boothy;225818 wrote:
its a point of view
also too much emphasis is placed on london as bein 20 times worse than anywhere else, i dont think its alone
London is more densely populated than any other city, so problems will always hit the area first. Some Northern cities are getting bad, even Suffolk towns/villages have problems (there were a number of stabbings in Stowmarket, which is a small town a fraction the size of Ipswich without that many young people)
Ipswich has a slight problem in places where young people gather but few stabbings. However there are rather a lot of CCTV cameras and cops here watching people (a situation accepted since December 2006), and like Reading (a similar sized large town/aspiring city) the bobbies tend to go in quickly and separate anyone they see squaring up to one another.
I believe there was one stabbing near where I live recently but this was between young teenagers who knew one another rather than a random attack, and was hushed up by those involved (certainly didn’t make the papers)
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i do think it can be exagerrated
Whilst Britiain still remains less worse than many foreign countries. I’ve been reading the crime news daily across 3 regions (London/SE Eastern England) for at least 10 years and have never seen so many people getting murdered. If anything from listening to scanner the cops play down the amount of crime what really happens in any area (also because of human rights laws victims can choose for the press not to be notified of crimes)
I do think however its blamed mostly on young people when the rise in violence is across the board, with people as old as our grandfathers getting involved, also a massive rise in domestic violence even amongst the middle aged.
Also too much emphasis is placed on the use of weapons when it is more a problem culture of violence, people can kill or seriously someone larger than them with bare hands/feet, not even with fancy kung fu stuff but just by outnumbering them or going for vulnerable body parts.
I remember the exact same panic in 1986 but the amount of incidents was actually slightly less. There was a general increase in street violence amongst young males around that time (bear in mind I was a teenager then and “at the frontline!”), but less actual murders.
Ironically what stopped it to an extent was the arrival of good quality MDMA and other drugs on these shores, the the drugs culture the early rave scene started, but this just pushed the violence to a smaller group of people (such as between dealers, or domestic arguments between friends, family and partners on comedowns).
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the tories say those who carry knives to be jailed
how the fuck they plan to do this i dont know, young offenders institutes are more packed than adult jails!
plus thats a lot of people
not all the offenders would be YOI age, many are well over 21, but adult prisons too are full..
Actually one way it might work would be to not send down a drug dealer or user without a knife or who has never got involved in violence – but to give minimum sentences to those both doing drugs and carrying weapons.
This would have to be done very subtly though to avoid overtly cocking a snook at the UN anti drugs convention.
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this campaign at the moment is bollocks
http://www.itdoesntneedtohappen.com or whatever
instead of patronisin young people by tryin the emotional guilt trip (“i loved him, now he’s gone, because of knives…”)
this is true. I know in the darker days of my life the only thing what stopped me hurting or killing perceived enemies was either the threats of reprisal from their friends or that prison life would be more shit than my normal life, not any do-gooders campaign. I think they overestimate how “civilised” humans actually are.
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most people still feel safer with a knife on them, or those i spoke to do anyway.
yep I know a few younger lads who now carry knives (although would only use them in extreme circumstances) this is a definite deterioration though, as all through my own teens or the 90s it was still rare for someone to carry a weapon of any sort (or to use it) unless they were actually living a life of routine daily crime.
Carrying a weapon against an equally equipped enemy and knowing the risks is a military doctrine of “mutually assured destruction”, the same that various nations’ military use to justify the posession of nuclear weapons.
