personally I think the UK is potentially at a bit of a crisis point. I DONT think handguns and what not should be legalised however we are at a point now where in some places police responsive times are so long that people have no practical protection from crime.
I am all for the police policing and people not taking matters isn't their own hands, but that all falls apart when the police either can't or won't protect a law abiding person......
Not saying I have the answer but when local scallies vandalised my car and I phoned the police, I told them exactly who did it and also that there was a bordering on textbook fingerprint on the spoiler that one had snapped off.
the police would not even send a Bobby out and I was told off the record.they already knew who it was but it was not worth their time as they were 17.
I've been through the same thing. I used to live in a run-down town in the North-East about 30 miles from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There was a local gang of teenagers there who made life miserable for the residents, especially the elderly people who were afraid to go out at night. I was working at a start-up Biotechnology company which had recently set up there because of the relative cheapness of land on the (mostly empty) local industrial estate. The gang there used to always be at least 8 strong. One night I was coming out into the car park (we worked long hours due to new product development deadlines) and I saw someone hitting my car with something that looked like a tree branch. I shouted "what the **** do you think you're doing?" and the next thing I know this teenage scumbag was walking towards me with a 3 foot long scaffolding pole shouting that he was going to smash my head in. He then started hitting a lamp post with it in an attempt to intimidate me (while his friends were cheering him on). At that point I started the audio recorder on my phone. I stood my ground and told him that if he hit me with that I would make him regret it. He came up to me within a distance of about a metre and verbally abused me for a couple of minutes before turning round and walking away. His parting shot was: "if we find out where you live we'll break all your ******* windows".
I later rang the Police and was told to go to the nearest open Police Station (which was over 10 miles away) to make a statement. (There was a Police Station in this town but it had recently been closed to the public, but there were a couple of Policeman based there.) I gave them the audio recording I made and after listening to it
the Policeman warned me that if I went ahead with a complaint then I could be prosecuted for using the F-word in a public place! (Was he just using this as a means to get out of doing the paperwork for a minor crime?) He then asked me what I meant when I said I'd make the thug 'regret it'. (I said I meant that I'd make sure he was prosecuted for assault.) I still went ahead with the complaint. Later on I got a call from a local Police Sergeant who said this thug was 16 and already had 23 criminal convictions, mostly for shop-lifting but also for assault. He would not go into any more specific details about his offences. He then said that his colleague was out-of-line about me being prosecuted for using the F-word in that scenario.
Apparently, that gang was responsible for most of the theft, vandalism and assaults in the area, but its leader had never spent a day in a Young Offenders Detention Centre. He said that we wouldn't be able to prosecute him for this because it was my word against his and his friends would back him up and since I only had an audio recording they could say he was just kicking something rather than carrying a weapon. I had some more trouble with him later but just verbal abuse so I didn't need to fight him. A few months later I read in the local paper that this thug had just been convicted of setting fire to someone's hedge and threatening a woman who had witnessed him doing it (she also took pictures of it). He got a suspended custodial sentence for that. Apparently, his older brother was even worse than him, but when he turned 18 he packed it all in because he knew that all the offences he committed before 18 would be wiped off his record but not afterwards.
I suggested if it happened again then I would introduce them to my baseball bat they were not happy at all. imo they were well deserving of some pepper spray!
this was a minor crime but the attitude is the same for burglaries. IF the police won't protect us then it's only natural for us to want to protect ourselves.
Yes, the Police will prosecute a respectable adult for taking the law into his own hands against juvenile delinquents and the ratbags know exactly how to play the system. A friend of one of my colleagues did exactly that recently. He was sitting in his living room and saw some local teenage thug run up and rip off the plastic downpipe from his roof guttering. He ran out and grabbed him (Citizens' Arrest Powers) then called the Police and held him until they arrived. However, the thug's parents (notorious scumbags themselves) subsequently claimed that their son was physically assaulted by him and he was prosecuted and convicted for it! (This man had no previous criminal record and a responsible full-time career.) If he had CCTV up and he had held the boy in front of it then he could have proved he did not assault him, but unfortunately, he didn't.
