Crime
Cruelty and chaos
Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the…
A brief history of luck
One of the staples of crime drama is the ‘cold-case squad’. This allows programme-makers to add period detail to the…
A macabre legend
The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories.…
High life
New York Back when people used to read newspapers, they called it a ‘human interest’ story. Now it appears as…
High life
New York It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no…
High life
New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The…
Policeman’s Notebook
There’s no such thing as a typical week in policing and this last one was no different. It started on…
A murderer among us
I was Dennis Nilsen’s boss
Letters
Growing pains Sir: James Forsyth (‘Rewiring the state’, 4 July) shocked this loyal Spectator reader with the following: ‘Even before…
Extra, extra — read all about us!
Instead of telling us about America, or even the world outside, American journalists now tell us about other American journalists. The…
Letters
Police relations Sir: As a former Met Police officer, with a similar background to Kevin Hurley, I was surprised how…
Letters
Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies,…
Defund the police
Forces have become too politicised to function
Cop out
To save black lives, top brass must face reality
Speak of the devil
Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix…
Is change on the horizon in Baltimore?
Crime-ridden Baltimore finally dodged a bullet this week. The bullet, in this case, was former mayor Sheila Dixon, who nearly…
Abolish the police. Then what?
One of the best rules of thumb to emerge from systems theory is Stafford Beer’s famous statement: the purpose of…
The roots of riot
That LEGO set or Louis Vuitton bag you’ve always wanted can be yours free if you just wait for the…
Locked up in lockdown
COIVD-19 has turned us all into prisoners: draconian lockdown orders, solitary confinement, monotonous food, limited fresh air and exercise, irregular…
A dirty business
Criminal gangs are growing rich on public-sector contracts
‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’: James Ellroy interviewed
James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon…
The cops are impotent in lawless New York
New York Things are heating up, in both London and Nueva York, as this place should correctly be called.…
How you can tell the gender of a thief
My attempt at being Columbo was only taking me so far. In solving the mystery of who raided the barn,…
Bomb attacks are now a normal part of Swedish life
Stockholm One night last week, explosions took place in three different locations in and around Stockholm. There were no injuries…
Is hate crime really on the rise?
The Guardian ran a story on its website today headlined: ‘Hate crimes doubled in England and Wales in five years.’…
