Report to the People
16th October 2006
Bad
Language
You
can tell a lot about what someone really thinks by the language they use.
Take
the phrase "petty crime". It
speaks volumes about how seriously someone takes, say, drunks using your close
as a public toilet or yobs throwing bricks through your window, if they describe
such behaviour as "petty".
They
either don't care or have no understanding of how crime like this makes decent
people's lives a misery.
New
Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, however, says this attitude has to change.
Prosecutors
must, she says, get into the communities which are blighted by what they might
dismiss as minor or "petty" crimes. Only
that way will they understand the importance of these offences; how they grind
down those who face them every day.
Her
first week in the job also saw the Lord Advocate declaring that upcoming law
reforms will stop vandals and other hooligans playing the system for months on
end before their case comes to court. Instead,
they can be hit with £500 fines within days.
Not
only would seeing swift justice administered to those who have made their lives
a misery restore a bit of the community's shaken faith in the criminal justice
system, it would free up courts to deal faster with the serial offenders
responsible for "one-man crime waves".
The new woman at the top has clearly got her priorities right: she seems determined to make the criminal justice system follow her lead and recognise that everyday crimes cannot be excused or trivialised as "petty".
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