Would you get involved to stop this? The Home Secretary says it's your duty

THE OTHER night on the last train to Dover from London Charing Cross there was an incident that the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, would have deplored. The time was 12.25am and we were about five minutes away from Orpington when a man staggered up the aisle, briefcase akimbo, and tried to open a locked door.

He banged and banged on that door. Another man then stood up, shakily, and said he was "an idiot". There was shouting and pushing. The entire carriage watched insilence. There was more pushing, more swearing, more shouting.

Then I shouted at the two men to "stop it".

Everyone's heads swivelled as one in my direction. There was total silence for one long moment. Then everyone looked at the floor, or the newspaper, or out the window. The men resumed battle. Orpington station had never been so welcome.

So what would the Home Secretary have done? Yesterday he said that in order to end our uncaring "walk on by" society we all needed to realise that such incidents are not someone else's problem. We all need to have a go at petty crime. He noted that he recently saw a teenager spitting on other people. "I thought, `You can't just stand and watch this'." He intervened. "He gave me quite a lot of lip but after a while he calmed down," he said.

Some police do not agree with the Home Secretary. They would prefer that we should fight petty crime by making phone calls. "That is easily done in these days of mobiles," said Chief Superintendent Peter Gammon of the Police Superintendents' Association. This is because even boys whose only weapon appears to be spittle may be hiding a knife in their pockets. "Individual acts of so-called heroism go sour very frequently," he said. "Our policy is do not have a go. There have been some tragic incidents where people have been seriously injured and even killed."

He called Mr Straw's ideas "dangerous". "People need to assist police and work with them to create no-go areas for petty criminals but that is not about physical intervention. But it is about being prepared to stand up in court if necessary." Yesterday the Home Office was quick to qualify Mr Straw's remarks, saying that no one should put themselves in danger and that common sense was always required. "Nobody was suggest that anybody should be put at risk," a spokesman said. "What the Home Secretary is saying is that we all have a role to play as good citizens. These things are not somebody else's problem."

But Mr Straw's speech does endorse the idea of intervention. He is, after all, a man with at least three citizen's arrests to his name. He says that we need to create more "capable guardians" in our society.

"This is not just about giving communities back the confidence to take on the thieves and the drug dealers. It is about all of us realising that we have a role to play, in our everyday lives, in confronting the sort of low-level disorder and disrespect that leads on to more serious crime," he said.

But those whose lives arespent confronting such things have a view too. "It's the glib remark of a wealthy politician," said Bob Holman, a community worker in Glasgow's Easterhouse estate. He called Mr Straw's ideas "too simplistic" and said intervening can lead to revenge attacks.

Ignoring trouble did not express approval. "It might express justified fear. Action needs to be taken collectively within a neighbourhood and by people who are in a good relationship with the youngsters."

The Home Secretary said that he was not asking people to do anything that he has not done himself. This is true. Jack Straw seems to have been born with a "have-a-go" gene. As a child, he told off an ice-cream vendor for playing his music too loudly after 7pm. Over the years he has chased and apprehended two muggers and one burglar, the latter being cornered in a place called Nab Lane in Blackburn.

Psychologists have been studying bystander apathy since Kitty Genovese was attacked in front of 37 people in New York some 30 years ago. Their response was to turn up their television sets. In half an hour she was dead.

Research showed that her big mistake was to be attacked on a busy street. "As long as we think other people are around, we are less likely to act," said Professor Bibb Lataine, of Florida Atlanta University. "Each individual looks at a worrying event and decides it may not be as bad as he fears because others are not doing anything."

Even the Church of England understands why we all think of our own safety first. "But then you need to think what else you can do. If you only think of your own safety and walk off, then nothing is achieved," said Steve Jenkins, a spokesman for the Church of England. What would Jesus do? "I hate those questions. It's not something I can answer."

The Home Office says that we need to use our own judgement. This is difficult in an age when people are killed over a parking space or stabbed if they ask someone to stop queue-jumping.

Psychologists say it is more an individual thing. Certain types of people tend to intervene when they see a crime because they think it is the right thing to do. They tend to have been brought up in families with a strong sense of personal responsibility. They do not think they are brave, or particularly unusual.

Nobody was brave or unusual in the train carriage the other night. Two men fighting over a locked door is about as petty as it gets, but the Home Secretary would say that was no excuse.

Things could have turned nasty and then we would have wondered who to blame.