Mark Easton on the recent spike in reports of “theft from the person”, ie opportunistic, non-violent theft.
The second possibility, (2), is that greater anxiety about money makes us more aware when something apparently goes missing. Perhaps a year ago people assumed they had spent that fiver on something and forgotten. Or they never missed it in the first place. Now, they think it must have been stolen - particularly if they like to believe they are being more careful with their cash.
Well yes: if you lose or misplace something it’s your own responsibility. If it’s stolen it’s somebody else’s fault. If the loss matters more, the temptation to assume it was somebody else’s fault grows along with that. At the same time there almost certainly people around who think they have a right to a little predation on others, a number likely to rise as money gets tighter. And open plan offices, for instance, are petri dishes for that kind of dishonesty: full of stuff and full of people who have business circulating around the place.
I guess most people have run across an office psychopath in their time. They’re a kind of case study in themselves. But crime aside, what you have here at the most basic level is an index of mutual mistrust – a measure of the extent to which people under varying levels of economic pressure are turning on each other rather than to each other. This does not have pleasant implications politically.
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