The Knife Went In: Real-Life Murderers and Our Culture by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple [Theodore, Dalrymple]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology and philosophy, Medicine and public health, Biographies and diaries
ISBN: 9781783341191
Publisher: Gibson Square
Published: 2020-12-02T12:13:36+00:00

But man, proud man,

Dress’d in a little brief authority

No longer under the influence of glue, the man who the day before had bludgeoned an old man to death was now preoccupied by the non-arrival of his tobacco, experiencing it as an injustice and infringement of his rights.

For a time, violence in the hospital next door to the prison became so serious a problem that a police station located in it supplemented the security department. This, if anything, made matters worse, for it convinced wrong-doers that they had nothing to fear from the boys (and girls) in blue. The latter resolutely refused to take action even against those whom they witnessed personally acting in an aggressive or violent way. It was as if they were under orders to keep the statistics down — the prevention of a rise in the figures, rather than in crime, being their main responsibility. Sir Robert Peel would have turned in his grave.

The final straw for me came when a nurse in the casualty department told me that she had been punched in the face by a patient in front of a policeman who had done nothing except preventing the patient from repeating his action. He had not arrested him, let along charged him.

I wrote a letter to the Chief Constable of the city to complain of the supine nature of his force, and described the case of the nurse.

He replied assuring me that his officers were under strict instruction to arrest and charge every violent offender in the hospital. In effect, he said that what had happened could not have happened. The nurse was lying or psychotic perhaps.

I did not believe that the nurse was lying, but of course could not have stood in a court of law and say that I knew for a fact that what she told me was true. Against an administrative blockade there is very little that the ordinary citizen can do, unless he turns himself into a militant campaigner.

Nevertheless, my letter to the Chief Constable bore fruit (of a kind), though likewise I cannot absolutely swear to cause and effect. About three months later police posters began to appear throughout the hospital informing the public that any person who assaulted a member of staff within the hospital premises would be arrested and charged. I took this as an indication that my original complaint had been justified. But also that on the facts above the Chief Constable was an unscrupulous liar, more a politician than a policeman. He had an eye more to pleasing his masters than to the protection of the public — something common to practically all Chief Constables nowadays, for whom pre-empting criticism is more important than pre-empting crime.

The police posters, while better than nothing, perhaps, were unsatisfactory (though revealing), nonetheless. They expressed the idea that the response to the crime of assault depended upon who assaulted whom, as well as where the assault took place. Hospital staff, like the rest of the population, were fair game again once they left the hospital premises.

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