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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

My hon. Friend is right: the Oklahoma law has nothing to do with the musical of the same name; it has been named after Mr. Clint Eastwood’s famous line—““Make my day, punk””—from the motion picture ““Dirty Harry””. Under the ““Make my day”” law, in effect, anyone who dares to enter someone else’s property can be shot dead; any force is permitted. It goes further than the Bill before us today, but in the direction that the hon. Member for North Thanet wanted to go with his Bill, had it made progress. Although we are not debating the Oklahoma Bill today, we can draw some conclusions from its effect on crime rates, particularly those for burglary, and decide whether it achieve its claimed objective. Given that it contains even tougher measures than those in the Bill before us, if it did not work in Oklahoma, one can only assume that this Bill would make no difference whatsoever to the incidence of burglary. Between the Oklahoma law’s introduction in 1987 and 2000, there was a 48.5 per cent. fall in burglaries. Very good, but that is almost exactly the same as the decline in burglary in the United States as a whole, where the law was not nationwide. So in fact, the law made practically no difference whatsoever to that decline. Even more interestingly, under existing provisions allowing homeowners to defend themselves, UK burglary figures have fallen even further, over a shorter period, than those for Oklahoma or for the US in general.