PORCH PIRATES

You usually don’t have to work too far down my neighbourhood Facebook page to find screen-grabs from someone’s home security system. Sometimes the video itself is posted, with the clock running in the top corner, as if Kiefer Sutherland is working to defuse a bomb just off-screen. There is rarely any sound, which tends to focus the attention.

A planter might be stolen, or an Amazon package, even the occasional bike. But more often than not, no theft is obvious at all. A warning is posted anyway - Neighbours, be on your guard!

Immediately below the footage someone moans reflexively about the state of the neighbourhood. Sometimes they threaten to just give up and leave. It’s just not safe any more. What is the world coming to? The horror! Apocalypse McBurney. At some point it is decided that “Crackheads” are to blame. Or "Porch Pirates”. Vagrants, Shitheads, Assholes.

I saw a clip this afternoon of someone in a black parka, back to the camera, wrestling with a striped deckchair (itself stolen from a Graham Greene novel, surely) on someone’s front steps. The perpetrator might have been Meryl Streep or Justin Timberlake, I had no idea which of them was more likely. Which makes it hard to believe that the point of the post is to help identify the “thief”.

The real aim of these videos — every one of them — is to suggest that we are under siege, that law and order is at risk of collapse. They are cheap cover for anger and fear, and for a reactionary ‘us versus them’ sort of speechmaking.

If we persist, these tawdry and oh-so-unhelpful Fox News impersonations will see us make enemies of our neighbours. They will diminish us all.