Afternoon:
10°c
A group of boys is lined up on the pavement in the rain opposite my house looking at my parked scooter.
This cannot be simple admiration because the Vespa is bottom of the range and its engine sounds consumptive.
I watch them for a few minutes, then walk past them to the shops to buy supper.
When I return, 15 minutes later, the bike has been moved, the front panel removed and the steering skewed to the right.
I surmise that someone has tried to start the engine by looking for wires, wrenched the bike about a bit and left it in disgust.
I have followed every part of the excellent Criminal Justice series on BBC so I know things aren't always what they seem - but I wonder whether the group of boys might possibly be connected to my scooter.
So I run down streets in search of them and find them looking into car windows, darting in and out of a food and wine store, and winding their way towards the main road.
Craftily, I phone the police from a vantage point nearby. The efficient phone operator asks me if I am safe and how old the suspects look.
I admit that they look about 10. We both stifle a giggle. I add that I didn't actually SEE them vandalise my bike. That brings the matter to a close.
I return home and tenderly bind up my knackered scooter with black tape, as if I were a boxer's girlfriend. And I am filled with both rage and guilt. No, I didn't see the boys but who are the other likely suspects?
The blind man who taps his way back to sheltered accommodation in the early evening? The old woman laden with shopping bags?
On the other hand, evidence is the only base for crime-solving. Boys are always complaining that they are unfairly blamed by shopkeepers and the middle-aged.
They hang out on the streets because they have nothing else to do. It doesn't make them criminals.
According to the fashionable authors of SuperFreakonomics, statistics are everything. A mathematical algorithm could identify the potential "bad guys" through behavioural and demographic characteristics.
The authors justify police targeting of Muslims on the dispassionate statistical grounds that those arrested on charges of terrorism are likely to have Muslim names, along with a tendency to rent their homes and a failure to take out life insurance.
Is it OK for friendly geeky guys in open-necked shirts to say things the Police Commissioner would flinch at?
If shoplifters are disproportionately young women, and paedophiles older white men, then shouldn't both those groups be scrutinised disproportionately?
Ten-year-old boys who stare too long at scooters may have the innocent souls of future mechanics but I reserve the right to glare at them just the same. It is not prejudice but data discrimination.
Hillary holds all the aces
The Assembly at Stormont looked a little in love with Hillary Clinton yesterday.
How could you not be? That calm, low voice, somehow less mannered and distant than President Obama's.
Her small and dignified figure, in her trademark trouser suit and without a handbag of any kind.
She spoke softly and carried a big stick like the best statesmen. She said Northern Ireland was a model across the world for conflict resolution. She talked movingly of Bill Clinton's visit to Belfast in 1995.
When Obama won the presidency, Hillary made a graceful speech which nevertheless suggested victory was morally hers. You might say the same about the Nobel prize.
Praise only when it's due, please
Along with other journalists, I've received a perky publishers' message about a new book by reality TV star David Van Day.
Would I mind sending some advance praise about the book, which could appear on the jacket?
I can only sorrowfully assume that Bono has already turned down the offer. It may sound bizarre to ask confected praise for an unknown book by an artificially created “star” but this is the logic of “advance praise”.
Let us wait until the books are published before judgment.
• Everyone agrees that General Sir Richard Dannatt's decision to accept a Tory peerage was naïve and, worse, political.
Labour threatens to dock his remaining pay. Tory defence advisers have “grave doubts”.
Friends of the new head of the Army, General Sir David Richards, say the PM should be listening to a subtle, sophisticated, modern kind of general, not a clapped-out old Christian (I paraphrase).
It is a different kind of naïvety to suggest that politics is not rampant among the Armed Forces, just because it takes place in private.
Reader views (1)
"It is not prejudice but data discrimination." That's just rationalising prejudice on the basis of hearsay - in reality you don't actually have any data!
You're calling for profiling (e.g. targeting Asian men as terrorists) which does not work and does not make our communities or our property safer. It justifies the kind of corner-cutting, lazy police work that we all surely want to get away from. Targeting BEHAVIOUR rather than appearance is proven to be far more successful. Targeting a whole group because of race or age (or both) is enormously inefficient and does not work, whilst at the same time it alienates an entire section of society.
- Nolan, Londonist, 14/10/2009 09:59
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