You don't need statistics to be affected by violence

SALISBURY may not be a hotbed of violent crime, statistically speaking.
But you only have to witness one shocking incident, or be on the receiving end of a random blow when you’re passing someone else’s punch-up, and it will stay with you forever.
Like the poor 92-year-old chap who had his arm broken outside a pub in Bridge Street last month.
At his age it’s not just physical recovery, but regaining confidence, that takes a long time.
Reading about him brought to mind the summer, a decade ago, when my family hosted foreign students for a language school.
Attracted by the low prices at the same pub, one group – and I’m talking Swedes in their thirties and forties, with a penchant for traditional Icelandic knitwear – would gather there after lessons for a quiet pint.
Until the day a bunch of oiks with tattoos on their shaven heads began jumping around in the bar, getting ever closer to the students, then ‘accidentally’ bumped into one of them, taunting him: “Nice jumper, mate.”
The Scandinavians beat a hasty retreat.
I thought at the time: What an impression foreigners must get of Britons and of the behaviour we tolerate in public because we’re too scared to intervene. I’d be too scared, too.
Two or three years ago, I was window-shopping in Catherine Street when a lad – still in his teens, I should say – came marching up the opposite pavement, phone glued to his ear, effing and blinding at maximum volume and threatening extreme violence towards someone who had failed to pay him for something. Illegal substances sprang to mind.
Shoppers averted their eyes and quietly parted to let him through. Nobody wanted to attract his attention.
He was fearless, certain that he would not be challenged, and there were no police in sight.
When I mentioned to a colleague that I was thinking of writing about this, she told me she had just witnessed a fight between two men in Exeter Street.
“They were pushing and shoving, shouting and swearing, and one of them pushed his bike into the other one,” she said.
“I had to go back up the road and cross over to come down the other side, and other people were doing the same thing.
“I checked that I had my phone handy, in case someone got really hurt. You want to fulfil your civil responsibilities, but you don’t want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Most of us want nothing more than to get on with our law-abiding lives in peace.
But we share our streets with a significant minority of anti-social yobs who seem free to cause havoc whenever they feel like it.