Who do they think they are kidding?

You know those figures about the number of householders prosecuted for hurting burglars? Yes, the ones you heard on the TV on the weekend. Well it turns out that they don’t actually mean very much:

"There are no statistical details of these cases - they aren't kept. It is not a particularly accurate list and we never said it was. It is quite possible that there are other cases."

The Telegraph found another 7 cases in an hour. Still not very high but that is not the point. The point is that it was known that the statistics provided were not a true and factual representation of the picture and yet the lie was used on TV, on the radio, in the papers and in the halls and chambers of Westminster by the few to justify their position on the law affecting the many.

Why would they do such a thing?

Couple the rubbishing of these statistics with the fact that the prosecution of householders is not the only measure to consider and we see that the government’s position is not as credible as they would like us to believe.

On the question of trust and the social contract we have with the state to protect us this is a backward step. On the subject of self defence in the home some, if not many, members of the public feel disadvantaged. The government’s answer to this is to trot out things that can kindly be described as half-truths and to state that householders are confused.

This weekend we were subjected to a TV programme showing dramatisations of legitimate householder defence. In one dramatisation a burglar is stabbed to death while rifling a draw in a kitchen. The householder, hearing the noise, grabs a knife which he has been keeping under his bed, creeps downstairs and stabs the burglar in the back without warning. The experts told us how this was perfectly legal.

Another showed a burglar running from a house with an armful of booty. The householder shouts at the guy and then chases him out onto the street, smacking him on the back of the head using a golf club (was it a one iron? I think it might well have been). He collapses. The experts tell us again that this was a legitimate use of force to protect property.

Yet we know from what we have seen and heard with our own eyes that such actions have been the beginning of long, hard and often ruinous periods of threatened and actual litigation by the state upon householders that have done very similar or exact same things.

They try to address our confusion with facts and scenarios that are so obviously not true that we have to question their motivation. What do they like so much about the current situation? Why do their fear actually empowering the householder? Why do they come out of this looking more confused than the rest of us?

Posted by John at January 17, 2005 11:15 AM | TrackBack