中文导读
恐袭再次在英国发生，这次是在伦敦桥。从伦敦议会大厦汽车冲撞人群到曼彻斯特体育馆自杀式爆炸袭击，英国持续被恐怖袭击阴云笼罩。英国首相特蕾莎•梅怒斥恐怖主义，称英国已经对极端主义的容忍已到达极限，提升执法力度刻不容缓。然而在这一方面，英国缺少的似乎不是经费，而是人力。
Another terrorist attack sparks a debate on how to stop future atrocities
IF TERRORISM’S success is measured by its disruption of a city’s way of life, the reaction of Richard Angell exposes the fanatics’ failure. “If me having a gin and tonic with my friends and flirting with handsome men…is what offends these people so much, I’m going to do it more, not less,” Mr Angell, an eyewitness to a terrorist attack on June 3rd, defiantly told the BBC.
The details of the attack are grimly familiar. Three men rammed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people in restaurants and bars around nearby Borough Market. Eight minutes after the first call to the emergency services, police shot all three dead, but not before the perpetrators had killed eight and injured dozens more.
It was Britain’s third deadly terrorist attack in as many months. As after a similar incident on Westminster Bridge in March and the bombing of a concert in Manchester in May, Theresa May expressed her outrage. But she went further: the country “must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change.”
One of those things, she said, is that extremism should be curbed online. Violent Islamist ideology should be more readily identified and squashed. And Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy should be reviewed to ensure that law-enforcement agencies have the powers they need, including longer sentences for terrorism offences. She added that this could mean changing human-rights laws to restrict the movements of suspects and ease their deportation (two of the London Bridge plotters were foreign nationals).
Few experts think that Britain’s police or security services lack powers. Theirs are as extensive as those of any Western counterpart, says David Anderson, a former statutory reviewer of the country’s anti-terrorism legislation. Police can hold suspects without charge for up to 14 days, much longer than in most democracies. “Temporary exclusion orders”, only one of which has been issued, allow the government to prevent Britons merely suspected of fighting with foreign terrorist groups from re-entering the country. “Terrorism prevention and investigation measures”, also rare, impose curfews on and exclude from certain places those believed to be involved in terrorism, even if they have not been convicted. Police and intelligence agencies may access large quantities of personal data, subject to judicial permission.
Criminalising actions such as encouraging terrorism is intended to allow officers to intervene before more serious crimes take place, says Lord Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions. During his time, at least, the wife of a terrorist who failed to report a plot was more likely to be prosecuted than the wife of an armed robber. The sentences for some of those lesser crimes could perhaps be increased, he suggests, but the likelihood of getting caught is a bigger deterrent than the severity of the punishment.
At least one of the London Bridge assailants, as well as the Manchester and Westminster attackers, had in the past come to the attention of the authorities, before being put on one side. That has raised questions about whether the police and security services are overstretched. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, accused the prime minister of trying to protect the public “on the cheap”. He is only partly right. The budget for counter-terrorism policing rose from ￡579m ($750m) in 2010-11 to ￡633m in 2017-18. The intelligence agencies were given the go-ahead to recruit almost 2,000 extra officers in 2015, as the threat from Islamic State emerged.
But the general police budget has been slashed. The number of officers in England and Wales dropped from about 144,000 in 2010, when Mrs May became home secretary, to 124,000 in 2016. England and Wales have fewer police per person than countries such as France, Germany and Italy. The number of armed officers has fallen by about 700 from nearly 7,000 in 2010. After a spate of terrorist attacks in France in 2015, David Cameron, Mrs May’s predecessor, ordered that their ranks be boosted. But that has proved hard. It is a dangerous job, subject to criticism and scrutiny.
Crime has been dropping steadily, so reducing officer numbers is reasonable. But the cuts have come as police face other pressures. Officers say that a squeeze on social services has left them spending more of their time dealing with people with mental-health problems, for instance. Neighbourhood officers build the relationships that lead to people sharing information on shady characters. But keeping their numbers up is expensive.
On efforts to combat extremism at its roots, Mrs May was most vague. Recent governments have struggled to define it. A tendency to conflate religious conservatism with the kind of fanaticism that feeds violence has undermined efforts to root out terrorism. This has sometimes frustrated Prevent, the government’s counter-radicalisation programme. It is the only serious scheme of its kind in Europe, says Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on violent extremism. He argues that Prevent’s structures and principles are sound, but that its intentions have been misunderstood. Muslims fear that it focuses on them alone, although in reality it targets extremism of all varieties, including the far-right.
It also needs to be more transparent, suggests Mr Anderson, making clear how success is measured, and should involve more young Muslims. Fixing its reputational problem is crucial. But that will not happen quickly. In the meantime, the plots will keep coming.
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June 10th 2017 | Britain | 901 words
