Zero-tolerance approach to crime is the answer

OUR streets are out of control and will only degenerate further unless a zero-tolerance approach to crime is adopted.

Frank Walker, a member of the ALP Left, and his party colleagues, believed it was a huge victory for civil liberties. No longer would street drunks be harassed by police and told to move on – no longer would common abuse be treated as a crime. Tolerance was in the air. The net effect of the disappearance of the Summary Offences Act, along with the adoption of a dismissive attitude toward the institution of marriage and a feminist-led denigration of the role of the male as the principal provider in any union (church-sanctioned or not) was a dramatic weakening of acceptable standards of public behaviour. Street policing, based on the reforms introduced by Robert Peel to London's police in 1829, was effectively discarded. The rights of victims were overlooked as a generation of deluded whackos tried to prove their thesis that those who engaged in criminal behaviour were the ones who needed real support, and that, if anything, the householders who had been abused, robbed, or worse, probably deserved such treatment because of their lack of empathy with the criminal class. Labor played the politics of envy and compassion for all they were worth, just as successive "progressive" Democrat administrations had done in cities like New York, Detroit, Boston, Chicago and Washington. By the '60s and '70s, New York was deemed ungovernable, beyond salvation, because of the levels of crime and the breakdown in civil administration. Despite the ominous trend in the US and the UK, NSW policy-makers bought the faddish approach to law enforcement in its entirety. The criminals became the victims and the real victims became forgotten. Sociologists worried about the cultural roles of Aboriginal Australians but no one cared less about the cultural roles of traditional parents. People whose accents reflected a degree of educated sophistication were sneered at as the ABC sought announcers who could sound as Ocker as the most ill-educated. While the loveys of the arts world were accepting vast grants to explore the poetry of the brickie's labourer, the culture was coarsening to an alarming degree. The civil libertarians had achieved their goal here and in the other great Western cities. While New York and London were becoming unlivable, black children needed military escorts to take them to white schools in liberal Boston, Detroit was descending into a fire-blackened wasteland and Chicago became the epitome of local government corruption. NSW politicians registered nothing of this and blithely continued to believe the fairytales they were told on their international junkets. Rudolph Guiliani was the first New York mayor to address the problem, calling in the man who ran Boston's transit police, Bill Bratton, to take over the police and enforce a zero tolerance regimen. Bratton, now running the LAPD, famously turned back the clock and gave beat police the powers they had been stripped of by generations of do-gooders. Some called it the broken window theory, that is, don't let a broken window remain unfixed, or graffiti remain on a wall. Fix the window, wash the wall, show those who want to degrade neighbourhoods that their antics won't be tolerated. Prosecute the street criminals, arrest the fare dodgers on the subway who jump the turnstiles, stop the squeegee men at the traffic lights intimidating motorists. New York, which had been written off, has been rehabilitated. Its the safest big city in the world. The cleanest, too. Even Central Park's rats have been replaced with squirrels and the flowers that used to be stolen or broken now bloom for the enjoyment of all. In NSW, the opposite has been occurring. We have a magistrate who finds abuse acceptable, we have judges fighting for credibility, we have a police hierarchy which is so afraid of the results of its own investigations it keeps them under lock and key, and we have a third-rate government composed of political hacks who wouldn't be able to hold a job in the private sector. In the past 10 years of the Carr-Iemma reign, so-called soft drugs such as ecstasy have flooded the streets, junkies have been given protection to shoot-up hard drugs in what is laughably described as "drug trial", and the streets have become more violent. The frequency of major outbreaks of public disorder such as the riots in Redfern, Macquarie Fields and Cronulla, and New Year's Eve's Bidwell dispute which saw street gang members brought into a major confrontation a week later, are clearly increasing and becoming more violent. Gangs and would-be terrorists have begun trading arms including anti-personnel missiles. The State Government, which ran Operation Viking before the 2003 state election, tried to fool the electorate last week with its announcement that Operation Wixstead would be on the streets performing the same role, but not as an election stunt this time. Now the recycled Police Minister John Watkins has announced what he claims is the biggest community policing program in more than 20 years – but it looks like a resuscitated and rebadged Neighbourhood Watch. This is junk policy produced by politicians who deserve to be junked. To beat street crime, NSW needs zero tolerance and it needs a Summary Offences Act and a Bill Bratten with the political independence to enforce it. Anything else is whitewash applied with an eye to the March 24 state election, and just as durable.