James
James lives alone in a small flat in Hackney. I visited him in early June. It was early in the morning and a steady stream of young professionals flowed past his house, dripping with the trappings of their success; fast cars, Rolex watches, mobile phones, Armani brief cases. I found myself wondering, almost against my will, whether they offered any temptation to James, a self-styled “Virtuous Burglar.”
“There is a common misconception,” says James, “that all burglars are guilty of burglary. This isn’t the case. Some of us just have the desire to rob houses. We may find ourselves in other people’s living rooms, by invitation, or on the Tube, looking at people’s laptops, and even, in extreme cases, assessing the extent of their home defences, Ring doorbells, locks and so forth. But this is not our fault. It isn’t necessarily linked with any history of offending, or crimes against people or property. Burglarising is not defined by what we do; it is who we are.”
James is part of a growing movement which believes that, far from being defined by a pattern of offending behaviour, committed by determined and amoral individuals, “burglariser” is in fact an identity. It is not, believes James, something that an individual has any control over, and should not, therefore, be stigmatised.
There is some scientific backing for his view. Dr Jimminy Singer theorises that differences between the brains of burglars and non-burglars may even begin before birth. “We see these differences in the way the brain reacts to stimuli even in the womb,” says Singer. “These so called “burglars” simply are the way they are. The only way forward is therapy to help them stop or reduce their offending behaviour, or even better, to identify them and give them access to therapy before they offend. But they cannot change their nature. It’s hard wired.”
HMP Little Hampton
The help currently available for burglars, or “burglarisers” as they prefer to be known, is currently very limited. I was invited to attend one of the few peer to peer support groups available for burglarisers at HMP Little Hampton’s Offender Management Suite. Eight men, and one woman identifying as a “cat-burglariser” sat in an open plan lounge in the afternoon sunshine. “The problem is,” the cat-burglariser told me, “there is no help for us until we actually offend. There is little to no correlation between having the structural brain differences that all burglarisers have in common, and actually committing burglary related offences. In other words, not every burglar robs houses, and not everybody who robs houses is necessarily a burglar.”
“So true!” chimed in Frank (not his real name). “It’s so important to recognise as well that there’s a massive difference between a burglariser and robber. Burglarisers have consenting relationships with home owners, who invite opportunists like us to take their things by leaving their front door open, or going on holiday. There’s no evidence that any home owner has ever been harmed by a burglariser - in fact, many have benefited as they can claim on their home insurance and get the sympathy of their neighbours. Robbers - they’re a different story. Weapons, breaking down doors. Terrible.”
Everybody either sucks their teeth in disapproval, or nods sagely. Although I did notice one man, in his fifties folding his arms over his chest. He approached me afterwards, and introduced himself. Ted Bear (not his real name) was, he told me, “at the end of a very successful career.” He had, over the course of thirty years, robbed at least a thousand houses in six UK counties, and several French regions. He had graduated from being “the skinny lad who goes in the window and undoes the latch” to “…well, the judge described me as the mastermind behind a criminal gang. I am not proud of that, but I’m not NOT proud either. I worked hard.” In Bear’s estimation, all the worry about terminology, burglariser, robber, all the fine distinctions, are “pointless handwringing. Virtue signalling. I’m a villain,” he told me. “A villain, pure and simple. I got caught, and if I want parole, I’ve gotta play the game, so I’m here.”
“But didn’t you say your offending days are over in that meeting?” I asked him. “Oh yes,” he said. “They are. But not because of any attack of moral conscience. That’s not my scene. And what that lot…” (he gestured rudely at the door) “what THAT lot won’t tell you is that they’re just the same as me. That shit about therapy and brain differences and all that. By the time you’re willing to tell anybody you’re a “burglariser” or whatever, at the very least you’ve stolen sweets from the shop. At worst, you’re robbing houses every weeknight, or you’re saying it to try to get invited to house parties after you get out of prison. It’s bollocks.”
Of course, having been through the system, Ted should not entirely be taken at his word; a certain amount of internalised burglar-phobia should be expected in individuals like him; having been exposed to the kind of anti-burglar sentiment currently bubbling up on Twitter and other social media platforms, it is no wonder he classifies himself as a “villain.” With help and understanding, Ted could have taken a different path - like one of his old associates, Prof Jared Brishigh.
The Research
Brishigh is the senior researcher on the “Counting Social Attitudes to Burglary” project at Greater Hampton University. I met him in his sparsely decorated office. He was young-ish, slight, gentle - in short, he did not look like you’d expect a burglar to look. He is, of course, no longer actively involved in offending behaviours, but told me “I’m still a burglariser, I just don’t break into any houses.” He did, however, show me his newest tattoo: a line drawing of a masked man with a swag bag, a house with a broken window in the background.
I asked Brishigh about Bear’s claim that the academic had, for several years, worked as an errand boy for Bear’s criminal enterprises. “He told you he had to fire me, didn’t he?” said Brishigh, rolling his eyes. “That I couldn’t cut it as a burglariser and that’s why I decided to get my PhD in Sociology and write about it instead? That I was in love with the idea of burglary, but didn’t have the guts to go through with it for real?” I was discombobulated. Ted had, indeed, told me this exact thing, his voice full of contempt. I tried to change the subject: “you must have got a real insight into the criminal underworld through your association, though… did it have any influence on your research?”
“Not really,” said Brishigh. “I don’t glarmorise crime or memorialise my own association with offenders through my work. And both terms, “criminal” and “underworld” are highly problematic. In fact, I made my name writing about the rise of social representations of burglary and burglarisers in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s only with the advent of the city and the widescale manufacture of locks, and the shadowy hegemony of Yale, that the figure of the Burglar emerged in popular culture,” he told me.
“What do you think of when you think of that shadowy, liminal figure, a BURGLAR? A man in a striped top with a mask and a black bag full of swag, being chased by a bobby in a police helmet? Many people are surprised to know that the ordinary burglariser bears no resemblance to this folk devil. In fact, many burglarisers live ordinary, decent lives. They struggle against their thoughts of breaking into people’s houses and taking things that don’t belong to them. They live in fear of being found out. This secrecy further stigmatises them in the public imagination. They can change their behaviour, but they can’t change who they are.”
Population Norms: Burglarising as a spectrum
Burglarising, as a tendency or even an identity, rather than an offending behaviour is fairly common in the British population. Brishigh’s colleague, Dr Jules Santander, head of Criminality Research at Greater Hampton University, and author of several research papers including “Mapping the Meaning(s) of “consent” in Judicial Pronouncements on TWOCing” researches the prevalence of burglarising tendencies in the normal adult population. “In fact,” he told me, “more than one third of adult males and one in ten adult females can experience arousal symptoms, such as elevated heart rate, dilated pupils, and increased breathing rates watching stimuli associated with burglarising.” These parasympathetic responses, Santander argues, are not about gentle titilation, or just enjoying cinematography. “The more extreme the criminality, the greater the parasympathetic response,” he told me. In one study, involving video scenes from the Fast and the Furious franchise, heart and breathing rates increased to as much as three times baseline.
“How do you explain that,” asked Santander, “unless some level of burglarising were normal in the population. Going into houses carrying swag bags and taking stuff without the owner’s consent is not any kind of abhorrent behaviour, this is simply the extremes of normal. At one end, somebody who doesn’t even covet their neighbour’s ass. On the other end, there’s Danny from Ocean’s Eleven. And rest assured, neither Danny Ocean, nor the one who doesn’t covet, ends up in prison. No, it’s the mid level people, the Goldilocks Burglars of the world, who end up doing Porridge. It’s a spectrum, and both you and I are on it.”
Sympathy for the Devil
Meanwhile, in Silversmiths’ University, an old Polytechnic at the other side of the Greater Hampton, Drs Qualiwally and Quantitit are tracking changing attitudes to burglary. “There is a lot of NIMBYism about this topic,” says Dr Qualiwally. “Many people have enough ‘sympathy for the devil’ to secretly root for those involved in the Hatton Garden Heist, or to cheer for fictional burglars, like Walter White when he robbed that train. But, hypocritical though it may appear to a casual observer, those same people many not want their own house to be robbed.” Dr Quantitit backed up his colleague’s statement; “up to one third of people reported enjoying the Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels movie, but less than one in a hundred wanted anybody identifying a burglariser to nick their shit out their house,” he reported.
Drs Qualiwally and Quantitit have proposed a controversial scheme in which those showing signs of burglarising at young ages are exposed to a range of therapies which may help head off offending behaviours at the pass. They have proposed allowing affected individuals access to virtual reality scenarios, in which they plot burglaries, carry them out, and then escape from the police. “This may reduce offending behaviour, as the pre-offending burglarising juveniles can act out their fantasies without harming anybody,” said Qualiwally. “They may also learn about the techniques that the police use to catch burglars, so that they are put off offending behaviours.”
“That’s just one side of it,” continued Quantitit. “The other side is access to older burglars, who have gone through the system, and may have records themselves. This peer to peer counselling will help them identify resources in case they are ever tempted to offend. They are also encouraged to use art resources, and study previous burglaries, to properly understand themselves and their patterns.”
For Quantitit and Qualiwally, the most important parts of the piece are destigmatisation, consciousness raising, public awareness, and therapy. “We have this ridiculous situation,” said Qualiwally, “where a young person can be stigmatised simply for Googling “how to pick locks,” or “what’s the jail term for burglary,” or “how to defeat a Ring doorbell,” or for getting the floor plans for a bank off the dark web. We all know that Ring is a right wing plot from Ben Shapiro, but that’s by the by. The point is, no young person should be stigmatised for merely expressing an interest in techniques of burglary, or for high jinks with their peers.”
Quantitit, the more militant of the two, gave him a dark look. “I wonder,” she said, leaning back on her MotoArt desk, Montblanc pen in hand, “whether those who hoard private property should be given any latitude at all. Aren’t they the real criminals?”
The Real Criminals
This is the unspoken truth of the Virtuous Burglar movement; the “baddies” are not those who sneak, in the night, into people’s houses and take their things. They are not even those who enable the burglarisers, directly or indirectly, or who fantasise about what they, themselves, would do, in the way of burglary, if they didn’t risk prison. For these people (and they are mostly men), the hate figures are the intolerant, anti-burglariser, property hoarding campaigners. Mostly women, and very active on Twitter, these campaigners make statements regarded by the burglarising community as hateful. I met with one of their spokesmen, Charlie Red, herself a victim of burglary.
“They just spout such bullshit!” she opened, not immediately reassuring me that she was driven by public concern, rather than flat out bigotry. “They want you to believe that there are people walking about who secretly ‘are’ burglars. Hard wired burglars, who have still never offended, and it’s never caused them any trouble, but still they have to “struggle” with their drive to do this thing they’ve never done. Bullshit.”
“But surely,” I said, “you are what you are, and some people are just wired to be burglarisers. Like homosexuals. Maybe even like paedophiles. Don’t they deserve sympathy and understanding? Therapy? Help not to break the law in pursuit of who they really are?”
“Oh fuck off,” said Charlie, again not convincing me that she is a serious person. “Lots of people have dark thoughts. Lots of people. You’ll find researchers who say that one in three people think about burglary. I don’t think it’s that many, not by a long shot, and the data is dodgy as hell, I mean it’s based on the Fast and the Furious for fuck’s sake, but even if you accept it, one in three people isn’t running about nicking shit.”
I must admit that I found her swearing off putting, but she thrives on heat more than argument; she is a Twitter personality, she’s not bound by the same etiquette as the academics I interviewed. Deciding to give her the benefit of the doubt, I asked her what qualifications she had in the area; she replied, none. I asked her what research projects she had collaborated on; she replied, none. I asked her how she knew that the type of early intervention programmes proposed by Qualiwally and Quantitit would not be successful. She gave me the following answer: I repeat it in full, without comment, and without editing, and leave the final word to Ms Red.
“Any sensible person knows that you don’t nick other people’s shit, and if you do, you’re a bad person. Any sensible person knows that if you fantasise about actually nicking people’s shit, you’re a bad person. Everybody knows that if you see something at your friend’s house that belongs to your friend, and you want to nick it, you check yourself. Anybody who wants points for saying they want to nick my shit, and aren’t doing it, is not getting invited to housesit.”
“Everybody knows that by the time you’re actually nicking somebody’s shit, you’ve made a fucking plan. You don’t accidentally slip up and fall into the jewellers and accidentally buy a set of lock picks, which then accidentally fall into somebody’s lock, and then you fall out of the door with their shit. This isn’t fucking rocket science.”
“If you identify as a burglariser, I don’t care. If you want to tell me that you identify as a burglariser, I’ll raise a little red flag in my mind and not let you know where I keep my car keys. If you defend actual burglarisers, I’ll keep a very close eye on you until you’ve gone, and if you nick my shit, I’m calling the police.”
“If you get out of prison for burglary, then tell me that God made you that way, you can’t help it, but now you’re a virtuous burglar, and you spend your spare time advocating to reduce the stigma around burglary and working with pre-offending burglars, and saying “that’s a lovely lamp, better look after it carefully, I’d like to nick it but I’m not going to,” then you are entirely transparent to me. Off you fuck.”
“Robbers, burglars, thieves, pickpockets, twokkers, whatever terminology you want to use, they are all the exact same. They don’t need counselling. They need to not steal stuff. And if they do steal stuff, they need to go to prison. That’s it. I don’t care what a struggle it is for them. Just don’t do crimes, and you won’t have to do time. I don’t see why this is controversial.”
Thanks for this hilarious parody Ceri! One has to laugh at how ridiculous things have become on the identity front. :D
I actually thought this was real for several paras, lol - perhaps a sign of how mad public life has become? But it did make me think of John Douglas's reflections in Mindhunter of the follies of a therapeutic approach towards psychosexual offenders, who he says are excellent profilers themselves - ie great at reading other people and saying what others want to hear - and whose crimes are the most precious part of their lives, which they will go to great lengths to keep doing. In other words, the self-reporting honour system attached to therapy (based on the assumption that that the patient wants to change and will work honestly towards that) simply has no meaning for these guys.