Mozart, Our Newest Crime Fighter?

UK police have enlisted a new crime fighting method:  classical music.

"The approaches to three ((subway) stations on the eastern edge of the District Line were subjected for six months to bursts of Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel and Mussorgsky. The result was a one-third reduction in the number of robberies and a general diminution of other anti-social incidents.

Cheap, clean and classy, the method is now being broached at a further 35 stations. It works as a deterrent effect rather than a corrective one. Hooligans are not reformed by Mozart, so much as driven away by a noise that is as alien and hostile to their world as whale song to a camel herd.

Psychologists, jumping onto a moving carriage, hypothesise that symphonic music leaves youths feeling œuncool, disoriented and at risk of ridicule. Train managers on Tyneside in northeast England report that it eliminated low-level nuisances such as swearing, spitting and smoking. The second Rachmaninov piano concerto in C minor had the highest success rate (odd that this Brief Encounter soundtrack should still cling to the railways like lichen).

Bus termini in the East Riding of Yorkshire experienced similar benefits and Co-Op stores in the West Country have been fitted with subverted ghetto blasters to fire salvos of classical music at the approach of any hostile looking gang of layabouts. Travellers in musically protected areas say they feel reassured for their safety and culturally enhanced by the accompaniment to their waiting time."