. Not of customers, I should say, but of the Romanian shell game scam gangs who have been such a fixture recently. You could see the shopkeepers and sales-staff up and down the High Street standing in their doorways wondering if something unusual had happened. Not really, its just an unfamiliar local outbreak of some law and order. It remains to be seen how long this will last. The Chinese gang, I should say, either don't have the English to know what has been going on or they are all made of sterner stuff: five of them were working a hundred yard stretch of the High Street, making a killing with their pirate DVDs and smuggled cigarettes as usual.
Meanwhile, we are told that Yusufu Miiro, the other man murdered, this time by someone in a hoodie and mask who can't yet, for obvious reasons, be arrested, had been studying criminology at Middlesex University before his life was cut short on Thursday. His ambition in life had been to be a detective.
*Three more arrests in the Adnan Patel murder were made this morning, 16 July 2008.