Text benotete Hausaufgabe

Frühjahr 2009
Einzelprüfüngsnummer 42617
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England and Wales are not unusually murderous. The homicide rate compares
favourably with the EU average. But when it comes to non-deadly violence
Britain soars alarmingly ahead of the rest. According to the International Crime
Victims Survev* Britain comes second, ahead of countries with much higher
murder rates.
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The evolution of Britain as a low-murder, high-violence society is in evidence
every Saturday night, when many, stoked by alcohol, prefer an after-dinner fight
to mint chocolates. Much of this goes unrecorded, as the British Crime Survev* ignores
victims under 16; yet even so, against a backdrop of generally falling crime, the
figures for attacks by strangers remain stubbornly high.
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Brooke Kinsella, a soap actress whose brother Ben was murdered on June 29*,
got five and a half minutes on the BBC to put her case. That is more say than
most people have in how they are policed.^Britain's police forces are answerable
only to the home secretary and their local police authority, a weedy^ board of
councillors with little clout. Policemen are subservient to a rigid System of central
targets, which has inadvertently encouraged coppers to focus on busting minor
offenders rather man on keeping their patches safe.
Unlike America, whose elected sheriffs enjoy (and sometimes abuse) real power,
Britain's police chiefs do not take Orders from the people they protect. That is
soon to change - a bitJThe Tories want to replace police authorities with elected
police commissioners, who would setpolicing priorities. The government seems
to be leaning towards a tamer Option.
Ministers may fear that local control of the police would lead to populist law
enforcement. That is a danger, but two things mitigate it. For one, the existing
criminal-justice System, led by a government in distress, is not exactly unpopulist. (A recent Cabinet Office* review recommended that those undergoing
Community punishments should wear fluorescent vests to shame them publicly.)
More importantly, the public is quite often ahead of the game. Öne example is
the public Obsession with putting more bobbies on the beat, once ridiculed by
criminologists but now all the rage in the form of "neighbourhood policing".
"Violent Britain - Island savages", The Economist, 10* July 2008
*Die unterstrichenen Ausdrücke sind nicht zu übersetzen!
'weedy: derived from ,weed' = any plant that grows wild and profusely, e'sp. one that grows among
cultivated plants, depriving them of space, food, etc.; here used figuratively
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