One owns a popular restaurant; the front door was destroyed, and the cash register robbed. The other was renting a car, the entire rear window of which was smashed to bits and the contents swiped. So common is this sort of looting and thievery that when he returned the rental car, he noticed that the car company’s lot was full of vehicles with broken windows.

Since November, throughout California, thousands of dollars have been stolen from stores including Apple, CVS, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry. In San Jose, over $40,000-worth of inventory was stolen from a Lululemon before the robbers escaped in getaway car. In Carmel-by-the-Sea last week, thieves wielding sledgehammers broke into a high-end jewellery store, smashing, grabbing and then fleeing. Right before Thanksgiving, 80 individuals rushed a Nordstrom in the Bay Area to participate in what authorities called “organised theft”.

Cannabis dispensaries are another favourite target. In Oakland, the Police Chief LeRonne L. Armstrong explained that most of these attacks turn violent: “more than 175 shots were fired” during cannabis robberies in Oakland last month alone. Even a physical therapy office in Beverly Hills was robbed this month by armed, masked burglars who entered the office and stole the doctor’s Rolex. The list of robberies is not limited to stores or businesses.

Many of the victims are ordinary individuals, walking down the street in broad daylight. As Jamie McBride, the head of the union representing LAPD officers, told tourists last week: “We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control. I said it to people before. It’s like that movie Purge, but instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days to commit whatever they want.”

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Paedophilia is not progressive

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Once upon a time, we would have been shocked by this level of crime. Today, citizens fatalistically adapt their behaviours. I know countless women who no longer walk alone after dark in California’s cities. Everyone knows to hide anything they leave in their cars. Those who can afford it are installing gates and building tall fences around their homes. The wealthy are hiring personal security and no longer relying on police for protection. I’ve seen this all before — in Nairobi as well as other places in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and India.

Stores are boarding up their windows and closing earlier. They are hiring security staff and implementing new safety processes. A Safeway in San Francisco has installed gates that “let customers easily enter the store but swing quickly shut behind them, preventing would-be thieves from dashing out with shopping carts full of stolen items”. Rental car companies, like the one my friend used, are hiring glass repairmen to work full-time fixing the overwhelming number of broken windows.

As for those who cannot or will not adapt, they are faced with one option: to leave their city and often the state. High taxes are not the only reason so many big companies have pulled out of California over the past two years.

But how did we arrive at a point where people either have to adapt to the crime surrounding them or to flee; where the police union’s spokesperson has to warn the public that they are no longer in control?

The answer lies in an abundance of affluence. Affluence has allowed us to overcome many constraints in a way past generations could never have imagined. For long periods, a majority of people in the West have not had to worry about what tomorrow might bring. Questions over where future food, water and shelter will come from are no longer bother the majority of Americans. We’ve got apps on our phone that tell us what the weather will be not only tomorrow, but ten days hence; apps that allow us to buy meals, drinks, cars and even apartments with only a click or two; apps that even think for us.

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But with that increased quality of life, we’ve become lazy. We’ve stopped paying attention. We’ve come to take for granted the institutions that hold up our affluent society. We have assumed that they would continue functioning without our personal involvement and investment. It seems that when a society is as wealthy as ours and as insulated from day-to-day threats, the vigilance to maintain its institutions wilts.

What makes this affluence particularly damaging is the fact that the rich are the furthest removed from the consequences of their negligence. In California, those with enormous wealth are often also the loudest advocates for leniency towards criminals. Those individuals, who have the least contact with crime, are frequently the most enthusiastic proponents of reforms that reduce the safety of the average American. Democratic donors give their money to candidates who support defunding the police. They campaign against stop-and-search, three strikes, and “broken window” policies. They argue for lighter sentences or even the decriminalisation of certain crimes — shoplifting, for example, has been all but legalised in San Francisco.

Wealthy liberals for some reason feel more compassion for those committing crimes than for their victims. They believe in a form of “progress” that ignores human nature and social reality. As Mary Harrington recently wrote: “Team Empathy… tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.”

Meanwhile, some of the politicians they support, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even deny problems such as smash-and-grab exist. Others urge the public not to be distracted by rising crime, but to follow the “arc of history” towards the utopia of social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism. Melina Andullah, founder of Black Lives Matter LA, recently said of those concerned about the rising tide of crime: “They’re trying to move us backward. We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”

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The hypocrisy of America's terror debate

By Simon Cottee

On December 1, Jacqueline Avant, the wife of Clarence Avant and mother-in-law of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, was shot and killed in her home in Beverly Hills. The suspect, Aariel Maynor, was attempting to rob her home when he shot her. He also attempted to kill her security guard.

On hearing the news, Abdullah’s response was to condemn it as “appalling”, yet also called on officials not to use it as an excuse to introduce tougher measures on crime. Elsewhere, Oprah Winfrey mourned the loss of her friend with a social media post that ended with the comment: “The world is upside down. And deeply in need of some love today.”

Love, as Oprah imagines it, is an ideal. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, we will achieve universal love. But, in the absence of any meaningful proposals, to hold it up as the solution to criminal activity is pure decadence.

Far more important is the need to keep in place the infrastructure of policing, investigating, trying and punishing that has evolved in the Western world — a system that seeks to strike a judicious balance between the safety of society and the rights of any accused individual. Tweak that system by all means. No one claims it is perfect, and much has been achieved in recent years by the movement for criminal justice reform.

But don’t delude yourself with talk of “love” or proposals to defund the police. For the perpetrators, the best kind of love is tough love. For the victims, whether they’re affluent or not, the best kind of love is being protected. We don’t need “social justice”, just plain justice.

“Everyone”? Yes, that’s the claim. And that includes members of the royal family. Markle used her Oprah interview to tell the world about the depth of unhappiness she experienced when she was pregnant with her son Archie.

“I just didn’t want to be alive any more. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought… I went to the institution, and I said that I needed to go somewhere to get help… And I was told that I couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be good for the institution.”

Thrust into a (frequently hostile) media spotlight, estranged from her father and sister, and living far away from her mother and old friends during her pregnancy, it’s not surprising that Meghan felt distressed. What is surprising is the implication that she was disallowed from accessing psychiatric care, given Prince William’s particular interest in mental health as a campaigning issue, and the fact that Prince Harry has spoken publicly about his own mental health difficulties. Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, and Princess Diana were all known to have seen therapists.

The younger royals — and now Merkle — have been enthusiastic participants in this broader discourse on mental health, which relies on a definition of mental illness that is both expansive and depoliticised. Everyone is encouraged to be more emotionally open in reaction against the ‘stiff upper lip’ adopted by the queen’s generation — but little attention is paid to the issues of wealth, class, and access to scarce public resources.

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Rather than seeing disclosure as the first step towards seeking treatment, this newly popular model understands disclosure to be a form of treatment in and of itself — in fact, the more public the disclosure, the better. Jo Hemmings, a self-described “media psychologist”, spoke on LBC radio on Tuesday to honour Meghan Markle’s own efforts in this regard, saying that: “it was extremely healthy to share it with the entire world” because “she needs the world to listen to her… she’s just taking talking therapy to its extreme”.

She has been described as “brave” by the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki. And the mental health charity Mind tweeted out a statement acknowledging that although “opening up in this way can be really difficult… when high profile people talk about these experiences, it helps to break down the stigma around mental health issues.”

And yet it’s not at all clear what negative consequences Markle was risking in speaking about her history of depression. One of the very few public figures to have questioned her account, Piers Morgan, received more than 41,000 complaints to Ofcom, was immediately rebuked by his co-host, and has since stepped down from his position at Good Morning Britain. It seems that, on this issue at least, the public are determinedly sympathetic towards Markle.

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There is no student mental health crisis

By Louise Perry

Not all disclosures of mental illness would be greeted with such (almost) unanimous support. Historically, celebrities who have confess to having recovered from common and invisible mental health problems like anxiety and depression are far better received than those whose displays of illness are more public and alarming – think of Britney Spears shaving her head, Michael Jackson bleaching his skin, or Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah’s sofa.

In a 2018 Guardian article about her own experiences of mental illness, the journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson writes of a very particular style of “opening up”:

“In recent years the discussion around mental health has hit the mainstream. I call it the Conversation. The Conversation is dominated by positivity and the memeification of a battle won… it tends to focus on depression and anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. It is less comfortable with the mental illnesses deemed more unpalatable – people who act erratically, hallucinate, have violent episodes or interpersonal instability.”

The Conversation shies away from conditions that are disturbing, destructive, and very clearly not curable through disclosure alone. In some rare instances, there are forms of mental distress from which people never recover, and to which the only solution is heavy medication and institutionalisation. The Conversation doesn’t know what to do about those.

Instead, the focus is on those forms of mental illness that are really just extreme manifestations of universal forms of emotional distress, like sadness and worry. Imagine the response if Markle had confessed to suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder, or if her perinatal mental illness had manifested, not in an urge to hurt herself, but instead an urge to hurt her baby. It is one thing to admit to a depressive illness that is now passed. It is quite another to admit to a permanent condition that is liable to produce frightening and poorly understood symptoms like psychosis.

But only a small minority of psychiatric diagnoses fall into this category. In England, Mind reports that 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year, overwhelmingly either depression or anxiety, and although there is little evidence to suggest that antidepressants work better than a placebo, more than one in ten people are now taking them. For Conversation enthusiasts, these figures should be understood as positive — a sign that we are finally “opening up” about private suffering, and thereby waking up to the true prevalence of mental illness.

But few proponents of this approach ever pause to reflect on whether this kind of radical openness actually does lead to improvement. Given that suicide rates in the UK have reduced only slightly in the last 40 years, and have actually increased in the US, while rates of non-fatal self injury have shot up, it’s certainly not obvious that the new model is any more effective than the old one.

And while the expansiveness of the Conversation may potentially serve to destigmatise, it also serves to obscure. This week, the journalist and mental health campaigner Bryony Gordon described mental illness as a “great leveller”, affecting prince and pauper alike. But while it is of course true that the highly privileged do sometimes experience mental illness, this is a category of disease that is closely tied to societal conditions that both create and aggravate distress — and the Conversation, with its preference for talking therapy over material change, cannot accommodate that kind of analysis.

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By Giles Fraser

When we lump together depressed duchesses and schizophrenic homeless people into the same category of “the mentally ill” — a category that, in any given year, will apparently contain fully a quarter of us —  precise analysis becomes impossible. A graphic on a government website reporting that “50% of people seen sleeping rough had mental health needs”, for instance, is now unintelligible. Does this mean that half of rough sleepers are in urgent need of being sectioned? Or would their problems be solved by relocating to California and “speaking their truth”?

A key participant in the Conversation, Heads Together — an organisation spearheaded by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and intermittently supported by Prince Harry — aims to “tackle stigma and change the conversation on mental health”, with the solutions presented all orientated around deliberately uncontroversial forms of education, generally through digital means.

Which is unsurprising, given that Prince William, as a future head of state, is required to maintain political neutrality. So although his campaigning work is no doubt sincerely meant, it is also obliged to be anodyne. It can’t mention issues like class or government policy. It can’t even demand increased funding for NHS services. It is necessarily limited to platitudinous statements which do destigmatise — albeit in a very limited way — but which also flatten and distract. The public response to Markle’s disclosure is entirely in keeping with the Conversation, which — with celebrity and royal assistance — has succeeded in normalising a very narrow band of mental illnesses, but has also stripped away any semblance of political critique.

But when it comes to our complex relationship with the royals, nothing illustrates it better than the American Cinderella story: a kind of modern riff on the original fairytale with, usually, a feminist twist. From The Prince & Me to A Christmas Prince to The Princess Switch, these fictional fantasies centre on an ordinary girl who falls in love with a prince, usually to the horror of his family, but also often to her own distress. She’s a farm girl! She doesn’t know how to curtsy or what fork to use! She hardly even bathes — and she doesn’t want to!

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Woody Allen: the biggest lie of all

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The American Cinderella is independent, hard-working, and as uninterested in a royal marriage as she is unqualified for one. But love will not be denied, and in these stories, a compromise is inevitably reached: the princess-to-be teaches her stuck-up in-laws that it’s okay to embrace change, but she herself also develops a new appreciation for stodgy royal values like tradition, duty, and service. And they get married and live happily ever after, the end.

But in real life, the wedding is only the beginning.

*

Oprah’s tell-all interview with the stateside Sussexes reminds us just how much the fairytale once seemed real. Meghan Markle was the glamorous true-life realisation of that empowered princess, and her marriage to Prince Harry the stuff that modern fairytales were made of. There was the transcontinental romance, the lavish wedding, an incoming Duchess who was not just American but a mixed-race divorcee with an impressive education and a career of her own — and no, she didn’t know how to curtsy.

Granted, it wasn’t exactly like the movies; there were whispered suggestions in the gossip pages that Markle had strategically placed herself in Harry’s orbit in a way that was more wicked stepsister than Cinderella. But it was close enough. Watching from the US, there was a sense not just that Markle was living the dream, but that she was irritating to all the right people (yes, especially the racist ones) in a way that was profoundly, even historically, American. 1776 was a long time ago, but don’t we still get a little thrill out of that irreverent contempt for authority — especially if it is wearing a crown?

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Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?

By Tanya Gold

Fast forward to the big twist a year ago, when Harry and Meghan announced that they would be stepping back from royal life. Even not knowing exactly what it meant, it certainly seemed like a win. A win for Meghan, who was being abused by the British tabloids (not to mention, allegedly, certain less-enlightened members of her new extended family), and also for American values, for freedom itself. From across the pond, Megxit seemed like a second, more intimate iteration of our original Revolution, complete with its own Declaration of Independence (this one announced on Instagram along with the couple’s new brand-to-be, Sussex Royal).

There was even the particularly delicious irony of Harry having appeared at a 2018 benefit performance of Hamilton — a musical about his ancestors getting kicked out of America. Harry even sang a couple lines from the song in which a grossly overconfident King George proclaims his intentions never to relinquish the nation to autonomous rule. The lyrics depict a ruler in the grips of pompous delusion, in the style of a needy lover:

“You’ll be back, soon you’ll see
You’ll remember you belong to me”

It’s funny, of course, because we all know how that little romance ended. But a year after Megxit began, it’s equally clear that the Sussexes won’t be back — and more importantly, they won’t be quiet.

*

To hear Meghan and Harry tell it, their departure from royal life was a question not of freedom, but survival. The biggest bombshell came from Meghan, who said that she was desperately lonely, isolated, and eventually suicidal, and that the Palace refused to offer support. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she said.

This question of safety, physical and otherwise, loomed throughout the conversation — as did the ghost of Diana, who was also beloved by American audiences, and whose death is perceived to be at least partially the fault of the royal family who shunned her after her divorce. Harry said he feared that history would repeat itself, and Meghan described a barrage of intimidation during her pregnancy with Archie — not just death threats and tabloid harassment, but racial insensitivity from inside the palace, including concerns from an unnamed party over how “dark” their firstborn would be. Together, the couple painted a picture of desperation, being treated like outsiders by an institution that bent over backward to help everyone else.

“They were willing to lie to protect other members of the family, but they weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband,” Meghan said.

It’s a great line that is also, alas, a little too good to sell the illusion of totally off-the-cuff, unrehearsed honesty that we’re meant to take away from this moment (despite Oprah’s assurances at the start of the interview that her subjects hadn’t been prepped in advance). It reminds you that Meghan is both an actress and an influencer, and exceptional at both — and also that this interview came after weeks of escalating spin from both camps, which reached its peak with a story that Meghan was a difficult Duchess who shamelessly bullied her staff.

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By Mary Harrington

But even if those rumours are true, it’s an insignificant skirmish in a war that has already been won. Just look at the Sussexes, sitting with Oprah under a vine-draped pergola, Spotify and Netflix deals in hand, as radiant as the California sun. Meghan hasn’t just escaped back to the States with her prince in tow: she’s tossing a lit match over her shoulder — with an assist from Oprah, no less, who might just be the closest thing the US has to a Queen. Is it all a bit contrived? Without question, from the strategic displays of emotion to the “casual” followup with Meghan and Harry as they tend to their backyard flock of rescue chickens. (“I just love rescuing,” Meghan says, in the second-most loaded moment of the interview.)

But that’s Hollywood, and that’s America — and this is Meghan Markle’s home turf. She knows that what we really love, even more than a traditional fairy tale, is an underdog story that ends with a cry for freedom, a confessional interview, and a few tears. Even if it’s all just made for TV.