George Hamilton Again
November 27, 2008
George Hamilton, the blind shoplifter featured here on Same Difference last month, after he was banned from Edinburgh city centre, has struck again. This time, he has been caught stealing razor blades in Renfrewshire. He’s been jailed for 10 months.
Same Difference 
The blind shoplifter. the disabled mugger, the onelegged drug dealer. Iused to know people with those tags and labels. They provide the same function as the the gay gansgter, the zimmer frame shooter and others that I have known.
The reason that these stories are news is that they don’t fit with our assumptions about crime and those that cmmit crime. These narratives are carefully written for us and we like them because they appear to fit what we experience. Anything outside of that perception becomes news.
Narratives of social division tell us that we can only belong to one social bracket at a time and we believe this because again it fits into our everyday experience in the sense that we can only do one thing at a time, so we can only be one person at a time.
The fact is that our position in society is connected with all our other roles, all our other social brackets. So Mr Hamilton is blind and he commits crime. This is no accident. This has some kind of connection. This connection is almost never explored in the news media, or it is paid the scantest of regard.
there is a reason for that too, because if the connections between MR Hamilton and his criminal life were exposed then the news media would have to admit culpability and that cannot happen, so we are left with the puzzling notion that Mr Hamilton must be a freak of nature, that you can’t be blind and go shoplifting, that its inconceivable.
Jimmy Kerr
LikeLike
Thanks for your comments Jimmy Kerr.
I see your point completely, and if you read my first post on Mr Hamilton, ‘Whatever Next,’ I have said that I don’t see any reason why a blind person can’t shoplift. But I’m sure you agree that shoplifting is a crime, so blind or not, he should get appropriate punishment.
Personally I found the fact that he was banned from Edinburgh city centre more surprising and funy than the fact that he is DisAbled and a criminal.
LikeLike