Knife Crime

Akala is a very intelligent guy.

 

I know there's a big hang up about stop and search, but I'd use it to its full extent. Trouble is there just aren't the coppers on the streets in the numbers needed to make it a deterrent. There's a maximum 4 year custodial sentence for carrying a knife, but that is for adults and most of the knife crime seems to be committed by children. Not sure what's going on in schools about knife crime, but I think they need to show some shocking videos of knife wounds and really drive home the consequences of carrying,

 

Yep I mentioned him in OP. But like Tobes said, it's a complex problem with complex solution. Far easier to look for a simple answer to please the masses.

 

Only way is where the consequences of being caught carrying outweighs the fear or need to carry ... and stop castigating the police ... if you ain't carrying you have nowt to fear ... too many young lives being ended by cowards ... if you carry and use against someone unarmed then you are a coward ... no question.

 

I know this and the suggestions I made are largely reactive measures to knife crime. I also know there's lots of preventative work to be done to stop kids from wanting to carry knives in the first place, but often this work is long term and doesn't always yield instant results. So I have to say in the immediate term there has to be a massive deterrent to try and quell the problem and for me that's stop and search, with tough sanctions for being caught carrying a knife.

 

One thing i find worse than kids carrying a knife.



Adults carrying a knife. The soft ****ing weasel ****s.

 

Nowt to fear.... apart from....maybe being stabbed

.......

 

Noted. How do I cut my spuds though?

 

Just make sure your knife is bigger than theirs and you should be fine son


^^^wise words that I tell my boy every morning.

 

Long post (sorry Tel) but this is slap bang in my wheel-house:

Firstly, crime rates are down and compared to the mid-90's they are hugely down. Perception of crime has increased steadily though. Violent crime has remained high, it is the only one to buck the trend sadly.



One huge thing that has changed from when i was a kid was that you used to be able to leave your disagreements at the school gates and go home and sleep it off. Especially with boys it was often enough to calm it all down. Nowadays, through social media, it builds up instead and becomes a big issue. Honestly with my boys I'm less worried about knife crime than I am about social media (I reckon 90%+ of teenagers would fit any definition of addiction you'd care to use when it comes to social media/ mobile phones).

Akala is ace and absolutely spot on about most of his comments in this regard.

Increasing punishment for carrying doesn't work, it simply doesn't. For every study that suggests longer sentences reduce crime there's 99 that show it doesn't and in fact almost certainly makes the situation worse. So what is the solution? Probably the opposite, countries which focus on the causes of the crime in the first place, educating the perpetrators and rehabilitating those who are involved are the ones who tend to weed out the problem. You come down hard on these kids and they'll spend their entire lives precluded from mainstream society due to their criminal record and viewing the police (and wider authorities) as the enemy. A view they will then pass on to their friends and children. People keep saying what they want to tell these kids when in truth the solution is probably to listen to them more and work out what the underlying issues are.

One thing I would disagree with though was the comment that exclusion from school was the start of a problem with the pupils. By the time a pupil is excluded nowadays they tend to have had a number of warnings and often get managed moves to other schools for a fresh start before they are abandoned by the system entirely. In 10 years I've only handled 3 permanent exclusions (not all from one school) and all three of those pupils could (and perhaps should) have been imprisoned for what they did to get excluded. It wasn't the start of a process it was the end of a process (beginning with their family - or often lack of - from birth) and yes they are then very likely to end up committing crimes because a) they are exactly the kind of people who think the rules don't apply to them b) they don't like authority c) they have almost certainly already committed crimes and will just continue. [ As an aside a police commissioner in Glasgow was on Radio 4 the other morning commenting about schools de-listing/ excluding pupils who were going to do badly in their GCSE's and then these pupils turned to knife crime. It was a shameful and frankly deceitful conflation of two separate issues which I'm hoping does not become some sort of public narrative].

 

So what's your solution Einstein ... more "understanding" ... amnesty and rehabilitation for the offenders whilst the death toll rises? ... let's ignore the impact on the families of the people killed ... just statistics ... rehabilitation of offenders is paramount

 

The problem is also the environment we need to do this in. Schools can play their part but they have their limitations - teachers and support staff often don't have the necessary skills (or time) to address this for a sustained period, budget cuts mean the necessary involvement of external agencies' support to train staff or work with these children is limited, and is dependent on sufficient parental support which is often not forthcoming or absent. My feeling is that in addition to schools, there needs to be greater investment in free/low-cost amenities which attract youngsters into other, more positive activities whilst also providing mentoring with the aim of a longer-term change in mindset.

 

How about 5 years in the armed forces if found carrying? ... no desk jobs ... teach them how to use weapons properly, give them a trade, an education ... what's not to like?

 

The irony being I was discharged from the forces for going at somebody with a knife.

 

Well we have a choice as a society.

Follow the example of the USA, Ignore all actual data and continue down the path of criminalising everyone we can and locking everyone up when possible. It has been shown not to work and actually make the situation worse but it's popular and makes people feel better about themselves so it's what I fully expect the government to do.

Or we follow the examples of countries like Holland who have put the rehabilitation of the offender as a higher priority and not only have crime rates fallen more drastically they actually now have prisons that are so empty they are renting them out to neighbouring countries.

As for the "whilst the death toll rises" Daily Mail type hyperbole... yeah lets copy what America does. That'll fix it. I'd facepalm back but it doesn't even begin to cover the issue.

 

I couldn't agree more with your liberal approach. They're closing prisons in the Netherlands because they've got a shortage of criminals.

Their liberal approach even reaches out to people addicted to drugs. They don't prosecute these guys, they help them and rehabilitate them and the results of doing this speak for themselves. Less users and less deaths. They teach kids from a young age about sex and drugs, they don't make them a sin, they give these kids the knowledge to make an informed choice. I've been stood in a cafe next to the red light district when local schools do tours of that area and they don't cover the kids eyes up when prostitutes are banging on the windows at potential customers, they let them see that it's completely normal.

Not many Dutch people smoke weed and use prostitutes, even though they're allowed to do so. That's largely down to the tourists to take advantage of things that have always been a sin in their countries.

 

Is it really as extreme as that? Wowzer.

To be honest I'm not that bothered whether something is liberal or more right-wing most of the time I'm just interested in whether it works (and/or creates problems). If a hard-line approach to criminal issues actually worked then I could get behind it. It doesn't though. I'm not a politician, I'm a pragmatist.

 

Yes we have a choice as a society ... but we also have choices as individuals ...

Each to their own but I'm fed up reading about how these individuals have been 'forced' into their offending ways by society ... there are choices to be made ... you can still make your way in the world through talent, commitment or just damned hard work.

Statistics are not universal proof in isolation ... they can be used selectively to support almost any hypothesis ... were the numbers of violent deaths per capita in London less whilst hanging was a punishment? ... likely yes... would that justify bringing it back if the stats back it up ... no.

My sympathies are always going to lie with the families of the stabbed, not the scrotes who have ended life.

 

Be impossible to say to be honest. 50 years ago it was much easier to not report crime (although it is fair to then assume there was a lot of unreported crime that was by it's very nature unmeasured!) and/or obfuscate crime. It simply is much much harder to get away with murder now and it's all recorded. I would suspect that London was a much more violent city back then though (50-60's London not exactly famed for safety) but the main thing that has been done to reduce crime in the last few decades? Good street lighting - but that's another thread.

Statistics can be abused for many things the key is to ignore politicians and journalists entirely and read non-partizan statisticians actually backing up work with mathematical vigour. The minority who are not pushing an agenda (those tasked with simply dispassionately looking at what reduces crime) are almost entirely unified on this.

My sympathies obviously also go with the families of those who have been stabbed (what a pointless things to say) and evidence shows that to prevent that happening in future is rehabilitation. Ignore it if you like, newspapers and politicians do as well and instead make vacuous comments like your final line, pay lip service to taking measures to tackle crime and then do exactly what doesn't work.