But then where do you draw the line? Surely assault is assault.
Gotta wade in with BM on this one. Sure assault is assault but there are measures of it. It's worth noticing that the police are concentrating on insignificant petty offences where they can cop a fixed penalty and an official result whilst virtually ignoring serious stuff where they have to go to the bother of discovering who did it and then proving it.
Crimes solved figures soar where the offence is too petty for people to bother defending, but the stats look worse when they begin to do some - uh - policing.
Fair do's it's not all the fault of the police, It must be pretty demoralising to go to the trouble of finding a criminal and then have the CPS decide they can't be bothered to prosecute them and then the courts dishing out peppercorn penalties which are immediately commuted to probation and fines that they immediately go out to commit some more crimes to pay.
All in all, it can be summed up with a criminal system that pursues caught-in-the-act-bang-to-rights type offenders that can be dealt with by a fixed penalty fine. What the actual offence was, is not really the point, that is secondary to the successful conviction and income figures.
Jaundiced? Who - me?
The most prevalent convicted and penalised crime in our country is: Speeding.
That is only because they have a law that requires you to grass up whoever was driving even if it was yourself.
No wonder everybody in the world wants to come here.