Statistics

The trouble with statistics is that they’re easily skewed and seldom reveal a complete picture.

For example, government statistics reported in the Scottish press today reveal a significant fall in the country’s homicide rate - down 20% on last year - to levels not seen since 1979.

Knife crime, the ugly smudge on Scotland’s copybook, is also down, with homicides involving a ‘sharp instrument’ accounting for 35 of the nation’s 78 homicides last year.

This is excellent news: Scotland now ranks alongside Bulgaria and Romania on the European ‘homicides per head of population’ league table.

The Scottish government was quick to pat itself on the back. Justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, said the success was thanks to the government’s drive to put a thousand extra Scottish police officers on the beat since 2007.

While I agree with the commitment to provide more cops at street level, I dispute Mr MacAskill’s assertion that homicide rates are falling because of his government’s commitment to fighting crime.

Common sense dictates that the gradual reduction in homicide rates over, say, the last hundred years is as much to do with advances made in medicine during the corresponding period. We’ve become much more competent at repairing stab wounds; it’s not necessarily the case that we’re less violent towards one another.

When collating the number of assaults involving knives and ‘sharp instruments’, is the degree of surgery the victim needs recorded? Surely that’s a significant factor in determining whether someone lives or becomes another homicide stat, but I doubt it’s being recorded or analysed.

In my opinion, it's our doctors, paramedics, nurses and surgeons who deserve our thanks, not some spineless politician.

A run of bad luck in theatre - or idiotic funding cuts to the NHS budget - and those homicide rates can skyrocket.

Government statistics? I seldom believe them. They’re too easily manipulated and only slightly more trustworthy than the average politician.

Libraries, Funding Cuts and Diabolical Politicians

Many of you have read my previous posts regarding the disastrous cuts being made to Britain's police forces, prisons and education budgets.

I read Nicola Morgan's post on the proposed cuts to library services today, and it turns my stomach to think of Britain degenerating to such an extent.

If you value your local library, use it. Use it to write to the UK government, expressing your outrage that these so-called leaders are taking us back to the dark ages.

The Patience of a Writer

I'm sure that'll replace the original, at some point in the future.

Patience is a virtue, some say. It's also an absolute 'must have' for a writer.

And so is persistence.

I remember when I was just starting out - I thought, quite honestly, that it'd take me a few months to establish myself.

What a loon! A few months??

I found out the hard way that writers need patience. It takes years, decades even, to establish a niche, a market, a presence - call it anything you like. But it doesn’t come easily. And so many good writers give up far too soon.

That's why I admire guys like Peter Watt. He plugs away for hours on end, day in, day out, to meet publisher deadlines and self-set goals. He achieves his objectives, and his hard work pays off. Just last month he released a new instalment of his Duffy and Macintosh saga. If it’s even half as good as the previous novels in the series, it’ll be a cracker of a read. My copy's sitting on my lampstand, waiting patiently to be read. (See how he puts so much of himself into his work?)

And I can’t imagine anything more satisfying than having someone read my stories, interact with the characters I’ve created, or gaze about (in their minds, of course!) at the settings I’ve crafted - and the best way to achieve that goal is to be patient and persistent.

I know it’s easy to become despondent in this business. A few weeks ago I emailed an agent I’d queried with a cover and partial a few months ago. They’d come back quite quickly, asking to see the full ms, and I sent it the same day. Months passed with no word, so I to sent them a polite ‘ahem’ asking if they’d received my full submission. Yes they had, was the speedy reply - but it had been filed in the wrong place.

Am I annoyed?

Hell, no.

I know some people who’d be livid, but I understand these things happen. We’re all human. And, I swear, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve lost a file, I’d be writing this blog from the study of my gleaming white yacht in the Whitsundays.

Do I still want that agent to represent me? Of course I do - one wee mistake doesn't change the fact that this agency ticks all the right boxes as far as maximising my manuscript's potential is concerned.

But it does lead me back to the ‘patience & persistence’ thing.

So, don’t be put off by having to wait - few things happen quickly in publishing.

Don’t stop querying - you only have to get your work in front of the right reader once.

And don’t stop entering competitions.

Yes, that last one will keep me paddling along for a while :)

There's pink, and then there's PINK!

Okay, so no one should laugh when they’re watching a report about homes being resumed. I get that. But is the Aussie sense of humour really on its last legs?

I was watching Nine News the other night and there’s this item about the Queensland State government’s plan to ‘resume’ - compulsory purchase, the Brits call it - about 60 properties in the Yeerongpilly area of southern Brisbane, to make way for a new railway station.

The camera zoomed in close on a few poor unfortunates who’ll be worst affected (I’ve come to expect that when my heart strings are being tweaked for me), such as the hair-dresser who’s worked hard to build up her clientele in the area, and a property developer with a half-built apartment complex who doesn’t know if he’s Martin or Martha any more. I could feel the emotion.

But I kinda lost it when the mature (for want of a better phrase) lady resident blasted onto my screen. Don’t get me wrong – I feel for her, too. Honestly, I do. She’s just finished refurbishing her home and this announcement couldn’t come at a worse time for her.

But she’s wearing her hair bright pink, almost in a punky ‘what-the-hell-are-you-lookin-at?’ style. It goes with her bright pink top, though, and her bright pink lippy.

‘She likes her pinks bright,’ I say to myself.

And there’s nothing wrong in that – she can wear anything she likes, and adopt any look she wants.

Here’s what killed the interview for me, though. The reporter asked her what she thought of the government’s announcement. And she said...

‘It’s shocking.’

But nobody else laughed. Absolutely no one. Not the cameraman. Not the reporter. Not the couple of anchors back in the news room. Not even the weatherman.

Now, I feel for these poor Yeerongpillyites, I really do. But, come on. There’s more than enough bad stuff going on in this ugly big world that’ll depress us. I reckon we should all take every opportunity God sends us to have a good going belly laugh.

Unless you work for Nine News, of course. Very professional.

Not even a smirk.

Recipe for Disaster

Today, the Down Under Dunder focuses on the cuts to public spending that are about to ravage the UK, in particular the proposed cuts to police funding.

The last reports I read from a my favourite UK news web sites said that 40,000 front-line police jobs (that’s actual cops on the beat) are to be lost in the UK over the next four years.

Forces across the country are faced with having to make cuts of up to 25% of their annual budgets. Inevitably, that will result in cuts to actual numbers of on-patrol police officers, as well as police equipment and civilian staff. In other words, the service that each force area provides to the tax-payer is destined to diminish.

Strathclyde Police already have a recruitment freeze in operation. That means each cop who retires or is killed in the line of duty isn’t replaced, resulting in a net reduction in the number of officers available to do the job we demand of them: protecting our lives and property, preventing crime and, where crime has been committed, detecting offenders. Every other police force in Scotland is already doing likewise, or is about to.

As it stands, pitifully few crimes committed in Scotland are detected; roughly 49% of all reported crimes are solved, according to Scottish government figures released on 7 Sept 2010. Any less and ‘...we may as well just put the lights out and walk away...’ to quote Perth Sheriff Lindsay Foulis, the Scottish equivalent of an Australian magistrate. (In fact, Sheriff Foulis was decrying the automatic early release of prisoners, but automatic early release and poor detection rates are issues which are closely related; both can trace their roots directly to the biggest problem facing the Scottish criminal justice system today: under-funding.)

All manner of police services and initiatives will also suffer.

Community policing, for example. Fewer cops on the beat will mean each ‘bobbie’ has less time to foster good community relations and build the respect that a community must have in its officers.

Requests for information under ‘freedom of information’ legislation will go unanswered, because there won’t be enough civilian staff to attend to those requests.

Crime prevention initiatives will fall by the wayside, abandoned as ‘non-essential’.

Inter-force investigations (of alleged police misconduct or incompetence, for example) will be compromised.

Hey, Amnesty International, are you watching that one?

You name it, it’ll be cut.

Fewer firearms officers, yet more criminals turning to guns, since the deterrent of being caught and convicted is diminished.

Fewer police helicopters, yet more criminals prepared to endanger the public as they careen along our streets at idiotic speeds in the hope of evading justice.

Fewer police dogs, yet more criminals encouraged to violate the sanctity of a stranger’s home and sneak off under cover of darkness.

Bad enough. But the real problem, as I see it, is the dystopia that must surely fester in such a sour melting pot of injustice. I see the UK turning into a nation of vigilantes – victims of crime, their families and friends, who let nothing stop them from exercising their God-given right to justice. Worse, any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants to throw his weight around will jump on the vigilante bandwagon faster than you can say ‘Nice bullets, Mr Kersey’.

Kangaroo courts; no right to a fair trial; punishments that grossly outweigh the severity of the crime committed; no right of appeal.

Defence solicitors should also be concerned by these cuts – where will their bread-and-butter business come from if the detection rate plummets?

It isn’t a pretty picture. In fact, we’re witnessing a disaster in the making.

When the crime rate spirals because our courts can’t cope (surprise, surprise, court funding is also under review), and when violent criminals who should be locked up wander freely among us because there’s no room to incarcerate the fewer and fewer who are convicted (prison budgets...care to guess?), the public will take only so much before they fight back against those who would steal their freedoms.

I don’t think it’s a question of ‘if’; more a question of ‘when’. And as soon as a community heads down the path to vigilantism, that community is ruined for all time.

These cuts will permanently scar the face of British society. They’ll turn a once-beautiful part of the world ugly.

It doesn’t have to be so, but it’ll take a far stronger government than the one we have now to steer Britain away from the brink of ruin.

One positive will come from these budget cuts, as far as the Tory / Lib. Dem. UK government is concerned: the reported crime rate will fall.

Of course it will; it’s inevitable. The ‘reported’ crime rate (not to be confused with the ‘actual’ crime rate) will fall because, in the not-too-distant future, days or even weeks will pass before some over-worked, under-valued, demoralised and ill-equipped plod turns up to log your crime report; and there’ll be little or no chance of tracing, let alone convicting, the perpetrator of that crime. The public won’t bother calling the cops to report ‘petty’ crime, and the reported crime rate will fall.

[Aside: what is ‘petty’ crime? Is it when some splendid example of adolescence and his trusty screwdriver cause thousands of pounds of damage to the side of my car? Or is it when someone less fortunate than me breaks into my home and shits on every photograph I have of my dear departed mother. I’m curious to know what the government’s spin merchants define as ‘petty’.]

Three years from now, if indeed it takes that long, the UK government will quote this drop in reported crime figures and laud its achievements in delivering tough policies on criminal justice while still reining in the costs of policing the nation. They’ll ask for another term in government and promise us better times ahead.

And the Mad Hatter will be nothing short of delighted, because everything will be what it isn’t. Finally.

He’d be delighted now, in fact, since I’ve come to the end and stopped.

Lockerbie

There’s been a heck of a lot of press coverage about the release last year from a Scottish prison of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, “the Lockerbie Bomber”. And quite rightly so. It seems everybody has an informed opinion, one way or the other, on the wisdom of setting this convicted murderer free, and it’s comforting to know there are still some people out there who are capable of rational argument.

I’ve held off passing comment because I’m living in Australia these days, and my feeling up till now has been that what goes on in Scotland doesn’t really affect me. But I’ve come to realise that’s a misguided philosophy since I will inevitably return there one day, to live or to die, and because I still speak with a brogue that identifies me as Scottish wherever I go, despite the Australian bushman’s hat sitting atop my head.

So, friends, I want to use this blog to make my position clear for all time: I believe it was fundamentally wrong to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi before he paid full price for his crime. In fact, I believe it's fundamentally wrong to release any convicted criminal before he or she completes the full sentence handed down by the trial court judge.

And, just so you know, it irks me when people – complete strangers, mostly – decry me, as a Scot, for the additional pain the Scottish government has caused the families of the victims of the Lockerbie atrocity.

I was sitting in front of the fire at home that cold night in Scotland in December, 1988, enjoying a beer with some friends. It was a quiet Wednesday evening in Perth, and we’d just begun our Christmas holidays. We were watching a video – can’t remember what was on it – but when it finished the TV brought us back to the real world with news coverage of the carnage that had rained down on Lockerbie, a relatively peaceful village in the Scottish borders.

The pictures we saw were horrendous. Flames. Twisted metal. Demolished houses. Papers and possessions scattered in the now infamous crater. I was a cop at the time, and I know from bitter experience of house fires and vehicle collisions – small bones by comparison – that the rescue crews and police officers on the ground will have witnessed something unspeakable that night, and for many days and nights afterwards.

The enormity of al-Megrahi’s crime must never be understated. Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi’s victims were human beings. Most were ordinary people, just like you and me, making the long journey home to be with their loved ones at Christmas, a sacred time of year for us Christians. But that didn’t matter to al-Megrahi. He had his agenda, and that was what was important to him.

That man denied his involvement. Even after an impartial court convicted him, he appealed his conviction, rubbing salt into the wounds he inflicted on the families of his victims yet again.

He has shown no remorse. He’s shown no empathy for those upon whom he heaped indescribable suffering. He should have died in prison, cancer or no.

Yet, the Scottish government saw fit – apparently without consultation with the families of the victims of the bombing (or with anyone else for that matter) – to ‘show compassion’ and release him from prison. And they cite a medical report from some source that now refuses to even explain itself to the people who most need to know how and why this decision was reached: the families who lost their loved ones at the hands of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

You may have guessed that I have a passionate viewpoint on the subject of crime and punishment. I admit right here and in public that I’m a hardliner – commit a crime and you’ll pay the full price for it. No remission or time off for good behaviour. No access to TV. No access to telephones. One meal a day. If you’re sentenced to 30 years, you’ll serve 30 years and break rocks while you do it.

Yeah, I know – I’m an animal.

Or am I?

Inspired by what I see as the inadequacies of most modern-day criminal justice systems, I wrote a novel speculating on how close the public is to revolt over the matters of crime and punishment – that was long before Scotland’s Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill gaily pranced to front and centre of the world stage and showed up the Scottish criminal justice system as the pussycat it really is.

But here’s the rub: if you read just about any newspaper in Australia or Scotland (my points of reference) you won’t have to search too hard to find an article somewhere exposing the softly-softly approach to modern ‘justice’. And if you read the online editions in particular, the chances are you’ll come across a readers’ comments section – what the public have to say about the level of punishment handed down in our courts.

The comments can get quite alarming at times, even for me, but the gist of what the public has to say is this: the vast majority of us want stiffer sentences; we want prison to be a horrible place, not a holiday camp, such that it serves as a genuine deterrent; but most of all, we want to feel safe to walk the streets.

Rapists often serve two years when they should (in my opinion) be locked up for life – hard labour, no remission.

Child molesters are smacked on the wrist and told to stay away from kids. (Here’s a rhetorical question: how many kids’ lives does a child molester have to ruin before he’s (or she’s) considered a threat to society?)

A murderer generally goes to prison for a lot less time than someone who steals $10 million from a bank – assuming the prosecution decides to pursue the charge of murder, and isn't enticed to settle on the easy option of accepting a guilty plea to culpable homicide.

Is that justice? Real justice? If you answered ‘yes’, come the hell on! Have you asked the victims of crime what they think? Have you asked their families?

So here’s my recommendation to Kenny MacAskill and Alex Salmond: stand up and be men about what you’ve done. You made an appalling decision. Sure, you have no legal obligation to travel to America to justify your actions; but your obligation to the families of al-Megrahi's victims goes far deeper than legality – it reaches into the very heart of this thing we call 'morality'.

Get yourselves over to America, meet with Senator Menendez and his colleagues, and with the families of every victim of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi if they want to meet you, and look them in the eye. Tell them why you did the unthinkable. Show them your reports. Justify yourselves. Prove that you have just as much compassion for them as you do for this convicted murderer.

Then, when you genuinely understand their hurt, their anger and their despair at what you’ve done, apologise to them, and to the people of Scotland for the embarrassment you’ve cause us, and resign from the Scottish government.

One Thing Australian...

All things Scottish, all things Australian, and all things literary… that’s what DUD is all about. That’s what Jack is (mostly) all about. And this is Jack’s blog, so that is as it should be.

However, once in awhile, Mr. Ramsay lets me pop Down Under to play on DUD. But I hesitate, sometimes. After all, I’m neither Australian nor Scottish. And, while I AM a writer, I’m not sure just how ‘literary’ I am. For sure, I know I’m not in Jack’s league when it comes to literarability.

However, I do have an Aussie connection. I have several good Australian friends, and I am going to have the pleasure of meeting one of them very soon. Larry arrives in Maine on Sunday night, and I will be picking him up at the airport. How exciting!

I am SCARED TO DEATH!

What if he doesn’t like me? What if I am far, far less impressive in person than I am online? After all, how much trouble can I get into when all I have are my words to make an impression? But once Larry meets me in person, he gets to see and experience the full deal. The real McCoy. Me, live and in color. Holy smokes.

This could be bad.

I once sneezed a pea out through my nose while dining in a restaurant.

I walked though the supermarket with a mashed and melted chocolate Rollo stuck to my butt.

I drove through town with a live chicken stuck in the grill of my car.

I drove through the same village with my groceries on the roof of my truck.

A customer introduced himself to me as Mr. Derbogosian, and I responded, “God Bless You!” (No peas were forthcoming, thank heavens…)

I bragged about getting a good deal on a piece of property by saying “I jewed them down to $25,000.00.” The man I was speaking to was named Steinberg. (Someone should shoot me and put me out of my misery.)

I got nervous when meeting a politician, so I licked my hand and slicked down his rooster-tail. (I feel a migraine coming on…)

I even broke wind in church (but made a remarkable save by scowling at the old man sitting one row behind me. It was a spectacular ploy, and the poor gent even apologized for it, afterwards. [I'm going to Hell, aren't I?])

And all that… well. That was just last week.

With luck, my Aussie friend Larry will be a big buffoon. He’ll lack grace, finesse and style, and he’ll be homlier than a stump fence, too. If that is the case—if he’s kinda like me—then we will have the time of our lives.

But if he’s cool, and suave, and polished… I think I’m doomed.

When he comes home-- when he flies the 10,000 miles back to Brisbane and Russell Island-- I hope you’ll not give his stories too much credence. If he’s as awesome as I think he is, my plan is to keep him drunk for the four weeks that he’s here.

And really… you can’t believe a single thing a drunk Aussie says, now, can you?