h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I heard the news of the murder of Sharon Beshenivsky in a panicky phone call from my mother on Friday evening. She’d seen the news on TV, and was immediately worried because she knew that the policewoman’s murder by armed robbers had taken place in a location I know very well. I turned on my own TV, and was chilled to see a reporter standing in a very familiar scene.

Morley Street, Bradford, is 10 minutes’ walk away from my front door and a minute’s walk away from the University where I spend a lot of my time. I’ve just been over there today. I stood outside my favourite city centre pub and gazed sadly at the still sealed-off street where the robbery and shooting took place. Police and broadcasters’ vehicles lined the kerbs near the barriers guarding the murder scene, and a police helicopter circled overhead. Suspects have apparently been arrested, which is good to know, but the search for evidence clearly goes on.

Who’s to blame for this tragedy? Well, of course, first of all it’s the scum who carried out the robbery and killing. May they rot in jail for decades, starting as soon as possible. But I also blame an entertainment industry that now glamorises violent criminality to an unprecedented degree, and a consumer culture that tells people that they are utterly unworthy of respect if they don’t have the latest expensive car/designer clothes/ostentatious jewellery. In this cultural climate, is it so surprising that some resort to the most extreme measures to get those ‘must have’ props? Sure, there were gangsters long before there were gangsta rappers, and there have always been status symbols and gold-diggers eager to flock to those who flaunt them; but it really feels to me as though amoral avarice has never been so shamelessly promoted. And one of the troubles with ‘get rich or die tryin’’ as a philosophy is that sometimes it’s other people who end up doing the dying.

Given the Blair government’s general enthusiasm for importing bad ideas from America and adopting simplistic populist solutions, I’m relieved to see that the notion of routinely arming the British police appears to have been rejected. This is in accordance with the reported wishes of the majority of the police themselves; they believe that for them to carry guns would have a disastrous impact on their relationship with the rest of the public. I entirely agree.

Meanwhile, I grieve for Ms Beshenivsky, her family and her injured colleague. I also grieve for my home city, once again in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Bradford city centre is currently being extensively rebuilt. A lot of new shops have already appeared, and a lot more new amenities are promised. I was just starting to feel that the old place was looking a bit brighter; but this dreadful story has served as a brutal reminder that new buildings do not immediately produce a new outlook.

R.I.P. Sharon Beshenivsky. May those who were close to her find strength and peace.

Once again Ormy you manage to put into elegant prose just what I'm thinking.

Ormy, any murder is disturbing. But when one happens in your own neighborhood, it is actually chilling. I realize that in the times in which we live, safety isn't guaranteed anywhere, but I feel much safer in my small town than I did when I lived in a large city.

There was a sensless murder one block away from my house in San Antonio. A man was on the roof of his house checking for damage after a storm. A carload of teenagers drove by and shot him. They didn't know him, had no quarrel with him or any member of his family, just wanted to shoot someone.

Don't get me started on guns. You would be in for a very long rant. We moved back to Misouri for two reasons. One was because my mom needed us up here. But the other was because I was tired of heariong gunshots in the neighborhood and wondering if it was safe to walk out the front door. We didn't live in the Bario or even in the inner city. We were in a respectable middle-classed neighborhood. And I didn't feel safe.

The American gun culture is just poisonous. Arrrrgggggghhhhhh! Leaving before I get carried away.

s Hypatia, it's always a shock when we go to the airport & see armed police.

I come from a farming background & used to earn pocket money with an air rifle - pigeons & rats - & at as I got older, one of my favourite pastimes was clay pigeon & target shooting. No more. The squirrels & magpies around here should be grateful I just use a catapult & water bombs these days.

I must admit that I often find people's reaction to something like this fascinating. The news programmes will often show a clip of someone saying one of two things:
"You see this sort of thing on the telly all the time but you never think it's going to happen right next door"
or
"You expect this sort of thing to happen in the inner cities but not around here"

I find that very revealing in that it shows how little people understand about the nature of violent crime and of human nature itself, how coccooned from most kinds of 'nastiness' much of modern society has become, and how people will often believe that they live in a 'nicer area/place' than the sort of people who murder and rob and that this somehow protects them. A murder is a terrible thing, mostly for the people known to the victim of course, but also for the people in the surrounding area because of the ripples of fear it sends out, particularly when it happens in precisely the sort of place where violent crime *isn't* relatively common. But it *can* happen anywhere.

It happened about 100yds from where I used to live in north London. A man was stabbed to death in an alleyway - that I used several times a week - as he was chasing someone who had tried to break into his car and steal his radio. It didn't stop me from using that alleyway afterwards and I didn't feel that my area was any more frightening that it had been before - it was just one of those things that happens in a city from time to time. I didn't know the victim or the family so I had little or no connection with the crime at all.

I've been a victim of minor crime on more than one occasion myself - had a couple bikes stolen, a camera, and on a larger scale, my van which I bought for £7,500 and still had three years-worth of bank loan to pay off. I also encountered a few instances of people trying to break into a van I was sleeping in at the time - boy did they get a surprise when I opened the door and enquired if they needed any assistance. Never seen anyone run so fast in all me life Maybe it's cos I'd just gotten out of my sleeping bag and I was starkers

My mother has also done the panicky phone call thing. There was a time when she'd call me if she got wind that a small child had fallen over and grazed a knee in the same county

As far as the entertainment industry is concerned, I'm convinced that there's something to the idea that what people see on TV and film (and in video games and music videos) affects their thinking. I wonder though if people were asking this sort of question more than 50 years ago following the murder of PC Sidney Miles by Chris Craig and Derek Bentley. Just a few years earlier, PC George Dixon had been murdered by Dirk Bogarde in the film The Blue Lamp. Derek Bentley was probably too young to have seen that film (I think he'd have been only 15 in 1950 and the film would no doubt have been an 'X') but Chris was a year or two older I think.

Gangster movies had been around since the 1930s, and while few people in the early 50s had a TV and weren't able to see so many films as I could watch when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, They must have been popular enough for Hollywood to keep churning them out and creating stars like Jimmy Cagney, Edward G Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. So what does that say about the people who went to see them? I wonder how many were inspired to commit robbery and murder as a result?

It's also interesting to note that about 10 years later Lionel Jeffries (playing a copper - Inspector Parker) would express shock and surprise that anyone would be "Sloshing a bogie in the course of his duty" (not an exact quote but pretty close I think, from memory) in the film 'Wrong Arm of The Law'.

Well, what a turnip for the books.

The place I work at was turned over at gunpoint tonight. Less than an hour ago in fact. Someone walked into the office, pointed a gun at the duty manager's bonce and took of with the night's takings - about ten grand. Nobody got shot at or killed but one or two people are rather shaken up by it.

And all the while, a bunch of us were out back, having an after-shift drink.

i used to live in a less than ideal neighborhood in SF called the tenderloin. it wasn't the gangbang projects just a sleazy little triangle smack against the heart of touristland. maybe that's why you had to dig into the small print of the examiner's weekly police log to read about all the nastiness that went on every day and night. for a murder in SF to make headlines it had to be a bluehair walking her dog in the marina district, or a really juicy chinese gangland shootout outside a nightclub. the poor capping the downtrodden...

yawn... next?

Thanks to everyone who posted here.

Hypatia, your story about the drive-by shooting really disturbed me, and I don't shock all that easily. I'm not surprised that you moved.

Your points are well made, BH, and I admire your mental toughness. I certainly haven't stopped going near the area where Ms Beshenivsky's murder happened - I just don't think I'll be taking a summer job in any of the shops in that area, as this is far from being the first time that an armed robbery has happened around there.

What you say about the American gun culture confirms my worst suspicions, Hyp. In an odd sort of way, the fact that Ms Beshenivsky's murder is still headline news in Britain a week after the event is quite reassuring, in that it indicates that a police officer being shot dead is still highly unusual and shocking here - just as it was highly unusual and shocking when police officers shot Jean Charles de Menezes dead in London last July after mistakenly deciding that he was a suicide bomber. Somehow, I suspect that 'man shoots cop' and 'cop shoots man' are rather more regular occurences over in the States.

Those events <'man shoots cop' and 'cop shoots man' > happen often enough that the response is "Oh dear, another one," and then it is pretty much business as usual. There isn't any real shock value anymore. It's pretty sad.

I rode with a police officer in SA for a Saturday night shift in the inner city as part of a PR thing the police department was doing. It was quite an experience. I've often thought I should make an AWW entry out of it. We were called to a murder scene and two domestic assaults. Also to a fight at an ice house (sort of a pub). And a drug overdose. And a liquor store robbery. All except the drug overdose involved guns.

Another gun incident I remember well from our years there took place on New Year's Eve. A family were sitting outside in their front yard watching fireworks when a stray bullet that had been shot into the air several blocks away to celebrate the new year came down and hit an 8 year old boy and killed him. That is so common. It's New Year's Eve, let's shoot a gun into the air. Don't these idiots realize that the bullets have to come down somewhere?

reading the news about the boro fan who got knifed in a'dam was a bit of a shock. there was no such place as pinockio's when i lived there, but it's apparently across the street from hunter's, where i used to spend time. in those days it was unwise to go into a street called zeedijk unless you were familiar with it, but elsewhere in the walletjes it was as safe as disneyland. hard to imagine this kind of thing happening in the warmoesstraat, where things never got more violent than a hardfought chessgame!