Celebrating Crime and Disorder With the Language Of Compassion

The Daniel Penny verdict and the difference between Empathy and Sentimentality

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

As reflected in the recent Daniel Penny case, one of the biggest themes in global politics since Covid is the public disorder in big cities and what to do about it. It was certainly a problem in Dublin city centre where there were multiple unprovoked tourist attacks, at least one resulting in death, and the general sense of lawless prompted the Minister of Justice to do a preposterous walkabout. Ireland of course was nothing in comparison to America from which rumour reaches us of shops pillaged with impunity and excrement flowing through the streets.

Surveying this scene, a regular person can often feel as they’re from another planet. Who makes these decisions about what we put up with, who we feel sorry for or how we punish the people who commit disorder-related crimes? Not the public, that’s for sure; matters of public disorder seem to be run on an alien moral framework, one that prioritises all the wrong considerations. The Penny case had an additional tragic element because of the death of Jordan Neely but when we remove that outcome it’s the kind of thing that happens every day at evey monent in every big city and that every normal person is expected to just live with; and in fact it’s become an article of faith amongst a certain type of self-consciously Progressive and Cosmopolitan person that it’s boring and gauche and cruel to even by bothered by people threatening to rape you, or the shitting in the streets, or shooting up heroin on the train. Why are we like this - why are they like this?