- Satellite technology will be used to track 5,000 career
criminals who are responsible for one in every 10 crimes in Britain, the
Home Secretary David Blunkett will announce tomorrow.
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- The radical new technology, which has been developed
in the US, will enable law enforcement officers to pinpoint the exact location
of criminals who have been released early from prison and fitted with electronic
tags.
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- It will feature among a series of measures in a five-year
plan to tackle burgeoning violent crime and antisocial behaviour. Home
Office figures released next week will show police forces recording rises
as high as 25 per cent.
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- A Home Office source said: "We are the largest users
of tagging outside the US and we will continue to do this. We will introduce
satellite tracing for prolific offenders as well as for domestic violence
and sex offenders."
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- Other measures include increasing the number of community
support officers from 5,000 to 20,000 by 2008, putting drug-using criminals
through treatment programmes and locking up those who refuse help, as well
as making greater use of antisocial behaviour orders.
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- Tony Blair is expected to reassure voters that protecting
"law-abiding citizens" from lawless teenage gangs and drunken
yobs will be central to government policy.
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- Although car crime and burglary have fallen, the annual
crime survey this week will show the public and police are reporting a
worrying rise in assault, harassment and alcohol-fuelled thuggery.
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- This is backed up by crime statistics obtained by The
Independent on Sunday recorded between March 2003 and April 2004 by seven
of Britain's largest police forces. In West Yorkshire, antisocial behaviour
incidents rose by nearly nine per cent in the city of Leeds, from 55,813
cases to 60,136. Across the whole of the West Yorkshire force, antisocial
behaviour rose by six per cent from 162,669 to 173,045.
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- In the West Midlands, harassment offences were up by
about 22 per cent; common assault increased by 15.9 per cent and public
order offences by just over 12 per cent. There was an upwards trend in
North Yorkshire with violent crime in a public place rising by 25 per cent
and drink-related violence by 11 per cent. In Avon and Somerset, community
disorder rose by just over seven per cent, while across Devon and Cornwall
violent assaults rose by 9.5 per cent and in Dorset violence against the
person rose by 12.2 per cent.
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- Chief constables attribute the rise to a greater emphasis
on tackling antisocial behaviour and drunken disorder, which means more
people are being arrested and more victims are reporting crimes. However,
this is unlikely to remove the widespread perception that not enough is
being done to make streets safer.
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- Crime reduction groups say the proposals will fall disproportionately
on young people and those already marginalised by current government policy.
Richard Garside, director of the Crime and Society Foundation, said that
the initiatives would do little to tackle the causes of crime.
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- "Antisocial behaviour is not just a matter of the
naughty child or the boozy adult," he said. "It is also antisocial
for the Government to pursue headline-grabbing initiatives that risk criminalising
whole groups of individuals while doing little to tackle the causes of
crime."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=542144
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