TRIGGERnometry - I Proved The Police Don't Investigate Crime - Dr Lawrence Newport

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Dr Lawrence Newport, a campaigner at Crush Crime. Sponsored by Venice AI: Enjoy private, uncensored AI with our sponsor https://venice.ai/triggernometry - use code TRIGGERNOMETRY to get 20% off a pro plan Shopify! Sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ Sponsor: Watch Chuck Norris’s video to discover his secret to staying strong and active at 84. Click: https://ChuckDefense.com/Trigger Follow Lawrence on Twitter - https://x.com/pursuitofprog Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. So the bike was both in the view of Big Ben, Parliament, and the Met. It was chained up, left there for two days,

and by the evening of the second day, it was stolen. I got a text on them saying, sorry, we are closing your case, we're not reviewing CCTV evidence, we're not going to do basically anything. I gave this story to the telegraph, and suddenly the med gets back and says, oh, no, no, we are going. So look at the CCTV footage. By the way, they actually never got a hold of the CCTV footage at all. So they said they would look at it, but didn't. Nothing happened. It's not just bikes, not just phones. I've talked to people who've had their cars stolen, and please haven't checked CCTV footage. Less than 1% of these cases,

end up with a suspect identified. Basically, every part of our system is completely utterly broken. Lawrence, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks very much having me. Yeah, it's great to have you on. You've got lots to talk about, but you particularly crush crime,

which you're part of, is something I want to talk about because you did a video last year, I think this was, which went super viral and proved a lot of the things that most people who live, particularly in big cities in this country and in other countries, frankly, all instinctively feel, which is there's a lot of, lot of low-level crime, like theft, burglar, etc., that is simply not being investigated by the police. Tell us what you did and what happened.

Yeah, so in fact, that feeling that you're describing is exactly what got me to start up, cross crime as a campaign, which is about this time, actually last year. I was talking to friends of mine, and I just noticed that pretty much everyone I talked to in a few weeks had had or knew someone who had their phone stolen or their bike stolen, and the same story kept coming out. Police were doing nothing. There was nothing happening. And then when started digging into the stats, it's extremely, extremely concerning. And there's not much political attention at all on this. So one of the ways, actually, just actually the week after, I launched Crush Crime,

I put out a video in which we had taken a bike. It was about a 150-pound bike, done up to look as nice as we possibly could make, something like that look. actually the bike shop that we bought it from helped us because they knew what we were doing and they were like please bring some attention to this issue do something and we bought a quite cheap chain for a bike and we locked it up outside the Met so between for anyone who doesn't know the the Met's headquarters is just a few doors down from Parliament so the bike was both in the view of Big Ben Parliament and the Met it was chained up left there for two days and by the evening of the second day it was stolen.

We had put two air tank GPS signals on it. One easy to find and one less easy to find so that if they found it, we thought they think of themselves as very great. They found neither of them at any point. It was taken. I called the police and reported it stolen. I told them, look, here is where it is. There is quite a lot of CCTV in that area.

You should be able to find something on. on this. The next morning, only about 12 hours later or something, about 18 hours later, I got a text on them saying, from the Metrovolves and police saying, sorry, we are closing your case. We're not reviewing CCTV evidence. We're not going to do basically anything. We recorded the video of me outside the Met pointing out the CCTV cameras, and I gave this story to the telegraph. And in the intervening period between filming that video, giving it to the telegraph, the telegraph called the Met, and suddenly,

the Met gets back and says, oh, no, no, we are going. So look at the CCTV footage. Don't worry about it. So we released the video with me adding a quick piece on the end, stating, the Met is now going to do something. If you actually want your bike looked into, you actually need to go and report it to the national press, and then they'll take notice. By the way, they actually never got a hold all the CCTV footage at all. So they said they would look at it but didn't. Nothing happened. Several weeks ago, I got contacted by a junior officer who said,

I don't quite know where your case was reopened. Often we only do this if there's new evidence, but I've seen it's just CCTV and we don't tend to check that. So it was literally just reopened because it was in the telegraph or the telegraph contact. Yeah, and then after the story had taken its course, they didn't follow up. Nothing happened.

So covered in CCTV, bikes stolen directly outside. with GPS signal, I could tell them exactly where it was. At one point it was on the move. I said, well, look, it's on the move right now. I can tell you where he is. So we don't intercept when it's on the move. Okay, well, it stopped earlier at this building. I'm pretty sure this guy's place. It's going back there later.

Well, is it a block of flats? I think it might be, well, we can't look at it there. So we won't get it on the move. Won't look at the block of flats. Because they basically state we're not sure which one it might be in. So I then asked, well, could you just put an officer outside? Look at the bike, you know, especially when he's coming nearby.

No, no, no, no, we can't do that. Done. So GPS signal locked outside. The Mets own headquarters covered in CCTV footage and nothing's going to happen. A lot of people having heard that who are not familiar with it, it will be like, that sounds a bit, oh, maybe probably they've just made a mistake or there's something's happened. But actually, when you start to speak to people who've experienced this sort of low-level crime

or when you experience it yourself, almost everyone, does, has a complete shock as to the level of undisinterest, active disinterest the police now have in investigating these kind of crimes. I had my car broken into, same thing. You have to contact the police, I think, by email. You get an email back saying, here's a crime reference number. Again, under a police camera, no investigation. Did you find it quite shocking that that happened? Were you a bit stunned, were you expecting this at this point? Well, I wasn't surprised that they didn't do much. I did think they checked the CCTV footage. I did think there would be something that would happen. I suspected the story would go something like they look at the CCTV footage. It's a bit

complicated. They give it up. I imagine something like that. And multiple officers I talked to before I did this said, oh, they'll look at the CCTV. Even the officers who I was speaking to were shocked when I told them they hadn't done anything with the CCTV. And because all of these officers I was talking to work in other areas. They were amazed that the system has fallen apart so badly, that nothing is getting checked at all. And actually since, like you say, it's not just bikes, not just phones. I've talked to people who've had their cars stolen and police haven't checked these TV footage, exactly the same. Like this is, it's just completely open in so many ways, which I got into a little bit of heated discussions on this a few times as a result of the video,

But one thing I said was that there's a whole swathes of crime in this country that is essentially legal. If the police don't follow up with it, it is essentially legal. We see the results of this in the stats that have just come out for this year. Death from the person is the highest on record, the highest it's ever been, as far as we've recorded. And the reason, at least part of that reason, is the fact that less than 1% of these cases end up with a suspect identified. not even a conviction, just identifying someone they suspect might have done it. This is, if you have that,

what you end up with is a whole swath of crime because it literally pays to do this. If you give it enough time, which is what we have, it's just the situation to get worse and worse and worse and worse, which is exactly what we see. And Lawrence, the thing that's also interesting about this is it's always a tiny percentage of people who are responsible for the majority of these crimes, isn't it?

Yeah, so this is like something which is true internationally, and it's particularly, and it's certainly true here. The Ministry of Justice figures show over the last 20 years that about 9% of criminals are responsible for over half of all crime. These are people that are cross-crime, we call career criminals. These are people with 15 or more offences to their name. 15 or more. And that's just the offenses that have been shown that they've done. Of course, there's other stats showing that. for around about every one offence someone is convicted of,

they tend to have done about 25 others. 25? Yeah. So someone has committed 15, has committed 25 times more than that. Yeah. I mean, some of them will be doing thousands. I mean, for example, there's a phone thief in London who in one morning, he was arrested after just one morning of activity

where he'd, I think, taken about 100 phones. It's not multiplying that up. You know, they are doing serious numbers, some of these people. because there's serious money to be made. You can make quite a good living. I'm not advertising it. You can make quite a good living, stealing phones and stealing bikes.

And you know that if you get caught, not much is going to happen to you. Many of them end up just back on the streets. Well, talk about this because the non-investigation is one thing. I mean, you went as close as you could do to actually locking up the guy himself and bringing him to the police. But let's say someone by chance or by memory,

or by miracle or by some reason, does actually get caught stealing a phone. They do it in front of a police officer. A police officer goes bang. What then happens to somebody who is a career criminal who is stealing phones on the regular? Well, this is why it must be incredibly frustrating to be a good, competent police officer who really cares.

Because not much. Not much happens at all. We have cases. So at Grush Grasm, we actually have a case scraper now working that pulls cases from across the country of career criminals, these 10% of offenders responsible for over half of all crime, are more likely to avoid prison now than they were in 2007. Many of them are simply not getting jail sentences at all.

Some of them are not getting sentences on their 300 offence. This is like they've been caught 300 times. Well, we're not able to establish a pattern, aren't we? That's the problem. You just never know, right? Yeah. I mean, there was one case a few months ago with somebody, I think it was about their 303rd theft offense of some kind.

And the judge said, I'm going to give you a suspended sentence because in the intervening period, since your trial, and now you haven't actually done anything bad, and I think that's showing that you're breaking the pattern. The judge wasn't aware because no one had informed them that actually joined the intervening period, they've been arrested for another theft offense, and we're going on trial again for that.

You know, we're talking over 300 offenses. Several of these people are still getting suspended sentences, some are getting two, three, four months, five months. And of course, with time off, they're out within a matter of weeks. So there was even actually a really good symbol of this was the recent operation on Westminster Bridge. Did you see this where they dress up as Batman at Robin? No, I haven't seen them.

So there were scams, of course, all across Westminster Bridge, which is also right in the view of the Met. They are scamming people all the time, scamming tourists all the time, you know, with those rigged games, ball in the cup stuff, all this kind of thing. officers are so well known to these individuals because they've been arrested so many times that even if they're in plain clothes, they know when to pack up and go because they have someone on the lookout for the officers they recognize. So given these career criminals know

who you are, they decided it would be good to dress up, which is quite funny. They dress up as Batman and Robin and Robin. And a smart thinking officer had some nice social media footage taken of Batman and Robin arresting them on the Westminster Bridge. They went to all this effort. and one of the offenders didn't actually turn up to court date. We don't know where they are. And the other offender got about a 900 pound fine, let back straight out. So like a day is keeping. This is obviously completely and utterly broken.

If you're a police officer involved in this, it's completely enoughly demoralising. And if you're a criminal in this, the most you're looking at is a few months away. And all of us have had to do work we haven't enjoyed for a few months. But then it's just like part of the price of doing business. and you're back out again, doing it again, as you were before, knowing that they've got less than 1% chance of finding you next time. And Lawrence, how much of this is to do with the fact that the court system is full to the brim? There's a backlog still after COVID, still a massive thing.

We simply don't have space in prisons. We need to build more prisons. The system simply can't cope. What's going on here? Yeah, I mean, basically every part of our system is completely and utterly broken. like this is the worst part of looking at any aspect here. You've got the problem, as you're just highlighting as well, investigations. That's not being followed up.

Then even if you get through that tiny point of investigations, you get to, you're less than 1% that sounds about identified. You actually get them not only identified, but taken to court, actually tried, actually convicted. There's a good chance they're back out again. But it can take years to get through any of these hurdles. As you're just saying, there's like 74,000 cases in a backlog, just in the Crown Courts.

In our magistrates courts, there's several hundred thousands of cases waiting trial. And it's actually started before COVID even as well. This has been like really long-term failure. It is in part as well, obviously, because we've got a prisons crisis. I mean, the Conservatives,

with 14 years in government, built net 500 prison places, whilst increasing the population by several million. I mean, it's, it's beyond unbelievable. It's just like a complete, failure of government, like a basic failure of government. We're now we're at, like, it's like 99.9% prison capacity. Now the problem is, Labor are going to build more prisons, 14,000 more places by 2031,

but on current projections, and because we're so far behind, even if they hit this target, will be in the same position we're in now because of population growth and so on. So it's not fixing the problem, it's just keeping it where it is. And what do we know about these repeat criminals? Are they come from a certain demographic? Are we talking drug addicts? Are these career criminals? I mean, what type of people are these?

Yeah, there's some interesting studies on, so some of it's by addiction, which of course is another reason why actually you do want to imprison these people for longer. We know from Netherlands, there's studies that when you put people away for longer periods and actually rehabilitate them behind closed doors, behind prison doors, rather. They're actually able to be off drugs for longer periods. you can actually break a cycle, which of course, for you for them for two months on suspended sentences,

it's not doing anything for you. It's not actually helping at all. It's not protecting the public. It is also the case that these are legitimately now routes, or rather actually routes for people to earn a lot of money. Like they are earning quite a bit of cash. Can I just pause you there? What do you mean by quite a bit of money?

Let's talk Turkey as I say in seven hundred. Yeah, so, I mean, if you're sitting, you know, 100 phones in a morning and you're selling these off for a few hundred pounds a pop, That's not bad. That is not a bad income. You know, tax-free. It is not a bad income. It's also the case that there's very clearly established pipelines. So only a few weeks after I started crushed crime,

my sister-in-law was on Westminster Bridge, and her toddler, she had her toddler with her and her baby. Her baby starts crying. She takes her toddler around to look after them both while she's just looking after the baby. And as she turns her back to the street, someone grabs her phone out of her pocket and runs off with it. Within a matter of hours, it's in a shop somewhere in Kingston area, and then within a few hours after that, it's in an address in Haringay, and within two, three days, it's in China.

That's an incredibly fast supply chain, basically, where it's obviously then stripped down for parts. Signal disappears. So you're talking here like something, which is now so sophisticated that there is an entire supply chain, entire organized crime networks on this. it's good, easy income, in the sense of good for being easy to access, that police have, as you say, basically turned a blind eye to. Because what you're really talking about here is organised crime. Yes. Let's call it what it is, because you've got this image,

or it's a few kids, but no, this is an entire crime network. Yeah, massively. And the police is simply refusing to do anything about it. So they're just letting criminal gangs operate freely on our streets. Yeah, and if they do do something about it, The results they see are these people getting no prison time and are back out doing it again. I actually ask some officers, how do you keep going about what you're doing, seeing this? And they said, you just can't think about it.

Because if you think about it, you wouldn't go to work every day. That is not a sustainable system. And what we're seeing is many good officers leaving the force. There is now a problem with recruiting officers and keeping officers. Because if you're good and you care about this thing, it beats you down enough. You eventually leave. And so we're now in another cycle. It's not just the courts. It's not just the prisons. It's also now the police as well, which is they're seeing their talent leave in swathes.

And why is this happening? You mentioned the Tories. Is it because they didn't put enough money into the criminal justice system to be able to process the cases? And now because there's the backlog and because there's a lack of prison places, we simply don't have the resources to actually do this. And therefore, the only thing they can do is to turn a blind eye. I think it's actually a mixture of multiple things, as these things often are, because it's like a whole systemic failure. But really over the last 20 years, there's been underfunding. There's also been like under appreciation for like actually having people whose job it is to make this good and to fire them when they're not able to. When I bring up problems on phone theft, the MET points to, it's not our fault. It's actually the mayor who's not funding us properly, not giving us direction properly, whatever it might be. Mayor says it's not my fault. I'm actually giving them more money than I did last year and they're still not doing it.

And actually, you know, I'm being constrained by central government. Central government says it's not our fault. It's the mayor and the Mets. Everyone's passing on blame. We see this with like multiple quangos. It's actually very difficult to look at one individual and say you're at fault. Your head should roll or you should be praised if it goes well. Very, very, very difficult.

And as a result, it means that everyone can farm off responsibility, palm it off to other people, say it's somebody else's fault. That is obviously not a way that any functioning company would actually survive and as a result we see what we would see in any company where that's the case just diffuse uncertain responsibilities and people wanting to shove issues under the rug that is like by far one of the major problems and has been for the last like 20 or more years it is also the case that there hasn't been clear direction you see it right now they're releasing this sentencing review the government has just undertaken a sentencing review what are they trying to do they find any

way they can to just not send people to prison. And I'm trying to come up with ideological ways to justify it when partly it's ideological for some of the people involved. Partly it's just they do not know how to build prison spaces quickly. They don't want to, for instance, amend the Prisons Act and designate emergency prisons, which they could do otherwise. We have actually done in the past a few decades ago. It is possible to do that, but they just don't want to take those actions. So instead, again, it is the public that has to take. take on the risk. It is a series of failures like this that have led to now, as I say, a kind of death spiral in our police and a death spiral in our courts, which it will take

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or personal information to a corporation or the government, you can get 20% off a pro plan using our link, venice.aI-S-Triganometry. You'll find the link in the description of this episode, or type it in, V-E-N-I-C-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-S-E. slash trigonometry and see what you've been missing. And now, back to the show. One of the things I remember, I think it was, the internet will correct me if I'm wrong,

but I think it was Sir LeBravman when we had her on the show who said that the decision was made at some point to prioritize certain types of crime over others. And I think you do talk about the fact that the police are pretty good at investigating murders. Yeah. They are pretty good at investigating assaults and things like that.

So is this simply, you know, limited resources, big challenges, we'll focus on this stuff because that really matters. These are low impact crimes. You know, people are going to buy a new phone. I think partly it's a question of focus, but it's also a question of, it's kind of a false economy

because when you don't focus on these things, they grow. And now, for instance, last year saw the highest shoplifting on record, it then increased by 20% to be the highest on record again. Now, if that's the person, the highest on record,

we're talking over 115,000 phones were stolen in London in last year alone. It's just phones. That's an incredible number. Other cities are not seeing this level. I was just recently in Amsterdam, and I was talking to people there, and they said, I don't know anyone who's had their phone stolen. It's very, very normal in London to know people who've had their phones stolen. We all know somebody.

It hasn't happened to us directly. It is a false economy, because what you end up with is, organized crime networks, as you were saying earlier, embed themselves. The supply networks become even more important. They become even more valuable. These organizations, they defend them even more. And eventually, you know, every day, what people see and interact with every day is shots and their phones and their bikes and otherwise. And that's what they see as evidence of decay around them.

And now all of us have to be more careful of our phones, to be more careful of our bikes. A lot of people are just simply not buying expensive bicycles because what's the point? And I mean, if you're going to any shop in London now, pretty much nearly anywhere now, items are in plastic containers and they're behind glass and they're locked away. And it wasn't this case like three years ago. And so we all suffer a worse quality of life as a result of this. And yet, after we campaigned for a while on this, the Met suddenly undertook a specific action for week in which they arrested 200 phone thieves in one week.

So it turns out is actually possible. They could do it. It just requires leadership and actually dedication to getting it down. And I think it's a very profound point you highlighted there, which is the demoralizing effect that it has on society. As somebody who's a Londoner has pretty much lived all my life in London, I find it deeply unsettling. I find it deeply upsetting.

when I walk around my city and I see criminals acting with impunity because they know nobody's going to step in. You go into the tube and now, actually, let's just be honest about this, whether you pay for the tube or not, it's just a question of morality. You don't have to. I was in Fenceme Parked tube station the other day. They just opened the barriers so people could just walk in and out as they chose. And you just think to yourself,

like, ordinary people are being punished for following the rules and criminals are being... allowed to get away with it and actually they've been given the better end of the deal. Yeah, I mean there's been like no focus on this, no attention on this and because

the police have done well elsewhere and because our system is so utterly broken, there hasn't been any actual focus on the stuff that we interact with every single day that is actually making our lives materially worse. It's obviously worse to raise children in a world where everything has to be locked away behind

plastic containers, and you have to explain to them, oh, that's because people might steal it. Like they learn the world around them is unsafe, untrustworthy, and nasty. Well, at least they're prepared for the modern world, mate, the way it is now. But I'm joking, of course, but I think Francis makes a very important point.

Because we saw Robert Generic, the Conservative MP. He did a video from the tube where he effectively, he confronted a few people who were not paying. And I did a tweet about it last year because I don't live in London. I tend to don't tend to spend much time.

And I went on the cheap for like the first time in like a year, let's say, or half a year, how long it was. And I was shocked genuinely because there were, first of all, I don't think in my life I ever remember people jumping over barriers in front of staff. And then I saw these same kids that had done that, like smashing the stop button on escalators, inconvenience and everybody else, pushing each other into other passengers on the thing. Like, that is not a London that I ever remember.

So it's changed very, very quickly. And I think part of the worry is that this general vibe of impunity can't help, I think, but not inspire more people to break the rules. Because even when you watch that Robert Generic video, the people that are not paying are not just, this might be my prejudicial way of thinking. they're not stereotypically who you might think is not paying for the tube. Well, I think it's probably kids messing about, people who really are, like, really poor and they have to somehow get in the tube and they can't afford it,

or some, like, hardcore criminals. But it was just like people going to work. Yeah. Just people on their way to work. You know what? I'm not paying. Yeah. And I think the worry is not only that there is a general sense of more people are committing

more crime, more people are being the victims of crime, but there's a sense of an overall, the word you used is, decay and I think that's absolutely right. Yeah, and it feels like it every day. I really struggle with the fact that, exactly as you say, like over the last, I've been in London like 10 years. You live on, I was born on the South Coast,

and coming to London 10 years ago, it was very, very different to how it is now. And the ways it's different is a general feeling of lawlessness. Like, there is a feeling that I'm, an idiot if I get my phone out on the wrong street and if it's stolen, it's almost like it's my fault because, oh, I should have known that, you know, nothing here is safe. I mean, I actually did a tweet the other week on shoplifting, on some of the new figures, I turned into my local shop and it's a nice area, someone runs out of the Tesco with their arms filled with items

and the staff just going, oh, what can you do? They literally just shoplifted right now and I thought, I could tweet about it, but I thought no one would believe me. Like I literally just said out another tweet on shoplifting, and it's happening, again, right in front of me. It is obviously completely unsustainable. And it's obviously something which, with some targeted policing on a very small number of criminals, this is why, even though there's not much prison space,

if you target the right people, you can actually dramatically reduce rates. Sort in the city of London, where they focused on a single bike theft gang, It's around seven people, arrested, imprisoned them. Bythefts dropped in the area by 90%. It's actually possible to make huge, huge, huge differences if you put away for some time

the small number of people who are disproportionately responsible for the majority of crime in this country. And it's also a story, it's horrifying to me. And it's a true story. I happen to my parents. My parents are old. My mother is disabled. My dad is a full-time carer.

He is also old and vulnerable. they went shopping, they came back, there was a gang in the house, robbing, robbing the place. And my dad didn't know, he walked in and he disturbed them. And they took my grandmother's jewelry, which is the only connection my mother had with her, with her mum who since passed away, and ran away. And you think, on the one hand, of course this is awful, this is distressing. But on the other hand, I said this to my dad, I said, you're really lucky. because imagine if they had got violent.

And this is a man in his late 70s. That could have easily turned from a burglary to a murder. Yeah. And when we don't deal with these types of crimes, they can escalate. If you just allow bike robberies just to happen all day, every day, some people are going to fight back when they see their bike being stolen

or their phone being stolen because people react to different ways when they're under pressure. That's a moment a knife gets drawn because we're not tackling knife crime the way we do it, we're meant to be doing. We're not doing stop and search. All of a sudden, the kid gets stabbed, the kid loses their life or a person,

whoever it may be. It just seems that what we're doing is we're allowing a cancer to grow and then flourish. Yeah, I mean, we can see it in knife crime because actually knife crime is also on the rise as well. Like there is going to be a buildup of this because there is more and more organized crime,

there's more and more money in this, there was more and more just general decay, general distrust. I mean, we even see it, in the case of police not investigating things, we see it in burglaries. Burglaries are so serious because they can for exactly what it's. I mean, it's both like horrific just to have stuff taken from you, but also someone in your home breaking in. It's an incredibly invasive and very unsettling. That's one area you're meant to be completely safe.

And they can become violent, both because people want to defend their property, totally reasonably, and because people in those environments realize I'm tracked and want to fight back and will do many, many things to get out of the situation, including up to killing people, which we obviously have seen cases of that. But there was a case just recently. It was a barrister. He had his house broken into,

his home broken into, and the actual criminal left behind a bail notice with their name on it. Did police investigate? No. It's like something out of true romance. He leaves his driver's license of the dead guy's hand.

And they didn't do anything about it. Right. It just left. So what are we going to do about this? So, I mean, there's a variety of things that can actually be done at a very baseline level. The first is that rather than the government's current approach, which is actually to let even more career criminals back out onto the streets, they have to instead designate emergency prisons that is possible.

I mean, so you commandeer buildings that aren't currently prisons. You make them into makeshift prisons. They call prisoners in that. Yes, exactly. They also need, you know, longer term, to look at the procurement rules and otherwise on prisons because the fact that at the moment

is estimated that the new prison spaces, if you look at the amount they've put aside in the number of spaces, it's going to cost about $335,000 pounds at place to build these. It's completely, that's mad. It's more than like the average house cost

in the UK. Like, what is going on here? What is actually happening? But that's longer term. For immediacy, there's a designate emergency prisons There's a course we've got, because of the backlog as well, if we actually opened up our courts for longer, if we open them up in the evenings at weekends, which happens in some American cities, we don't do it here.

But most of the time, there's several courts across the country who just simply aren't opening. Monday to Friday, they take a random day out or so on. Any given day up to a third of our courts might be shut whilst there's a massive backlog. given that, if they actually open them and we actually have people and judges sitting for longer, we have a bunch of people on Vermont who are awaiting trial in our prisons. You can get through thousands of people.

And of course, you've then got prisoners, foreign national offenders who are still in our prisons, who obviously should be deported. There's one thing the government does seem to be looking at actually doing now. We're talking about nearly 10,000 people, which obviously would make a lot of room when you've got about 80,000 prison spaces. Do you know why those people haven't been deported?

There's, I mean, that system is also completely broken. Every aspect of this thing is broken. There's whole problems there with various interpretations of parts of British legislation by judges over the years have become more and more generous. There's been wider and wider readings, I think, of the Human Rights Act and otherwise. In ways that I don't think actually the Human Rights Act does actually support some of these judgments, but it's been used in that way. It's not just that, but there's also just like simple things, like,

not, I know in some immigration cases, for instance, just not sending home office, just not sending lawyers. This was reported a few years ago by the telegraph. They're just not sending lawyers to these cases. They're not defending them. They're not. Basic failures across the board. And so you have a complete, again,

another area which has completely failed to operate. And as a result, we all now live in a situation where, unlike Nordic countries, for instance, that do deport prisoners incredibly quickly. You've broken the rules in the country. you don't need to be here. Thank you very much.

Someone else or other people who've actually moved here follow the rules. It's pretty basic not to commit crime. Certainly not to commit crimes to level you get sent to prison in Britain, which is quite hard to do. So, you know, if you're in that situation,

we should be sending you hurt. Yeah, it's, I mean, when you look at particularly the one that is absolutely horrifying to me is when you see sex offenders, it's a very serious crime, it destroys people's lives, lives. And they're going to prison sometimes for a matter of months. You actually wonder,

what the hell is going on here? Yeah, I mean, we've got some awful cases. There was someone who, because it's not even just sex offender cases, which are also awful. It's also just like almost murders. So there was one case in which a guy beats up his ex-girlfriend so badly that she writes his name in her blood on the wall because she thinks she's going to die. He had 20 previous offences and he was sentenced to under three years. What are we doing here? He's quite clearly showing the character he is. This is a domestic violence case which he almost kills a woman and the result is he gets

under three years. He'll be out in probably just about two. That's obviously not acceptable. No one looks at that and thinks that's what a society demands. These people need to be away from the public and the public should expect much longer periods where they're away and they're not a threat. It's mad that that isn't the case. Look, starting a business is exciting, but it isn't easy.

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Go to Shopify.com.org slash trigger. One more time, that's Shopify.com.org.org slash trigger. Is this primarily a practical issue based on the things that you've talked about? or is there an ideological dimension to this as well, whereby I'm just speculating. I don't know, you correct me, please, if I'm wrong. But, you know, there is a wave of thinking that, you know, criminals are criminals because of poverty and because they've been badly treated. And there's a lot of truth to all these things, by the way.

You know, but essentially crime is the product of victimization of the people who then become criminals and we've got to be kind and nice and, you know, whatever. Is there some of that happening too? Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's like an ideological trend to this, but it's also like kind of by the by, in the sense that when you're dealing with career criminals, you know, 15 or more offences,

committing the majority of crime in this country, some of which are extremely violent. The first duty is actually just to protect the public. Second duty can be things like, how do you rehabilitate them once they're behind bars, how do you deal with them once they're behind? All these questions. But the very first duty of the state should be,

to be you are clearly a danger to the public. We should remove you from the public sphere and put you away somewhere. And then we can talk about what we need to do in terms of rehabilitation or otherwise. Like I was talking earlier with drugs and other, like there are social factors. There are a huge bunch of complexities here. But the baseline has to be, well, if you don't do this, in fact, the baseline is that all of us now suffer a much worse quality of life. If you have people with 300 offences going straight out again, some of them, for instance, have been banned from every shop in their local area. Literally, one of them,

she has over 400 offences, is banned from every shop in the north-east of England, but it's still back out on the streets again. And shopkeepers are curiously asking, please put her away for longer. Because everybody in the area has to suffer now whenever she's around.

It's completely unsustainable. And again, as a result of just like not thinking down the longer term and not thinking about what this means compounded over time. But it is an ideological point as well. I think this is what happened repeatedly in both judgments, giving people laxional laxer sentences,

and in the sentencing council, offering laxer sentences, encouraging laxer sentences, and from legislators who kind of view prison as a bit of an awkward Victorian institution and don't look at it as a necessity to protect the public. And how much of this as well is down to the conclusion, conservatives cost cutting with the police. I think they took out of action, 20,000 police officers.

I speak to a lot of coppers who watch the show. And when it comes to Theresa May, they go a particularly vibrant shade of fuchsia. And they put a lot of the blame at her door, particularly when she was Home Secretary. Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely part of the story. Of course, the story with that is also that we've had terrible economic I was going to say growth, we haven't really had growth

we had stagnation decline for about 20 years or more in our economy and as a result pay is very bad, pay is bad across both private and public sectors policing numbers are now climbing back up they're nearly to what they were in 2010 of course per capita

it hasn't quite matched because the population has grown so much more in that time period as well but there are more officers the problem is they're not paid very well The job has gotten worse over time. The systems have gotten more and more additive and more and more complex because every single marginal case that causes a scandal

now has new paperwork added. So where it used to take 15 minutes to book someone in, it now takes three hours when you arrest them. So all parts of the system are trying to beat you down. So many, many good officers leave. And right now they're finding a difficult to recruit so they're opening up these standards or rather lowering the standards

to get more people in as officers. and then you end up in this cycle where your best people leave more and more and more and you have to keep opening up for a week and rinker candidates and accepting them in and then many of them leaves you end up with a big churn. So I do think it is in part pay, which is a result of our bad economy and bad choices in government, but it's also now a situation where the government actually needs to do like significant investment, but also choosing actual parts about what to be focused, what is, what is their actual goal for policing in this country, what is the actual goal of the prisons in this

country, rather than at the moment, which has been partly an ideological and partly just passivity and inaction, leading to just repeated class across the board. They don't know what they want police to do. They don't really know what they want prisons. They don't really know why we have prisons, right? Like they had a very upfront discussion about, well, duty number one of prisons is to protect the public. That's why we have them. We should put people in those that are attention to the public. That's a very simple thing that has not been communicated politically

in so long the Conservatives could get away with building only 500 net prison places. It's in 14 years while increasing the population by several million. It's just complete failure, complete failure. Well, I mean, one of the things with that

is I think, having spoken to a lot of people in that sort of mindset is they think of prison as punishment and they feel guilty about punishment. And punishment is not, necessarily the most effective strategy in whatever context. So for them, it's like, well, we're not going to put people in prison because it doesn't work, quote unquote, because the objective they're trying to get to is rehabilitation,

because they live in this kind of utopian world where someone who steals hundreds of phones a day, you know, needs to be miraculously turned into a good upstanding citizen as a result of prison, which can happen for some people, but not for everybody. So the protection of the public thing gets lost by the wayside, I think. But the other thing is, I think, something that bothers a lot of people who watch our show and quite a lot of people in general in the country at this point is, you know, in a country in which we have, I think, in the last year, 12,000 arrests for people's speech, for things they said on social media, et cetera.

There is a reason that two-tier-tier thing is sticking, I think. Do you have any sense of that aspect of it? Yeah, like, I mean, I find it particularly frustrating when you see, lots of talk about how they cannot prioritize actual thefts. I mean, even on my bike video, so many of the quote tweets from, you know, officer accounts, many of them were supportive, but there was a significant number that were also not supportive.

And it was, I'm doing too many important things to look out for your bike mate, was basically the reaction. But, well, okay, but scale that up and you've got a huge scandal. I think it's very, very difficult to take that view and say, well, you're doing much more important things when you're going after, you know, particularly, you know, non-crime, hey, incidents,

and this seems completely bizarre. And what's particularly bizarre about this whole thing is the disconnect between the sentencing we're seeing in some of those incidents, like Lucy Collins' tweet, which is a stupid tweet, I think she deletes it after some time, dumb thing to say in the middle of riots, heated atmosphere in general, two and a half years in prison. I mean, I just mentioned someone earlier who nearly beat his girlfriend to death, who just got only a few months more than that. That's like, and when we have some people who actually committed violence in the writers themselves, actually committed violence getting less. Now, that's obviously completely out of kilter.

The sentencing makes no real sense. Also the police time spent on it. The effort kind of spent on it as well. And the fact that we end up with a very bizarre set of priorities for policing, again as a result, that what is the purpose of police? is not really a question that the government is seriously looking at and thinking, well, what we actually want police to do? Protect the public. Okay, what does that mean?

And what does it mean in practice? And what do we actually have to look out for? Rather than kind of this smorgasbord of random things that they are kind of obsessed with right now, which one of them is regulating speech. I mean, I will say I have also had the other side of this too. Like during the bully Excel campaign that I ran after that, I spent like several months with like large amounts of death threats. and that I reported to the police

and they'll be... Well, the owners of Bully XL would send you death threats. There's a shocker. I imagine there's such a nice people. It was, yeah. He's lovely. Well, no, I'm a fly, mate. Why is he just ripped out of child's throat?

Well, it's not a fly. Sorry, but it was... It was certainly... Well, weirdly, during the campaign itself, not very much, but the moment the government actually did something, then something was horrendous. And so it went from nearly nothing to massive. And I couldn't deal with all the material.

It was so awful to look at. But I had someone go through a friend of mine and detail it all, and there was like 90 pages of material. I sent it to the police and they did nothing. It was completely useless. So, which was actually very frustrating. They thought, well, you know, if you're actually threatened to kill somebody and you're trying to find out about their child and their life,

you're trying to find out where their place of work is and what office they've got. That's like pretty bad. Like, could you do something? Can you know, like, nothing happened? So there are limits to this stuff. I think there really is actual limits. Well, no one in the right mind would say that free speech is about the ability to send people death threats.

That's not free speech. And look, even the Lucy Connolly thing, look, I think the sentence that she got is freaking outrageous. There's no other way to put it. That's mad. Now, her tweet, taking the... the context in which it was going on, can be perceived by some people as an incitement

to violence in the middle of riots. That might be quite dangerous. I think the problem we've got is partly technological, which is 20 years ago, if there were riots happening, and you were sitting in the pub with your mates, go, I wish to burn down the f***ing hood. No one would take that seriously.

And it's then a matter of personal opinion whether you think someone venting on social media, who's probably had a few drinks or whatever. Whether that's to be taken seriously. But now it's almost like everyone has a microphone and everyone is therefore treated as a broadcaster. And so Lucy Connolly is effectively treated

as a journalist who went on TV and said, burned down the hotels, right? Which I don't think is what happened. But even if you think to some extent that is what happened, the contrast you make, I think, is very fair, which is there are people who actually committed acts of violence who got a similar or smaller or a slightly bigger sentence, which I just think is insane.

And what I think the reason people bring up her case, but more broadly, the restrictions around speech, is that it shows that there are police forces in the country that do seem to have the resources to send six guys to arrest and take a former police officer to a police station because he tweeted something about anti-Israel protests, and then he had some Douglas Murray books on his bookshelf, which would judge to be very Brexit or whatever the quote was.

You know, and I think you just go, if the police were just struggling across the board, people would go, look, the economy, as you say, is not doing very well. The police are struggling. We know officers are working very hard individually, a lot of them. But the country is where it is. But when you see instances where that happens,

that's when you go, okay, well, this clearly is not just about the resources. It's also about priorities. Yeah, I think that's the frustrating part of it is exactly as you're saying. And like I was saying with this colony, you've got both the fact that apparently our prisons are completely full so we can't do anything, but also we're going to give this person an incredibly long sentence whilst giving domestic abusers who almost beat their girlfriend to death only a couple of months more. That's just like that is not, I think, how the British public would prioritize their sentencing.

And it's very difficult to see what the actual thoughts are behind that. And then you've got the actual policing side. Why are they spending time on this when they are not going, I mean, not checking CCTV. You know, this is something which is clearly very, very basic expectation, especially, you know, direct outside of the MES headquarters, even there, right? They're not going to check your CCTV. If your car's stolen, I've heard repeated cases where they are not checking CCTV. This is, you've got GPS trackers.

You can point to where it is in the street right now. They're not going to go after it. But if someone's tweeted something, they will send, like I've sent those videos, like six officers to your front door, this is obviously not a good use of resources. Now, I'm sure there's like complexities, there's edge cases, there's market, but in general. Well, that guy just got paid 20 grand in compensation, thanks to the free speech union. He should get a shout out because they're doing great work to protect people against this stuff. But you know, one thing I also wanted to ask you as well,

Lawrence, is one of the things I saw in response to both your video and Robert Generic's video is that when you point out that certain types of crime have effectively been decriminalized, people have a go at you. Yeah. Yeah, very, very upset. That I really don't get. Did you get a lot of that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I got a lot of pushback on saying that basically it's, if theft is legal in Britain. I don't really understand quite the pushback. I guess it's like technically it's not illegal because it's on the statute book somewhere. But I mean, you can write down whatever you want. But, I mean, I actually went to, there was a talk in part.

given by MET officers on phone theft. And several of the MPs in the room raised their hands and said, I have had my phone stolen or my constituents have had their phone stolen and they say, you guys don't check CCTV or cash these guys. What's going on? And they literally said to them, well, I'm telling you now, it's very sad that some of you have experienced, you know, not to the standard we expect,

but I'm telling you right now it is our absolute guaranteed procedure that we will follow up on every lead for every crime and we check all CCTV. It's obviously not true. Like you're telling, I'm sure it's true in terms of the policy is written down somewhere. It's obviously not practically true at all. And yet they just come out and state it in that way.

I think that's the kind of thing that people are thinking about when they say, well, no, technically is actually illegal. And sometimes we catch people. But the number is, you know, when you're talking less than 1% of identifying someone as a suspect, I don't think anyone would look at that and say that's an effective system and that's clearly, you know, clearly working as intended and we actually have, you know,

most of the time, yeah, 99.9% or whatever, they'll get away with it. No, I totally understand that point, but I'm getting at something else, which is that I think this seems to be inexplicably to me. I don't understand even what the motivation for it is exactly, because it's not even party political. Like, okay, the Labor government are currently in charge, so if you make a point about crime today, this very day today, that might be seen as an anti-labor point, but I think almost everybody would acknowledge that it was as bad under the Conservatives for 14 years as well.

And yet there seems to be a large constituency of people in the country. And I'm not just talking about random people on the internet. I'm talking about journalists. I'm talking about broadcasters. I'm talking about politicians even. Who when somebody points out that crime is not pursued, they attack the person who is highlighted. this. Do you have any thoughts on why that that constituency seems to exist? I think it is partly the ideological kind of concerns we were talking about earlier. It is actually quite inconvenient. If you really, really believe that prison is a Victorian institution that should be over with now and that actually it doesn't matter how much you push police onto people, etc., that you don't

need all this kind of like, you don't need to have investigations in this way. that actually what will happen over time is that with the right, you know, the right kind of social networks people won't turn to crime, you know, and, you know, community centers is often the kind of like the talking point, you know, if you think of it in those terms alone, it's very inconvenient to see, well, the less that we have focused on these areas of crime, the more they have ticked up, that these are largely economic crimes that people are doing because they can pay you quite well. You can do them at scale

and you can start setting up and running these supply chains and you can all get some good money into the door and they're quite easy. It's all very inconvenient. And when you look at the actual facts of if you, like in the Netherlands,

when they put in the 10 strikes rule for theft, burglary offences, they dropped by 25%. Because it ended up being you just a lot of people away for longer who committed those offenses. We see it in Italy when they let more people out of prison earlier, crime shot up. Wow.

Shocking. Yeah, those are all incredibly inconvenient realities. And as a result, you don't really want to deal with what's happening. So instead, you just try to shove it under the rug repeatedly again and stay, well, actually, like if you look at overall crime because of things like murders and otherwise, which actually police do spend significant time on, crime is going down. Well, all these aspects of exploding to the highest ever on record. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, but let's talk about those. All right, a bit of an unexpected one for you, but this actually got my attention. The other day, I was scrolling online and came across this video from none other than Chuck Norris.

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this is worth your time. Watch the video now at chuckdefense.com slash trigger. That's chuckdefense.com slash trigger. And we put the link in the description below to make it easy. You know, there's one part that we haven't discussed, which is we obviously need a police force. But we also need a social contract between the public and the police force, which allows the police to be able to police effectively. If that social contract is broken, which is what is happening now, I mean, we're going to end up in a pretty dark place, aren't we?

Where the police aren't trusted. Yeah, yeah, I think we're already there. I think it's getting worse and worse every year. I think officers themselves feel demoralised. I think that the public doesn't trust the police to solve things. There's no one I've talked to who said, oh yeah, you know, I expected when I called the police for them to do a great investigation. I mean, even I did expect them to check CCT.

right and I didn't happen but it's it's something which I think the public has lost trust in institutions in general lost trust in the courts I mean when it takes you four years someone's being raped it takes four years to get to trial now there's trials this case is already soon to be put to trial where they will be not on trial until after the next election and what's the response to the system where we used to get like the breakdown of cases uh in terms of how many of the backlog monthly. We only get them quarterly. I wonder why that is. You know, it's very embarrassing when you see every single month that figure tick up. It's been ticking up since like 2017. It's very clear failure. Nobody wants to actually look at this in detail and ask, okay,

how do we force the courts open? It's going to be awkward. How do we force the Met to do it? Who is it? Who gets fired when it goes wrong? All these questions. And that requires like bravery and leadership and everything else. Otherwise, trust institutions just continues to decline. And it's also as well, you know, post-George Floyd, this, you know, constantly hyper-fixated on race. I mean, we saw with the Chris Cabber case.

I mean, this was a guy who is under investigation for attempted murder for shooting someone allegedly in a nightclub. He then got in a car, refused to stop when the police demanded that he should. He then was ramming police cars. He got shot. And then there's this minority of people who then who've got their arms up in the air and go, oh, he was a good guy, you know, he didn't deserve to get shot.

And then the police officer who shot him is then put on trial. And you're thinking this is a world where nothing makes sense anymore. How can police possibly be allowed to do their jobs when, if you're a firearms officer, the moment you discharge your weapon, even in a case like Chris Cabber, where you have, that was the correct course of action to take, you were a risk of going to prison, losing your job, or just at the very best being involved in a court case, which is going to be profoundly stressful for nine on two, if not three years.

Yeah, I mean, I find it such an interesting, in all senses of the word, kind of situation, that we've ended up with. I'm deeply concerned about, I don't know the idea of authorities misusing their power. We have to be able to hold police to account. We have to be able to check that they're actually doing their jobs. The problem is that there is also so many cases now

of officers doing their duty and either something going wrong for various reasons and suddenly finding that they're not now just facing, even just internal disciplinary action, but criminal and otherwise. You add all that on top of the fact that job pay is not great to start with and the fact of all the stuff I was talking about earlier, you discourage people from entering the police force. Why would you?

It's a complete minefield. And so I think we've ended up, we're ending up in another bad situation here, not to kind of pile on these, but this is unfortunate reality. As a result, you get less people, less talented people going to the police. They have the lower standards more and more.

As a result, you probably need to check on them more and more because now they're probably doing a bunch of stuff they shouldn't be doing, and that just keeps that cycle going. The problem is at the moment, It is extremely bad. Like for officers now, there are so many things that if you get wrong, or even if you don't get wrong, you just get a massive spotlight, a national spotlight on you. It is incredibly stressful. I cannot imagine doing that job and thinking if I arrest this person and it's found to be an incorrect arrest like one of them were recently.

Someone who actually was accused of evading a fair and an officer did intervene this a couple of years ago now. one of the reasons why apparently officers do this much less now. They intervened and this person had not evaded an affair, but the officer arrested them. There was some harsh words exchanged and the officer

was placed under investigation including for assault, not because they punished anything like that, but just for the arrest itself and holding the person down because they were resisting arrest. That's an awful situation to be in now and it suddenly becomes something which could easily explode into a national story.

That is not a nice position of being and I can see why so many officers are incredibly stressed and incredibly worried because bluntly they have good reason to be and that's not a position of being. There's also the power of the internet where you can record an officer making an arrest

and then you can cut it and make it look in a police in a particular way. It's almost police brutality. You can go, oh, why did the officer arrest them in such a rough manner? But you've cut out a bit where the officer got punched in their head three times. Well, I mean, the Manchester airport situation last year, there's a very good

example of this where a clip was maliciously edited effectively to cut out why the police officer was using as much for it. I think they've been cleared since from what I've read. And, you know, these people were treated as like racist, violent, you know, it was crazy. And so it's a very difficult job. This is one thing I hope people take away from this. I don't think any of the Travus are criticizing police officers. But as a system, there are a lot of problems. Yeah, and like good officers, as I say, are like in a very, very bad and difficult position. And the fact that that isn't at the forefront of the government's thinking, right now in the policing bill, right now with the sentencing review,

they're not focusing on how do we get and keep the best talent in policing that we possibly can. And how do we build a service that makes people feel safe? instead we're getting this very weird patchy system where we're going to release criminals earlier than ever send fewer of them to jail than ever before even though we're already doing that and instead we're going to keep officers in this position where we can't recruit the numbers

we point blame around to various different people we don't build the prisons don't designate emergency prisons don't open the courts for longer and we keep looking at it going wow why is it getting worse And I'm curious, well, my question is, the question I was about to ask, has an assumption built into it. What I was going to say is, why have we not seen much expression of these concerns, which I know lots of people share, in the political system. I don't hear any party really talking about dealing with this kind of crime. Do you? Am I wrong about this?

I mean, that's why I started up, crush crime. I was like absolutely stunned. Nobody was talking about this thing that was clearly being experienced by everyone all over the place. You know, obviously, Jenric is taking up, he's taken up our point on career criminals, and he's now started talking about fair evaders and other such, like crimes like this,

too theft he was talking about as well. Labor have looked, like, flirted closely, maybe once or twice with maybe we're going to open some more prisons. And now they're committed to building more prisons. Frankly, to give him their due on this, more than the tourist did in 14 years of government, but still nowhere near enough because the whole is so bad. But it is very strange to me that there is not a concerted effort. For example, you don't have to go back too far.

Like, New Labour was incredibly focused on this. Tough on crime. Tough on the causes of crime. Yeah. And they did a, I mean, they built over 20,000 prisons places. They actually brought in, of course, the ASBO system, other systems to deal with low-level crime. and to get it, because one of the parts that is missing from this is that you have these career criminals,

and it's very difficult then to rehabilitate. It's unclear, it all gets quite messy, it's quite complex because of all these factors that go into it. But one of the things we do know is that if you get people on their first or second offence very quickly, and you send them to court very quickly, and they get a quick feedback loop. It doesn't even have to be a prison time,

just something, something to show them, we are watching you. You aren't getting away with them. this. Yeah. We then see many fewer of them become criminalism, otherwise would have been. So fast action, actually good policing mixed with quick action in the courts. Well, you can just like ankle tag or whatever, does stop people, many of them before they get to the point where they are now like in this for the long

term and it becomes much, much hard to rehabilitate then. That is the kind of focus that they should be taking and asking, what is the purpose of our police? well, make the streets safer. Purpose of our courts, make the streets safer. We need to target much more sensibly than we currently are. And it will pay off. Not first year, give it two or three years and you'll start to see the payoff. And people will see a massive improvement in their lives.

The one thing that I've found quite interesting about this as we talk is I go, well, if the law isn't being applied, it's not being upheld. At what point does the general public start to uphold the law? You guys are British. You're not going to do anything about it. It's not your culture. It's not. No, the amazing thing about Britain is everyone kind of is allowed to get on with it.

The downside of that is British people will literally turn away when they see a crime being committed. There is like, I think it is like a generally really great thing about Britain that people really do respect the rules and they find it very, very upsetting when people don't. Yes. Which is why I think also this is such an effect on the national level. psyche, it's like, because you can't, you can't, that's not a forever thing. That's a thing that took a lot of time to build, a lot of history to build. Very good point. And now we've kind of mistreated it for the last 20, 30 years. And as a result of that, that will go. Like, that's not, that's very hard fought and very easy to lose. It's like anything, right? You

takes a long time to build something, not much time at all to destroy it. And we are now, so many areas of British life, we are really taking an axe to and kicking repeatedly. because we've inherited a whole bunch of kind of background beliefs. It took a long time to build and so we've taken them for granted. That will collapse, that will change. And I do think, for example, when my sister North's phone got stolen, it's only a few weeks after I launched, as I said, I had several DMs from people saying,

you say you know where the addresses, tell me. Like, that was like a real shock for me in that moment. They didn't know me, but they were thinking, screw it. have an opportunity now, finally, to do something about this. You know, people feel very powerless. They feel very, very angry and extremely powerless. And that is because politicians aren't listening, the police aren't doing their jobs, the courts aren't doing their jobs. That makes you feel powerless. At a certain point, you're right in that Brits don't naturally want to do this by any standard.

But at a certain point, I think it does become dangerous. And I really want things now to take that energy and put it into constructive things, that build things, make things and change things for the better, before they get worse and before we lose something that's incredibly hard-fought. And it also makes us a laughing stock internationally. Like when I'm gigging in comedy clubs in America, the thing

that Americans always ask me is when I say I'm from London, one of the first things they talk about is the crime. They talk about crime, they talk about and there's quite a few of them and go, yeah, you know, I'm doing a show in London, but I'm a bit nervous because of the crime, how bad is it? This is really affecting our economy.

We make a lot of money in this country, deservedly so because it's wonderful from tourism. People should want to come to this country and experience the beauty of the countryside, the amazing city that is London, all the rest of it. But if people will think that they're going to come here and they're going to get robbed, mugged,

you know, pickpocketed, why would you? Yeah, yeah. It's really, really sad. And that's something which we have allowed to happen. And our politicians have completely actively allowed, sometimes even sponsored by, like very bad ideas and viewpoints. And still, like, the path right now is that we're still facing that same path.

You know, if there's one thing that we can say, like, yes, Labor Building these prisons, not enough, no one near enough on time, but the time they finish it, it'll be the same where we are now. But what are the conservative saying? Have they come out and said, we are sorry, we completely failed on prisons? We actually completely failed because the concern is how do you start to trust any politicians going forward until they can actually state, yes, this was a false. failure, we are going to fix it. And that's just not what I'm seeing at all. It does seem a bit of an open goal, if I'm honest, even if you're a, let's be honest, not all politicians are entirely

principled and honest all of the time. But uncontroversial statement, I think. If you were, you know, let's say either a kind of blue labor, you were trying to appeal to the working man, so to speak, or if you're a centre-right politician, whether it's even more natural to talk about toughness on crime and things like that, it's a bit of an open goal to say, you know, this is happening, you are feeling less safe,

we are about cracking down on crime we're going to make. And I don't even hear reform making that argument, oddly enough. Do you? I mean, I might be not paying attention, but... No, there's very, very little discussion on crime in general. Why do you think that is? That's weird. Yeah, I think.

I do think it's in part, ideological. I think it's also in part British politics, the thing that I've really learned about this over the last few years, like coming in kind of out from like the side in, it's like it is highly social. So it's not very seemly to speak at dinners and so forth about crime.

It comes across as like a bit, you know, a bit, I don't know. In polite, I guess, yeah. Like it's not very fun conversation. And it's kind of like working class tabloidy, you know, to discuss it. It's like low status. I think that's a big thing in politics. Like it's seen as like not very intellectual, to try crime. If they want to keep that up, they're going to find out

it gets pretty fucking high status pretty quickly. Yeah. Which is exactly why I wanted to bring, because obviously, like, actual people do deal with this every single day. And in London now, it's happening to everyone. No matter what your social classes, it's happening all the time. It's happening around you all the time. And yet politicians still view it very much as a, well, that's kind of a more tabloidy thing. it's a bit, you know, actually, you know, it's not very educated to speak in that way.

They wouldn't actually say those words, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, you get that sense. That's it, yes. Do you think it's also the attitude, and here comes a chip on the shoulder, is that, let's be honest, crime affects mainly poorer and working class, P. Yeah. The more the richer you are, the higher up you are on the social order, the less likely you are to be affected by crime. Therefore, it's not going to be as an immediate and pressing concern to you than if you live in a council,

estate in Roderham. Yeah, I mean, it's like, I've tried to make this argument to people several times, including journalists who were, um, some of which were extremely critical about, as exactly you said, like saying suites of crime is legal in this country. Well, uh, you can very easily point to a graph that says, well, you know, overall, it's, it's getting better for you. In multiple areas across the country, it is getting worse. Like knife crime in some areas has increased, like, quite dramatically. What do you say to those areas? Well, at the moment, the kind of established view is to say to them, well, don't worry about it. Because if you're If you look at this graph here, you can see that actually, like, your area might be worse,

but overall we're doing quite well, right? You know, that doesn't, it's not great for those people, you know, and when you start focusing on different areas of crime, you say, well, this is getting, this is the worst it's literally ever been. Well, yes, but, you know, like, zoom out a bit, be a bit more educated about it. And then you'll realize it's okay when your phone's stolen. You just that, you know, like that's obviously not what people, how people actually interact with their day-to-day lives. And it's obviously extremely, extremely poor. And yet, I think that is, yeah,

reflective of their views. If there are any criminals listening, we would like to request that you target more middle-class journalists. That way they might get the fucking message. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not middle-class. Don't target it.

Right? Well, look, I think it's really valuable. Because I think the thing that you're highlighting is something that a lot of and lots of people are just naturally aware of. I think people increasingly feel less safe. And that can manifest in different ways, but particularly in the cities in this country. And I think it's really great that you're pointing

the spotlight on that. I hope you keep it up. And I hope the politicians and people in the world of politics who are listening start paying attention to this stuff because if they don't, then those forces will manifest in one way or another. And it just seems like, an open goal. It really does. So I'm glad you're doing it and thanks for bringing it to people's

attention. Thank you very much. You know, we have to push it as hard as possible because as you say, like the default is they are not going to listen. The politicians are not going to listen. They're not to do things even when it's very blatantly obvious and that you should just imprison the 10% of people who are committing the majority of all crimes. This is a very clear, very obvious thing. They don't do it by default. We have to make a lot of noise and that's what cross crime is here to do. Well, I really appreciate coming on. Before we head to our substack and ask a bunch of questions from our supporters,

what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we should be? I think one thing which really is not given really much time at all is actually the position of the young in this country. So I don't, so separately to crush crime, I also run looking for growth, which is a movement, a political movement to advocate for policies on economic growth to actually rescue this country from the client, which is kind of the root cause of so many of our problems. The engagement we get there is like 18 to 35 year olds who actually really, really care about politics. They could not care less about what party does it. They literally could

not care less. We've had politicians from all kinds of different backgrounds at our events to talk to our audience. What they want to hear is, you have a plan, the plan is actually credible and we are on the way out of this thing. It's going to happen fast. It often means radical action in various ways, but it's cheaply that's going to happen fast. Younger people here in Britain and really come across the West, but a pretty bad deal over the last really like 10 years and continue to do so. And it's very, very little political attention, very very little national attention on things like they are far less optimistic. They are both about the personal lives and the country, their politics is much more diverse than it has been.

And the other time, there's much higher support for reform amongst 18 to 25 year olds than certainly for the conservatives and otherwise. I think like second to labor amongst that groups. We're not talking about what it means for young people in this country to, one, start to be actively involved in politics. And two, how much of a raw deal they actually have got here. And flesh that out. What's the raw deal?

So they've, I mean, if you imagine kind of coming of age during a period in which, you know, COVID, they were literally had to lock themselves inside for a long period of like their youth. And, you know, we can agree, disagree about aspects of lockdown or wherever it might be, but just factually speaking, they were actually locked away for large periods of a very key social point of their life, sometimes interrupting their university, you know, big experiences, big social experiences. they come out to a job market that is extremely uncertain to the point where even stuff that you might have gotten great advice on you want to do a law degree, you want to do, there aren't as many jobs in that because already artificial intelligence is moving in a very clear direction. That's what advice you give to those people that anyone now, 18, about what is actually going to be a good career in five, ten years.

Coding was the career everyone was going forward. That is not the thing you want to do now for longer term. Stay away from podcasting. Hey, Poccasans, you know, we'll see, we'll see. But like, you know, at the same time, you have triple lock pensions. You have a vast amount of movement into this country, from people outside of this country. A lot of jobs and other countries actually attracting our own youth outside. It's very uncertain what salaries look like.

It's very uncertain what the state of the country is. as a result, a lot of them are feeling like we actually run a poll very recently asking Britain has had 0.1% growth over the last year. Do you think this is acceptable or not? Every age group basically says unacceptable apart from 18 to 25 who says acceptable, right? Because they're used, they're just used to the client. Wow. They're used to it. We even ask someone, like, so we have chapters across the country for LFG, we have chapters in multiple cities. I went to one. or rather some of our co-fathers went to one, my co-fathers went to one where someone said,

in attendance, I'm 25 years old, and all I've ever known is decline, what can I do? That's the feeling. And they're used to it. They're used to the system. And as a result, optimistic people are leaving. And we really are facing, again, something, which takes a long time to build great institutions,

great universities, great places of people to live. And it's very, very easy to start losing that. And if you start seeing all of your talent leave the country, because what has it got to offer them? That's a question we didn't really start asking very, very quickly before we lose the next generation, which have been through a lot, I've done a lot. And actually, you know, we're talking about, you know,

political anger and angst. They've taken it all very well. And now they're leaving with their feet and those who aren't are feeling depressed, dejected, and otherwise completely ignored. And I think that's something which we need to start talking about. Well, one thing people always say when the old people always say when young people complain about the state, well, look at them, they're spending money on lattes and they've got these iPhones. And now the iPhones are getting nicked as well.

No, listen, man, the thing is, with all of these things, the hope is that by raising awareness of them, they eventually become political issues that politicians grab onto and eventually you see change through that system. I think growth is obviously going to be a huge part of solving many of these problems. But I also think that, you know, picking up some of these issues and running with them is a right thing to do for smart politicians. Because it's where the country is at. Yes. They're not artificial issues. They are where the country is at. So we will see how evolves over time and we'll keep an eye out for your good work.

Head on over to Substack where we ask Lawrence your questions. How do we incentivize the policing of genuine crime rather than low-hanging fruit like meme tweet? in a climate where the police have been going through a software rebranding and the college of policing appears to be steering in this direction.