bike thief arrested

brocbrocach

Chuchote wrote: »

Hah, think of France, where les flics retire early, but before they retire are trained, mostly as craftsmen, so the State has a network of spies mending everyone's plumbing.

More seriously, dubious character doesn't appertain to class. Working-class people are as likely to be kind and moral as upper-class people.

I offer you Ken, a kid of sixteen, whose mother would like him to stay in school and go on to get a good job; she herself is working responsibly. His father shrugs, he's going down to the pub. Ken has two role models, and is teetering between the two choices of way of life. Then he meets a friend from school who's licking his finger to count the nine lovely fifties he's got for a bike he nicked and sold on the street…

Whoever bought that bike has now tipped Ken's choice the wrong way.

I see your Ken and I offer you Gordon, his father is a barrister and his mother looks good. His uncle works for a "big 5 firm" and when young Gordon joins there via Blackrock and Smurfit he makes a rapid rise through the ranks of his unconnected peers. His ex-schoolmates work in finance, law and banking. Gordon does very well indeed on the work they send his way. One day a guy he knows from the tag rugby circuit pulls him aside and tells him about a nice little earner the guys in the bank have going ... they just need the right guy on the auditing side of things ...

smacl

Enduro wrote: »

Equality of opportunity is a good thing. It's completely incompatible with equality of outcome though.

Not really, equal opportunity is a worthy aspiration that is seldom achieved, and where society doesn't provide adequate opportunity for someone to succeed within the rules they're liable to break those rules. I don't think it is fair to consider equality of outcome until equality of opportunity has been properly addressed.

Chuchote

Adding to nee's points, http://health.spectator.co.uk/the-case-for-prescription-heroin/

The case for prescription heroin
Our refusal to treat addiction in the most straightforward way creates crime, misery – and more addicts
Johann Hari 9 May 2015

Extract:

Dr Marks could see the difference between the street addicts stumbling into the clinic for help for the first time, and the patients who had been on legal prescriptions for a while. The street addicts would often stagger in with abscesses that looked like hard-boiled eggs rotting under their skin, and with open wounds on their hands and legs that looked, as Parry told me, ‘like a pizza of infection. It’s mushy, and the cheese you get on it is pus. And it just gets bigger and bigger.’
The addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses or receptionists or Dr Marks himself. As a group, you couldn’t tell.
Faced with this evidence, Marks was beginning to believe that many ‘of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves’. In the clinic, as Russell Newcombe tells me, they started to call the infections and abscesses and amputations ‘drug war wounds’. So Dr Marks began to wonder: if prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more? He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen people to more than 400.
The first people to notice an effect were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Lofts told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’ He said elsewhere: ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’

magicbastarder

endacl wrote: »

Indeed. The harsh reality is that the choice to take heroin for the first time is a choice. And in this day and age, it's an overwhelmingly informed choice.

ah jaysus. surely you know the issue is more complex than that?
these things don't happen in a vacuum. there's a reason heroin addiction is more prevalent in certain socioeconomic strata; if it was just down to an idiotic choice, it'd be a much more equal opportunities drug.

Chuchote

An eye-opening vision of how someone becomes a heroin user comes from the cult French film La Haine (Hate), in which the most worthwhile character among the trio of protagonists drifts into drug use in a miserable, hopeless flatblock life. I haven't been able to watch any further through the film yet - all my hopes were fixed in this lovely character, the calm, sweet guy who keeps his two immature friends on the rails as they react to the death of their buddy in a police riot.

magicbastarder

this taps into one of the biggest issues i had with the austerity cuts over the last few years - the cut in education budget. iirc, the generally accepted multiplier of spending on education is approximately a factor of seven - i.e. every extra euro you put into education is repaid in the long term by a factor of seven.
but the clear corollary is that shrinking the education budget is borrowing from the future to pay for the present. i know a couple of teachers; one an art teacher, half of whose hours were doing remedial work in a school with a lot of vulnerable students. her remedial hours were completely cut; i don't think it's going to be a mystery what will happen to a student already struggling to keep up if that assistance vanishes.

another friend is a teacher in a primary school in a very economically depressed area, and with lots of horror stories about the situations the kids live in. after a particularly glum day in the staffroom, with lots of staff voicing 'what's the bloody point' style stories, the head teacher basically summed it up this way to them: 'just think of your role as being one where you get to provide the kids with an experience of normality for a few hours a day'.
how can you grow up normal if you're one of those kids?

tomasrojo

Having lost an extended family member to drug addiction, I'd just like to agree with nee.

Another factor in the prevalence of heroin addiction in certain communities since the 70s is that the authorities didn't care about it while it was restricted to those communities. There is a terrible attitude to these communities and it's existed for decades.

Chuchote

magicbastarder wrote: »

how can you grow up normal if you're one of those kids?

Yes, speaking from family experience, you can become utterly apparently normal, but be broken inside.

I see the government is going to give a big fund to families for creche costs. The instant result, of course, will be that creches become more costly. This government is one #headdesk moment.

ThisRegard

nee wrote: »

I did say that bike theft is emblematic of much, much bigger social problems that 99% of people ignore or don't even think about or consider; they're just happy to vilify the thief without trying to understand what may have made the situation arise in the first place, and what that means and what they can do about it.

This is Ireland, the unemployed and those that are simply lazy are looked after reasonably well. Bike theft, mainly by organised gangs or little scrotes, is not done so in order to put a bit of stale bread on the table for them and their 10 starving kids.

tomasrojo

Incidentally, though the conversation about social deprivation is very interesting, I'm not sure to what extent bike theft is driven by addiction. People engage in petty theft (petty in the eyes of the law in the case of bikes, despite some of them costing as much as new low-end cars) for many reasons, and I'm not sure drug addiction is a major one. Wanting to fit in is another reason, I'm sure. Just being young and stupid is another. Many of my (middle-class) friends and acquaintances when through a shop-lifting phase. It baffled me, but it was definitely "a thing".

Chuchote

ThisRegard wrote: »

This is Ireland, the unemployed and those that are simply lazy are looked after reasonably well. Bike theft, mainly by organised gangs or little scrotes, is not done so in order to put a bit of stale bread on the table for them and their 10 starving kids.

But may I reiterate my point one more time (probably one more of many): the reason for bike theft isn't scrotes or gangs. The reason is that other people are willing to buy stolen goods. If the Gardaí targeted the buyers, and there were many "solicitor bought bike from teen on street - now must pay €2,000 fine" and "civil servant bought bicycle from man in a pub - fined €2,000" with pictures of the buyers, and if these stories continued, the bottom would drop out of the market.

(The stories have to continue: look at the way mobile phone use in cars briefly stopped completely when there was a sweep of Garda pounces - and then resumed twice as bad when the gardaí stopped giving people points for it.)

The comfortable middle-class guy who says "Feck it, I've had two bikes stolen, I don't care where I get the next one" is personally guilty for robbing the thief of a life and a future.

I take your Ken, Gordon, et al, and raise you Mike, on his way to an interview for an apprenticeship, and Joe, on his way to the same interview, and Steve, interviewing these two kids. Mike has a rep as a bike thief, Joe is less bright and in ordinary circumstances wouldn't have a chance against Mike.

But in this case, of course will take on Joe and tell Mike, sorry kid. And the person who's stolen that apprenticeship is Gordon, who bought the bike off Mike in the back yard of his local pub.

Gordon's fine; he's going to have a nice career. He could easily have paid for a legal bike. But he's a thief; he's stolen Mike's life by buying the stolen bike off him.

ThisRegard

Chuchote wrote: »

But may I reiterate my point one more time (probably one more of many): the reason for bike theft isn't scrotes or gangs. The reason is that other people are willing to buy stolen goods.

Not all bikes are stolen to sell on. Some get stolen because people want something they don't want, some get stolen to go for a joyride, some get stolen just to get a kick.

Chuchote

ThisRegard wrote: »

Not all bikes are stolen to sell on. Some get stolen because people want something they don't want, some get stolen to go for a joyride, some get stolen just to get a kick.

Oh, absolutely true. But these are generally opportunistic thefts, of bikes that aren't well locked, surely? What we're talking about here is the fact that thousands upon thousands of bicycles are stolen in Dublin every year - from where they're well locked on the streets, from high-up balconies, from 'secure' lockups in apartment blocks, from garden sheds. These are stolen for profit, and the profit isn't there unless there's a crook ready to buy them.

I'd very much blame Lidl and Aldi, by the way, for selling angle-grinders and bolt-cutters to all comers. If I had my druthers, you'd only get these in hardware shops, and you'd have to produce photographic ID and have the photo filed.

ThisRegard

So blame everyone but the bike thief? Would you blame the county council for building the roads that allowed the thief of your car to drive it away?

Chuchote

ThisRegard wrote: »

So blame everyone but the bike thief? Would you blame the county council for building the roads that allowed the thief of your car to drive it away?

Oh, I blame the bike thief. But I think there's also the responsibility not to buy stolen goods - "Don't Turn a Good Boy Bad".

magicbastarder

ThisRegard wrote: »

So blame everyone but the bike thief?

trying to understand the situation in which someone ends up in a life of crime is not 'blaming everyone but the bike thief'.

dermabrasion

I posted about the copper knocking crap out of the bike thief, whom i suspected might have been a junkie. I have no reason to validate this stereotype, as I never met him. All I know is what was said by his defence barrister insofar that he was a repeat offender with substance abuse issues and that operated in a deprived area that seemed to be very easily caught time and again by the same Garda. I don't need to be told here that my class prejudice here is wrong, and FWIW the beating he got from the Garda has never sat right with me all these years.
I work in D1 for sometime now, and see addiction and the consequences of generations of Dubliners and other citizens left behind by society. Still, that does not give me any insight of living that reality so vividly posted above. I go home to leafy suburbs, worlds away from the chaos I see at work.
So what's my point? Not sure, but it is around this: I understand many of the reasons for where this comes from, and I am sorry for it. I believe in social justice for all citizens, but I also believe in justice. If my bike is robbed, I want it back, and I want the thief caught and prosecuted. The law must be balanced with society solving the underlying reasons for this. I want my taxes to go to help these issues as much as I want more Gardai.

ThisRegard

magicbastarder wrote: »

trying to understand the situation in which someone ends up in a life of crime is not 'blaming everyone but the bike thief'.

My post was in response to what was said about 'middle class' buyers and Lidl/Aldi being to blame.

magicbastarder

tomasrojo wrote: »

Incidentally, though the conversation about social deprivation is very interesting, I'm not sure to what extent bike theft is driven by addiction. People engage in petty theft (petty in the eyes of the law in the case of bikes, despite some of them costing as much as new low-end cars) for many reasons, and I'm not sure drug addiction is a major one. Wanting to fit in is another reason, I'm sure. Just being young and stupid is another. Many of my (middle-class) friends and acquaintances when through a shop-lifting phase. It baffled me, but it was definitely "a thing".

i suppose if you grow up in an environment where unemployment is normalised, you don't spend too much time thinking about what a criminal record will do to your chances of getting a full time job. and as you mention, peer pressure, boredom, and getting a kick from some petty theft are major issues.

similar to your experience, i went to a school where the amount of petty theft committed by guys who were doing it for kicks rather than economic reasons was quite eye opening.

tomasrojo

Sorry dermabrasion if it sounded as if I was taking you to task at any stage. I never thought you were condoning what the Garda said had happened.

ThisRegard

magicbastarder wrote: »

i suppose if you grow up in an environment where unemployment is normalised, you don't spend too much time thinking about what a criminal record will do to your chances of getting a full time job. and as you mention, peer pressure, boredom, and getting a kick from some petty theft are major issues.

It's a decision that a person makes. They can take a look around and see where they may end up, and they can just go with it or make an effort to make something out of themselves. Education in Ireland is pretty equal to everyone once you take private schools out of it and they do have the opportunity to do so.

magicbastarder

you are joking, yes?

tomasrojo

Another working-class quirk I noticed among my friends (a bit off-topic) is, if you do go to third-level education, pretending that your part-time job is your real job, so people don't realise you're at third level, and think you're getting up yourself. Relatives also pretend to their neighbours that your part-time job is your real job. It's a very different mindset.

tomasrojo

magicbastarder wrote: »

you are joking, yes?

Me? Well, he did use the term "scumbag", but I didn't think he actually condoned any putative police brutality.

EDIT: No, ThisRegard is whom you're talking about, I think!

magicbastarder

tomasrojo wrote: »

Me? Well, he did use the term "scumbag", but I didn't think he actually condoned any putative police brutality.

EDIT: No, ThisRegard is whom you're talking about, I think!

correct, it was a response to ThisRegard.

ThisRegard

magicbastarder wrote: »

you are joking, yes?

No, I'm not in the least bit joking. I actually went to a secondary school that's now a DEIS school, grew up in an area in the 80s that during the last Deprivation Index of Ireland survey was ranked as very disadvantaged, coming in somewhere around 300 in the list out of all Ireland.

So I know well the opportunities that are there and that can be availed of. I know people who have very successful careers as teachers, legal profession, media and tech. They had the same opportunity available to them as the person next door that became a thief and all round scumbag. The only variance would be the parents, but that's not a constant either.

So when I hear the excuse that the person robbing your bike is doing so because of where they grew up and the conditions that fed into it, I don't buy it.

There's no denying that there's an influence, but I don't buy it as an excuse. It's an easy out.

tomasrojo

ThisRegard wrote: »

No, I'm not in the least bit joking. I actually went to a secondary school that's now a DEIS school, grew up in an area in the 80s that during the last Deprivation Index of Ireland survey was ranked as very disadvantaged, coming in somewhere around 300 in the list out of all Ireland.

The point you were making about education being very equal in Ireland was what surprised me.

magicbastarder

ThisRegard wrote: »

There's no denying that there's an influence, but I don't buy it as an excuse.

i'm not trying to portray it as an 'excuse' - when you're standing in front of the judge, you're either guilty of a crime or you're not - it's the influence you mention that i'm talking about.

if someone from an area with chronic unemployment is 20% more likely (i dunno what the actual figure is - that's plucked out of the air) to end up in a life of crime than someone from foxrock, trying to understand the factors involved, and their influence on how people fare later in life (on a macro level) is *not* excusing the crime.

magicbastarder

for me, and i grew up in a stable middle class family, there's a lot of 'there but for the grace of god go i' involved (even though i'm not religious).

ThisRegard

tomasrojo wrote: »

The point you were making about education being very equal in Ireland was what surprised me.

Taking private schools out of the equation, I believe it is. The standards may not be equal across the board, but the opportunity to get into 3rd level education if the will is there I think is.