With regard to your Grandad, I can sympathise with you there, Adam, and I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments about the force.
It is a ridiculous situation whereby youngsters effectively get away (in some cases literally) with murder.
My feelings are split: either the kids should be held accountable - if they can do the crime, I feel in 99% of cases, they should accept a punishment for it. Otherwise, the parents should be accountable. This sounds harsh, but I feel there has to be a change in the law, or the situation will get desperate.
I mean, I was born in 1966. In the 70's, the naughtiest thing I did was ring some old dear's doorbell and run away. And I got clouted by the Bobby for doing it.
For as long as I can remember, I have been taught right from wrong. From a very early age I knew not to touch people's cars, that if I found property or money in the street to hand it in, etc...I ws taught respect for people and their property. There is NONE of that now, it seems. Young people don't have any respect, they don't care.
I went to Tesco about a year ago and happened to recognise a car that belonged to a neighbour of my Mum's. When I got back, there were some young British Gas salespeople SITTING on the bonnet. So I told them to sling their hooks, that it wasn't their car to sit on and how dare they? Well, imagine their response. The air was blue. And they didn't care that they were wearing the uniform of a blue chip company and giving them a bad name.
Generally, over the last X years, it seems to me that crime has ballooned. I know modern media mean that crimes are more often reported than, say in the 1920's, but nevertheless, I feel that it has increased dramatically. And I'm sure that with each successive generation things are slipping even further into decline. This is a blanket statement, and there are still far more good people in the world than bad (thank g*d), but I'm convinced that there will come a time when the people will demand a change in law to protect themselves and their property. Don't get me wrong, I'm an optimist, not a pessimist, and this process will take a very long time, but I think it will eventually come.
I am making sure that I bring up my sons exactly as I was. I am determined not to be ultra-strict (my grandparents and mother were not), but I want to firmly imbue my boys with the same sense of respect, responsibility and citizenship that I was.
But is it all the fault of the parents? That is a question with very deep and wide-ranging answers I'm sure, and we could probably fill all of cyberspace with our opinions on the matter...
Onto the Police. Yes, I feel the same way. An assault is an assault, a life is a life. But there is definitely more value placed on a policeman (or woman's) head. I'll do a bit of research to try and find out why.
The most obvious thing I can think of now is that the Police are there to uphold law and if they are bashed on the bonce, they can't. If you know what I mean!
I haven't yet found any points of law on the assault of police, but have found this: how strange...
This case ([1983] 76 Crim App Rep 234 DC) demonstrates that although assault is normally taken to imply a threat of immediate violence, the term `immediate' can be interpreted liberally. In this case the accused Smith was convicted of an assault by virtue of staring at a woman through a window. Even though there was no evidence that he intended to enter the premises, his actions were considered to be a sufficient cause of an apprehension of violence to sustain a conviction for assault.
