Street crime fears

Those of you who hear this talk in the morning may have been thrown into a seizure by this sudden burst of cordiality. Well, I'm simply ridding myself of a very small feeling of guilt that came over me several years ago when a father wrote to me and quoted his nine-year-old son. The boy said, 'Why is Mr Cooke so polite on Friday evenings and so rude on Sunday mornings?'

Considering the ratio of people who – in Britain, anyway – catch this talk on Sunday compared with those faithful old retainers who forego the tube and tune in on Friday evenings, I decided that the boy was right. From now on, I mean to be polite all the time.

I've just done a short, flying visit to England and, picking up the news where most people pick it up, on television, I was struck this time by how many of what I'd taken to be American problems, I mean social problems, how many of them are the common problems of Western society, of Britain and France and Holland and Sweden and West Germany and, lately in an acute form, of Denmark.

First and foremost, and apparently insoluble of course, is unemployment. Time and again in Europe and America governments of all parties have come in and told us, with the greatest conviction and goodwill, that their main aim was prosperity with full employment. Nobody has made it. They all found out, in turn, that high employment, which means most people having the money to buy lots of goods, goes with high inflation and then we're all battling with the problem of productivity and welfare.

That's putting it in a form of shorthand that must puzzle a lot of people. What I'm saying is that in some countries, certainly in the United States, I think in Britain, also, I suspect in New Zealand, most of all in the Netherlands, the care of the unemployed, the wholly admirable system of seeing that nobody must be poverty stricken has made it possible, for young people especially, to have free museums, free dancing, free music, free skating, free food, free medicine and live frugally and cheerfully without work.

Now, don't misunderstand! Long ago I had the experience for one year of not having enough coming in to maintain a wife and child. It's an experience I recommend only to people who have never been less than comfortable. It happened to me at a time when there was no dole in the United States, no way of picking up the weekly cheque and, to those people who were once known as the labouring poor, whose jobs, for whatever reason, were gone, who had to scrape and grit their teeth and hold on, to be unemployed and see nothing ahead is the most crushing, the most demeaning social experience a man and woman can go through.

But a government has to look at the whole picture of employment and we ought to recall a forgotten sentence in the original Beveridge Plan. He didn't create the welfare state but he gave us the blueprint and he wrote into it one warning that nobody today ever mentions. 'Make work' he said, 'and see that there is food and shelter, but do not hand out actual money beyond their barest needs or, in the young, the impulse to get out and make some sort of a living will be quashed.' With the greatest reluctance, I have to say, to recognise, that there's a lot in it.

I know today, and I'm sure lots of you do too, young people who are out of a job, have been for a long time, who manage to get by with unemployment cheques. I'm not thinking of the heart-rending plight of Knowsley and such places, or of chronic drifters, but of intelligent people and, in the United States, just out of college with a good degree.

The really shocking news is that about six in ten of them see no job in sight. Nobody can begrudge the fact that unlike such people 50 years ago in the Great Depression, they are not, generally, in despair and close to starvation. Today, I see them in droves every weekday now that we're getting bursts of warm days and the blossom out. I see them sunning in the parks, frolicking or reclining on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. It is good that they're not hungry. It's bad that many of them are content.

Well, I didn't mean to stay so long with this perpetual problem of high unemployment in a healthy economy – a problem that no politician of any stripe, any party, should be sure he can solve. I noticed, also, a growing and continuing debate in Britain which is just as ding-dong in the United States about teenage pregnancies. In America, it's about twice as common per thousand of the population, but in both countries the same two antagonists square off against each other.

One saying that widespread sex education and easy availability of contraceptives will reduce the unwanted children, and the other group saying that these measure lead to promiscuity and that the only solution is chastity before marriage, which, I humbly suggest, is a fine recipe but no solution for reality for the way things are.

Then there's the battle of working people for housing they can afford. Exactly the same grudge in the cities, especially the big cities, of Britain as America – two decades of building skyscraper offices and a blithe indifference to building low-cost housing. Not indifference exactly, and I don't know how it is with you wherever you live, but in New York the trend for the past 30 years is glaringly obvious and depressing.

More and more high-rise apartments for the fairly rich and more and more towering monoliths of skyscrapers of office buildings which will be rented by corporations at as much as 45, 50, 60 dollars a foot. And, here and there, a modest, bleak housing project, usually christened with great fanfare and the mayor hailing the arrival of the millennium.

Then, I had recently spent a little time in Boston with a good friend of mine, a woman in her thirties who goes around the high schools of the city warning the 16-, 15-, 14-year-olds – from her own experience – of the dangers of moving on from marijuana, or hash, to cocaine. This is not a peril only among the children of the upper or middle classes. Very artful synthetic cocaine is now flooding the country and is cheap enough to be bought by the children of modest families and it's a problem not only in the big cities, it's in the Southern back country, in Midwestern farming towns, out West, in the lovely villages of New England – everywhere.

So I go to England and the first thing I see on television is a piece on the efforts of the British customs authorities, drug enforcement division, to try and stop huge shipments of cocaine, and of its new, cheaper variant, coming into Britain.

Incidentally, this young American woman I mentioned, a cured addict, told me that even eight, nine years ago in England – she was at a university there and graduated with honours – she told me that, even then, in the university towns of Britain, as in the cities of the North and Midlands, it took her never more than 48 hours to make the easy connections and go off on weekend highs with congenial groups of nice, educated junkies. It cannot help but be worse now, though I find, both in this country and in Britain, that nice parents of nice children are quite blind to the idea that their precious offspring could be next.

And, more obvious, more depressing than anything as a social sickness, there is crime, especially what is called street crime or random crime. I haven't heard of any Western country in which it is not rising, though I suddenly realise that if I'd made that remark out loud in America, the administration would have come out quickly with the true statistic that in the United States crime, of most kinds, declined in 1984.

It's true, but you have to say, declined how much and from what horrendous peaks? There are still about as many homicides in New York City in a week as in Denmark in a year. I can't put my hands on the figure for London but I'm pretty sure that it's no more than one-tenth of the New York rate and New York is not alone in this sorry championship race. The figures for Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, Detroit are appalling too. Of course, New York has the reputation around the world of being at all times the most dangerous city just to walk around in – a reputation about as accurate as the Americans belief that everybody in London subscribes to the London Times and takes crumpets for tea.

I'm always surprised by even intelligent and you'd guess fairly well-informed visitors who ask if it's safe to walk in the parks. The answer is that by day it's about as risky to play or sit or stroll around Central Park or the Bronx Botanical Gardens as it is to do the same thing in Hyde Park or Regent Park or St James's. At night you'd be foolish, though since the former mayor Lindsay installed about a thousand sodium lights, muggers and other desperadoes have retreated to other well-known districts of the city. You don't go strolling the streets after dark in the South Bronx or the East Village.

And, most scary and in the news, just now, is the problem of crime at night on the subways, in the underground. And that brings up the controversy still raging over Bernhard Goetz, the slim, thoughtful, educated young man who, three months ago, was approached by four youths and asked for five dollars, who then drew a pistol and fired and wounded all four of them as they turned and ran.

Goetz immediately evoked a huge wave of sympathy from fretful subway riders who feel that enough is enough. He aroused a solid body of criticism from people who see chaos in any society that lets the ordinary citizen carry a gun and take the law into his own hands.

One grand jury indicted him only for illegal possession of a handgun. A second grand jury, confronted with new evidence, has indicted him with four counts of attempted murder and assault and criminal possession of a weapon. The trial is a month or two away and it will then be time to go into the question which now boggles the ordinary American in his frustration over crime on the streets:

How far does the right of self-defence go for anyone who is mugged or about to be mugged or fears the approach of a beggar?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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