WHAT YOU DO NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT DO

The three victims of the Southport killings 
 

This article is about the killing of three young girls at Southport last year and the person who committed the crime. He has deliberately not been named in it so as not to boost his profile. Instead I have included pictures of the young girls who were victims of this terrible crime.

 

Now that the killer’s punishment has been handed down – fifty two years in jail, no less – we begin the hand-wringing exercises. Politicians queue up to both condemn the killer and to say something like ‘it must never happen again’. The problem is that it is very difficult to prevent it happening again for the simple reason that in our society you are imprisoned for what you actually do – not for what you might intend to do at some future date.

 

Of course, no politicians can say this. They would have to admit that they were powerless and could not stop a poor, deluded person killing others in order to make the world a better place and possibly helping them to get to heaven in the process. There is just the small matter of spending the next fifty two years in jail before you can achieve that: eighteen years growing up and becoming a person, the rest locked up in a cell with little company.

 

It is worth emphasising this point because politicians are in the business of creating a perfect world. Unfortunately, the world is actually far from perfect and our freedoms have to be hedged around with protections, which sadly include the freedom to do evil things – like killing innocent young girls while they attended a dance class. He intended to kill all the adults and others attending the class and would have done so if he had not been stopped.

 

The only way he could have been prevented from killing those girls was if he had been locked up in advance. We then move towards the sort of situation imagined in that Spielberg film Minority Report in which people are arrested before they have a chance to commit a crime. Forget about human rights and the presumption of innocence and old-fashioned concepts like that. Lock them up first to prevent criminal activity.

 

To be fair, Minority Report is a science fiction film set in the future, featuring psychic characters who can predict crimes (‘precogs’).  As far as I know, precogs do not exist (yet) and the story can be safely stored in the fantasy category. Precogs have a 100% success rate and the business of putting people on trial and judging whether they had committed a crime or not. The fact that the crime had not yet been committed could answer that dilemma.

 

The government does have a programme called Prevent which aims to stop people being radicalised into terrorism. The official description says it is, ‘a national initiative … that aims to prevent people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. It's part of the government's counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST. The extent to which the killer of these poor girls was a radical or simply a nutcase is disputed but Prevent seems like a decent idea.

 

Whether it is successful is open to debate. For all we know, they could have prevented plenty of similar massacres like the one recently at Southport but I think it is unlikely. Such programmes inevitably find it hard to convert people who have travelled down the path of extremism. Eight people were killed on London Bridge and Borough Market in 2017 by men who actually met with each other at a supposed terrorism prevention centre.

 

I do not think that we should abandon such measures, but let us be honest. They have limited success in what they are tyring to do. It is simply impossible to lock everyone who might attack another who we all (except the killers themselves) regard as innocent. ‘This is for Allah,’ the killers shouted as they killed bystanders in Borough Market in the 2017 attack. Yet Allah did not ask them to kill people and should not be blamed if they do so.

 

We tend to lump people together and a lot of people will blame all Moslems for thse killings. Yet, Moslems are, on the whole, law-abiding and hard-working people who do not deserve being lumped with the fanatics who perform these killings. I remember that there used to be a DIY shop run by a Moslem family which closed up at around midday every Friday so that they all could go to the mosque on what was their holy day.

 

I never resented this if it happened when I was in the shop buying something, even though it meant I would have to come back later. Good for them, I thought. They are showing that something is more important than making money. In this case, it was religion, which some customers might not sympathise with, especially if it was Islamic, but I liked the way that they simply stopped for a short time and thought about God rather than Mammon.

 

That was – for many – a positive side of Islam. The negative comes out in the acts of terror that can strike at random and with devastating suddenness. It is all very well identifying those who could potentially commit a crime but punishing them before they have done so is against the rule of law. This means that they have to commit the crime before they can be punished, as the killer of these girls did – suddenly, viciously and with little or no remorse.

 

Allowing someone to commit a crime inevitably means that there will be victims and my heart goes out to the parents of these girls. Who could be more innocent than a young girl at a dance class? Who could be more guilty than the person (usually male) who attacks and kills them? Yet, until their murder has taken place, he has to be regarded as innocent. No amount of hand-wringing can alter this, even if it means we have to allow evil to flourish.

 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner