QOTD

Theodore Dalrymple (the long-time pen name for British prison doctor and psychiatrist Anthony Daniels), in the August 11th Spectator (U.K.), about "the latest government wheeze to mislead the public about the prevalence of crime in Britain":

Henceforth, shoplifters who steal less than £200 worth of goods will be summarily fined £80, just as if they had parked on double yellow lines, and their crime not recorded anywhere.

I was looking over the crime statistics in the Home Office’s Research Publication No. 217 the other day, which investigated the costs of crime to the country for the year 2000. At the bottom of every column was the total, save for the column indicating the number of crimes: the figure was so appalling, more than 60,000,000 per year, that is to say more than five times the figure usually given for general public consumption, that it was deemed better to conceal it by omission, in the full knowledge that journalists would never do the addition themselves.

Half the 60,000,000 crimes were shop-lifting: confirming my old dictum that, pace Napoleon, the English are a nation of shoplifters. But by removing shoplifting from the realm of crime altogether, the crime rate has been halved at a stroke.