Where did you claim that? Please link to the post. I must have missed it.
And cite please. Has burglary decreased in the UK since the 70’s? I can’t find the info. I’m truly curious, but my google digging hasn’t turned up the stats. Perhaps you could help.
So this is your opinion as a former burglar? Perhaps the economy improved?
Yeah. Me too. Ivan has shared more than he thinks. I never realized that some criminals think that the victim is to blame. I will remember Ivans posts the next time I’m on a jury.
No good Ivan. And as this is GD, I can’t really express some of my feelings. I can say that I think you are 100% wrong and that your criminal background has clouded your mind.
C’mon, Tank. You are not so dumb as to think that a strikeout eliminates a violation of the rules.
These threads are full of people posting things they perceive was said, based on bad reading comprehension, a bias in how they pervceive what they read, or a lack of competence to explain their actual thoughts.
Let’s leave the accusations of lying to the Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
If this thread were in the pit methinks Ivan would have a harder audience to convince. I’m very tired and not feeling well, but still tempted to link this and the monster thread to pit and ask once more ***“When does the criminal bear any responsibilty to the actions that lead to him or her being shot?”. ***
I mean seriously, if you can’t answer that, why bother defending prison kitties?
Bah…when this subject comes up in the pit I’ll come back.
First off I said this
and then this
It seems I was a bit out on my timeline, but there’s a little info here.
One of the problems we seem to be having regarding reliable information is that “official” helpful statistics are pretty hard to find.
Bearing in mind the need for prison places hasn’t lessened, I think we can safely assume the burglars just moved into another line of crime.
Really, this should have been fairly obvious to me. I stopped around '83, and it wasn’t because it was getting too difficult. Or because the hours or the money were crap either.(Although the fact you got the stuff for nothing always meant the buyer wanted to pay near enough the same!)
I stopped because I robbed the wrong person’s house one time and was reminded that there were people in those homes who I knew nothing about. Prior to that, I doubt I gave a thought for whose house I was in.
Ivan –
Not knowing any burglars does not support your claim that burglary is going down. Perhaps you’re hanging with a better crowd?
You stated that burglary has decreased since the 70’s. And you said it was not because of the fear of homeowners. You stated that it’s because of better security.
You also say that burglary was not getting difficult.
So this better security did not make burglary more difficult. You quit because you had a crisis of conscious.
The stats you linked to don’t support your claims that burglary is going down. It’s going up if anything. The website you linked to does not support your claims.
It wasn’t a crisis of conscience that stopped him - it was because he tried to rob another criminal that was bigger than him.
(If anyone wants to make that Pit thread, I think that would be a better place to discuss Ivan’s deficiencies)
Oh. So it wasn’t a security system that stopped Ivan.
Or morals or conscience.
It was coming up against someone bigger and badder than he was. Sort of like a home owner that may be prepared to defend themself.
Lesson learned.
You may be interested to hear how said ‘gangster’ dealt with the situation.
After making discreet enquiries, he came into the pub I drank in one afternoon, and beckoned me to go outside. Knowing who he was, running wasn’t an option, so I followed him out onto the car-park.
He then described a house I had burgled a week or so before, and when I said I didn’t know what he was on about, he warned me that he wasn’t the police and all he wanted to know was if someone had put me onto the house, because he was away on holiday at the time.
He accepted that his neighbour, who he’d asked to look after the house, hadn’t left the window open deliberately and that it was pure chance on my part that I came across it while there was nobody there. He also put down to experience the loss of his tv and video recorder, and advised me not to shit on my own doorstep in future.
Sort of shatters the violent reputation of dirty, rotten criminals, doesn’t it?
I think it’s time you bowed out of this thread and any others regarding guns and/or burglaries. You are an admitted criminal, and as such, you have no credibility here.
The most amazing things, which you don’t seem to grasp, yet has been pointed out several times; are your constant attempts to blame others for your actions, avoid personal responsibility and, like the above story, attempt to distract attention from those two problems.
Please put down the keyboard and walk away from these threads.
I am an admitted ex-criminal, not that it seems to make a difference to some people, and the ‘above story’ was a rectification of the assumption other posters were making, that an encounter with the threat of force was what made me retire from committing burglaries.
I was ‘reasoned’, not threatened into rethinking my position.
Sounds like you were shitting-your-pants-afraid. If you weren’t afraid of him and/or knew he wasn’t going to do anything to you, why wasn’t running an option?
You also took the opportunity, or at least so you say, to get out of burglary at this point.
Your anecdote reads to me like on this occasion that particular gangster elected not to beat the tar out of you for some reason of his own. Maybe he was in a good mood. Maybe you were so obviously, pathetically afraid of him that he figured you’d suffered enough already. Maybe you wept and begged enough to soften his heart. Who knows? The fact is that your anecdote sounds rather convincingly like you had every reason to expect a lot of pain in your immediate future, you realized you had gotten lucky, and that’s why you turned to burglarizing commercial sites.
It wasn’t about suddenly feeling empathy for your victims.
It was about you wanting to stay in one piece.
For justice, we must go to Don Asitkov!
Hmmm. If that movie didn’t shatter the violent reputation of criminals, I’m not sure you can.
Actually, some of the stats completely reinforce my claims that the average homeowners security measurements are piss poor.
• In a road, the burglar will choose the property without visible signs of security, such as security lighting or alarm bell boxes, over those with such devices.
• Households are more than twice as likely to be burgled if they’ve been burgled in the previous four years.
• Most burglaries are not pre-planned, they’re committed by opportunist thieves who spot an open door, window, or valuables on display.
• In 20% of burglaries they don’t even have to use force – they get in through an open window or unlocked door.
• 70% enter through a door, with almost all the rest through a window.
• A thief can get through any gap larger than a human head
• British Crime Survey statistics show that security devices, in particular intruder alarms, “…are very effective in reducing the risk of burglary…”
Or perhaps he merely realised it wasn’t personal, and that if he’d been 20 years younger he could easily have been in the same position? Who knows, eh?
But after that, he did put me on to some of those ‘commercial sites’ you mentioned, and buy some of the proceeds, so all’s well that ends well, eh?
You still haven’t explained why running wasn’t an option.
Because he obviously knew who I was and I didn’t want the problem following me back home to my parents house. I wasn’t scared of him because I was young and full of myself, but I was aware of what he was capable of and knew I had to face the music.
One petty criminal (you) being pants-shittingly-afraid of another more powerful criminal (him) after foolishly burglarizing his house is the simplest explanation that fits all the facts as we know them.
Criminals are not an empathetic or altruistic group, IME. Empathetic and altruistic people do not become criminals. The gangster not taking his losses out of your hide was almost certainly motivated by selfish reasons of his own. Here’s a possibility: he had his fingers in enough illicit activity that he figured he didn’t need to draw police attention to himself by beating up a punk-assed teenager. Simplest explanation and all that. Selfish, unempathetic criminals are so much more common than warm, caring criminals that I’m sure even you have to agree that my explanation is the more believable of the two. On top of that, I have no incentive to try to paint the story in a way so as to make the most favorable impression of the criminal class.
Because you live in a black and white world, and seemingly refuse to see colours or shades.