Farewell to Bill Sikes

There are few things the British like better than a thundering good argument about crime and punishment. Some of the great public and parliamentary debates in postwar Britain have been concerned with the end of flogging (1948), the abolition of hanging (1965), the Great Train Robbery of 1963, and the reform of the prison system in the mid-1960s. Last week crime was again the subject of a hotly contested national debate as Britons sought to cope with a new and alarming trend toward violence in Britain's underworld.

The initial shock came after a jewelry store was robbed in the seaside resort of Blackpool. As the traditionally unarmed constabulary chased five men who had looted the store of about $125,000 in jewels, the escaping thieves opened fire. Blackpool's respected chief of police, Superintendent Gerald Irving Richardson, was killed, and two of his constables were wounded. To an aroused public, 100,000 of whom turned out for the slain superintendent's funeral, the Blackpool shooting underscored the fact that the underworld in Britain is no longer reluctant to resort to armed violence. Not even the Great Train robbers had used guns, and in the old days crooks often informed on their gun-toting colleagues. Now, said Sergeant Leslie Male, vice chairman of the Police Federation, "the war against crime is a war, a vicious war. It is no gentlemanly game of Bill Sikes against the bobby."

Choice of Grub. Breaking a traditional reticence, top officers of Scotland Yard seemed to be starting a campaign aimed at building public support for harsher treatment of criminals. In what the London Times called "a rare and remarkable statement of police philosophy," two senior Scotland Yard officers sharply criticized the politicians and courts for what they termed excessive leniency. Said Peter Brodie, assistant commissioner in charge of crime investigations: "My colleagues and I remember when a villain got a whacking sentence and was sent to Dartmoor. There he got flogged, he broke stones and he sewed mailbags. After he was released he seldom came back for more. Prison then was a real deterrent. Now the pendulum has swung the other way. They have got television in prisons now and transistor radios in cells. There is a choice of grub and they get weekend leave to allow them to go home and breed more criminals." Unless "firm measures" are taken, the officers argued, the now safe streets of London will become as dangerous as New York's in five years. (In the first half of 1971 there were 37 murders in London, while New York had 714.)

Option to Shoot. The outspoken interview kicked up a storm in the newspapers, among the general public and in both major parties. "Do-gooders" and "hard-liners," as they call each other, argued fiercely. For the do-gooders' side, the Guardian protested that "all was not relatively well in Britain in the good old days of Dartmoor and the rope. The highwayman and the footpad flourished alongside public hangings and wayside gibbets. It is hard to see that harsher deterrent sentences would make much difference to the present trend." The Times put forth another, more practical argument: if the penalty for robbery were increased, it could come perilously close to that for murder, thereby offering little extra penalty to the criminal who chooses to shoot.

Part of the problem is that Britain's perplexed and angry bobbies are facing a new breed of criminal. In the 1950s, cosh-carrying gangs specialized mainly in daytime holdups. In the late 1960s, gangs terrorized London with extortion, torture and murder, and tried unsuccessfully to set up a Mafia-like crime network throughout Britain. Now four-or five-man gangs, highly mobile, heavily armed and often very young, roam Britain and indulge themselves in a new specialty: armed violence against banks, post offices and rich industrial targets.

Today's professional thief in Britain knows that by police estimates he has only a 40% chance of being caught and, if he is, a 40% chance of acquittal. If he resists arrest, he knows that a passer-by will not be as ready to help the policeman as in the old days because the thief might be armed. Such knowledge can only increase the trend toward the type of violence that caused the death of Blackpool Superintendent Richardson and the hardliners' anger at Scotland Yard.

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