Time to take criminal damage seriously – The Irish News

The loyalist attack on new social housing in Antrim should be regarded as a serious property crime, regardless of all that is patently outrageous about it.

Two properties targeted for nearby development are part of a £3.5m Stormont scheme funded by the council’s Housing For All programme, while a similar £6.2m development is under construction less than a mile away.

The public purpose of this investment is deliberately undermined and the value of the asset is significantly reduced. Properties attacked in this way suffer a rapid decline in value, as do those around them. More generally, properties in segregated districts are worth less than those in mixed districts.

The loss is easy to estimate and houses do not have to be for sale to appear on balance sheets, nor are the legal consequences theoretical or civil. Property damage includes any act or threat that reduces the value of a property, even temporarily. It is possible that a seven-figure crime has occurred in Antrim.

Despite this, the PSNI is classing it as minor criminal damage, describing its scale as two windows broken and damage to the paintwork.

To show they are taking it seriously, officers are investigating it as a religious hate crime. But it is not a separate offence. It is an aggravating factor in a property damage offence that must be considered when sentencing. Other aggravating factors include the involvement of a group or gang and damage to a public facility.

But an aggravated minor offence is still a minor offence and only attracts a more severe sentence in the normal range. Under the Northern Ireland Sentencing Guidelines, the maximum sentence for minor criminal damage is a community order plus a compensation order.

To be fair to the PSNI, it is limited by the same view among prosecutors and courts. Damage to property is rarely taken seriously, even when serious. The legislation sets a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison or life in the case of arson. The Sentencing Guidelines for Northern Ireland, drawn up by the judiciary for itself, set an absolute maximum of 12 months in custody (of which only half would be served).

Although the laws in England and Wales are almost identical, the guidelines for the most serious offences start at 18 months and extend up to four years. There is also a clear threshold for what constitutes serious harm – £5,000 or more.

Taking criminal damage more seriously in Northern Ireland should have a deterrent effect. A decade ago, attitudes to rioting changed across our criminal justice system and custodial sentences were imposed, partly inspired by the success of the same approach in England. Loyalists found their supply of young stone-throwers dried up and a problem that for generations had been considered intractable was clearly improving.

If people have a legitimate fear of being caught and punished, protecting threatened property need not be the pointless game of local whack-a-mole that the PSNI presents it as.

If people have a legitimate fear of being caught and punished, protecting endangered property need not be a senseless game of local “whack-a-mole”

Getting the cost of criminal damage right is a necessary first step to changing attitudes. Catching people who attack homes in the middle of the night is difficult and expensive, as is prosecuting and imprisoning them. No wonder the authorities see this as futile and excessive when compared to the value of a few broken windows. They have given Northern Ireland its own perverse version of “broken windows policing”, where serious crime is treated as minor crime while the neighbourhood falls apart.

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There is a wider problem with the PSNI’s mission of “keeping people safe”, a priority endorsed by the Policing Board. Criminal damage is a genuinely dangerous offence, hence the life sentence for arson. But giving absolute priority to safety leads to extraordinary results, such as in Cantrell Close, a shared housing estate in south Belfast, in 2017, where police arrived at 10pm and ordered four Catholic families to leave immediately after being threatened by loyalists.

In the same year, the Supreme Court ruled in the anti-flag protests case that the PSNI had erred in putting safety before the law, even when the right to life was at stake. The primary duty of the police is to “prevent crime from being committed” – in so doing, they serve the purpose of public safety.

We need innovative police, prosecutors and courts that take the harm done to criminals as seriously as the law allows, society wants and, as precedents show, will deliver results.

Without this, the chances of joint housing construction are slim.