Current Affairs The "another stabbing in London" thread

[abelard]

The kids who chased a lad before stabbing him at the end of our street a few weeks back chased him past a free/open to the public basketball/football court and outdoor gym. It might be a valid excuse in some places, but I don't really think so in London.

Good grief. As if anyone is suggesting that vestigial New Labour basketball courts alone prevent crime.

Young kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with turbulent upbringings do not join gangs because they WANT to, or because they are evil. They are almost always pressured and manipulated into to it, at an age when everybody is impressionable and they in particular are vulnerable and lack positive counterbalancing influences in their lives.

The state doing everything it possible can to make their lives even more unstable, like driving their often-single parents from their homes via the bedroom tax, or reducing and arbitrarily witholding their income via Universal Credit, or forcing them away from home after school and into minimum-wage zero hours contracts with unpredicable last minute scheduling while also raising the cost and reducing the frequency of the transit they need even to get there, obviously does not help.

Nor does shuttering hundreds of libraries, sacking thousands of social and outreach workers, cutting school meals, inducing teachers to take second jobs and driving 10% out of the profession each year, and reducing schools even in wealthy areas to literally begging just for the basic funds they need to sustain daily operations. Diverting 95% of what littles remains to Cameron's demonstrably failed self-serving benevolent Victorian revelries is, as the original post makes perfectly clear, also patently stupid and counterproductive.

When the state creates a vacuum, organised crime or petty gangs are always first the fill the void, as it has done in every other context, at every other time in history. Invest a negligible fraction of the public purse in strengthening families and restoring pro-active after-school programs. Or spend the rest of their lives paying to arrest them, sentence them, feed, warm, and house them.

This is all enabled not so much by Tory Victorian Age relics, which are always a given in UK politics, but by self-flattering liberal middle-class types who fantasize about how brilliant they'd be at being poor, without even the faintest inclination of how many opportunities and structural advantages they take forgranted. Believe it or not, but kids who are made to feel unworthy and unwanted their entire lives by media, by government, or even any time they enter a shop - in the manner displayed by so many posters on this forum - do not instinctively feel comfortable using even public spaces designed specifically for them - which is the entire point of maintaining programs that provide guidance, structure, confidence, and accountability.

I know the small Daily Mail chorus on here can always be counted upon to rise to the occasion, but it's pretty off-brand for you Bruce. At least pretend like you've spent a moment actually thinking it over first....

 

[orchard]

There's never an excuse for unprovoked stabbing.

I was a bored teenage tearaway during the mid-90's in one of the roughest cities in England at the time: I did drugs, smashed up things, got into fights...but even in that scene if anyone ever pulled out a knife it was gasps all round...no one ever did that unless they were full-on psycho, and not even the hard men at the time who took pride in scraps wanted to be known like that. Call it an unwritten code of honour, if you like.

Nowadays there's a lot more knife about... a lot more psychos. Something's changed in society and it's nowt to do with the youth having things to do or not. The concern about knives becoming acceptable culture is valid, and it's most definitely not David Cameron's fault as that pathetic Twitter tirade would have it.‎

Be more specific because knives are an acceptable part of our culture.

 

[abelard]

UK Knife crime was actually quite a bit worse in 80s and early 90s - when men sat up straight with their shoulders back and fought with honour - than it is now

I wonder what sort of structural and economic similarities we might find between now and then

It's almost as though personal anecdotes from the halycon days have no value in policy discussions

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Good grief. As if anyone is suggesting that vestigial New Labour basketball courts alone prevent crime.

Young kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with turbulent upbringings do not join gangs because they WANT to, or because they are evil. They are almost always pressured and manipulated into to it, at an age when everybody is impressionable and they in particular are vulnerable and lack positive counterbalancing influences in their lives.

The state doing everything it possible can to make their lives even more unstable, like driving their often-single parents from their homes via the bedroom tax, or reducing and arbitrarily witholding their income via Universal Credit, or forcing them away from home after school and into minimum-wage zero hours contracts with unpredicable last minute scheduling while also raising the cost and reducing the frequency of the transit they need even to get there, obviously does not help.

Nor does shuttering hundreds of libraries, sacking thousands of social and outreach workers, cutting school meals, inducing teachers to take second jobs and driving 10% out of the profession each year, and reducing schools even in wealthy areas to literally begging just for the basic funds they need to sustain daily operations. Diverting 95% of what littles remains to Cameron's demonstrably failed self-serving benevolent Victorian revelries is, as the original post makes perfectly clear, also patently stupid and counterproductive.

When the state creates a vacuum, organised crime or petty gangs are always first the fill the void, as it has done in every other context, at every other time in history. Invest a negligible fraction of the public purse in strengthening families and restoring pro-active after-school programs. Or spend the rest of their lives paying to arrest them, sentence them, feed, warm, and house them.

This is all enabled not so much by Tory Victorian Age relics, which are always a given in UK politics, but by self-flattering liberal middle-class types who fantasize about how brilliant they'd be at being poor, without even the faintest inclination of how many opportunities and structural advantages they take forgranted. Believe it or not, but kids who are made to feel unworthy and unwanted their entire lives by media, by government, or even any time they enter a shop - in the manner displayed by so many posters on this forum - do not instinctively feel comfortable using even public spaces designed specifically for them - which is the entire point of maintaining programs that provide guidance, structure, confidence, and accountability.

I know the small Daily Mail chorus on here can always be counted upon to rise to the occasion, but it's pretty off-brand for you Bruce. At least pretend like you've spent a moment actually thinking it over first....

It's interesting that you don't mention once in your lengthy post the family, and the often missing father in that family. My wife works in this field, so at least some of what she does vicariously sinks in. There's a tendency among those of a leftish persuasion to portray the disadvantaged as plucky strivers who have simply been either unlucky in life or trodden on by the system. There's no room at all in that narrative for the choice they make and the contribution those choices have made to their life. All the responsibility is passed onto the state.

As a learned man, I'm sure you like to look for evidence to support your opinions, so I would ask you what is the evidence that all would be well if only we devoted much more money to what we already do/have done in the past? Where is the evidence that ~ 100 years of free public schooling has helped social mobility? Where is the evidence that a significant increase in the social safety net for children has reduced broken homes or child poverty?

You criticise people for making what are quite probably instinctive responses that are lacking in evidence to support them, but you're largely doing the same, albeit from a different perspective. There's a risk when you paint with a broad brush that you make things sound very easy, and a bit of extra money will sort things out just fine, but we see with things like education that white kids who get free school meals do significantly worse than kids from other ethnic backgrounds who get free school meals. They're something like 20% worse than Chinese kids, for instance. If there is such variance, then what are the children for whom poverty doesn't have such a big impact doing that white kids don't seem to be doing? Maybe there is your answer rather than just saying "give us more money..."

Likewise with knife crime, which in London at least is overwhelmingly likely to be done by black teenage boys on other black teenage boys. What is it that makes these kids do that to each other that doesn't make Latino, Indian or eastern European teenagers stab one another?

 

[peteblue]

Good grief. As if anyone is suggesting that vestigial New Labour basketball courts alone prevent crime.

Young kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with turbulent upbringings do not join gangs because they WANT to, or because they are evil. They are almost always pressured and manipulated into to it, at an age when everybody is impressionable and they in particular are vulnerable and lack positive counterbalancing influences in their lives.

The state doing everything it possible can to make their lives even more unstable, like driving their often-single parents from their homes via the bedroom tax, or reducing and arbitrarily witholding their income via Universal Credit, or forcing them away from home after school and into minimum-wage zero hours contracts with unpredicable last minute scheduling while also raising the cost and reducing the frequency of the transit they need even to get there, obviously does not help.

Nor does shuttering hundreds of libraries, sacking thousands of social and outreach workers, cutting school meals, inducing teachers to take second jobs and driving 10% out of the profession each year, and reducing schools even in wealthy areas to literally begging just for the basic funds they need to sustain daily operations. Diverting 95% of what littles remains to Cameron's demonstrably failed self-serving benevolent Victorian revelries is, as the original post makes perfectly clear, also patently stupid and counterproductive.

When the state creates a vacuum, organised crime or petty gangs are always first the fill the void, as it has done in every other context, at every other time in history. Invest a negligible fraction of the public purse in strengthening families and restoring pro-active after-school programs. Or spend the rest of their lives paying to arrest them, sentence them, feed, warm, and house them.

This is all enabled not so much by Tory Victorian Age relics, which are always a given in UK politics, but by self-flattering liberal middle-class types who fantasize about how brilliant they'd be at being poor, without even the faintest inclination of how many opportunities and structural advantages they take forgranted. Believe it or not, but kids who are made to feel unworthy and unwanted their entire lives by media, by government, or even any time they enter a shop - in the manner displayed by so many posters on this forum - do not instinctively feel comfortable using even public spaces designed specifically for them - which is the entire point of maintaining programs that provide guidance, structure, confidence, and accountability.

I know the small Daily Mail chorus on here can always be counted upon to rise to the occasion, but it's pretty off-brand for you Bruce. At least pretend like you've spent a moment actually thinking it over first....

I agree with some of what you write, but not all. Ignoring your last paragraph, the previous two are pretty well spot on.

While I agree that the role of the state should be to establish the environment, it is not the role of the state to replace parents and this is where society is failing. The closing of Libraries as an excuse in the day of the Internet is nonsense, indeed kids in villages have never had libraries nor basketball courts or whatever and many of their parents are as poor as any in the inner cities, but don’t go around stabbing people.

The abandonment of religion and of religious support, of whatever faith, and of schools that have given up discipline, coupled with criminally feckless parents have all contributed.

This is not a problem that can be resolved just by the state or the spending of more money, this is an issue that goes to the core of family life and the values being instilled in kids at home and in school.....

 

[peteblue]

It's interesting that you don't mention once in your lengthy post the family, and the often missing father in that family. My wife works in this field, so at least some of what she does vicariously sinks in. There's a tendency among those of a leftish persuasion to portray the disadvantaged as plucky strivers who have simply been either unlucky in life or trodden on by the system. There's no room at all in that narrative for the choice they make and the contribution those choices have made to their life. All the responsibility is passed onto the state.

As a learned man, I'm sure you like to look for evidence to support your opinions, so I would ask you what is the evidence that all would be well if only we devoted much more money to what we already do/have done in the past? Where is the evidence that ~ 100 years of free public schooling has helped social mobility? Where is the evidence that a significant increase in the social safety net for children has reduced broken homes or child poverty?

You criticise people for making what are quite probably instinctive responses that are lacking in evidence to support them, but you're largely doing the same, albeit from a different perspective. There's a risk when you paint with a broad brush that you make things sound very easy, and a bit of extra money will sort things out just fine, but we see with things like education that white kids who get free school meals do significantly worse than kids from other ethnic backgrounds who get free school meals. They're something like 20% worse than Chinese kids, for instance. If there is such variance, then what are the children for whom poverty doesn't have such a big impact doing that white kids don't seem to be doing? Maybe there is your answer rather than just saying "give us more money..."

Likewise with knife crime, which in London at least is overwhelmingly likely to be done by black teenage boys on other black teenage boys. What is it that makes these kids do that to each other that doesn't make Latino, Indian or eastern European teenagers stab one another?

My thoughts exactly Bruce......

 

[dholliday]

wow, @abelard your contempt and distrust of the working class is blatant. Distasteful stuff from yourself.

The working class get along just fine without resorting to knifing people to death. Regardless of whether it's a Tory or a Labour government.

In your post you reveal the kind of lingering prejudices which are partly the cause of much social strife:

Young kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with turbulent upbringings do not join gangs because they WANT to, or because they are evil. They are almost always pressured and manipulated into to it, at an age when everybody is impressionable and they in particular are vulnerable and lack positive counterbalancing influences in their lives.

Not true. As evidenced by working class kids from almost all other backgrounds who are similarly disadvantaged (including Arabic youth, Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Far East etc).

This is all enabled not so much by Tory Victorian Age relics, which are always a given in UK politics, but by self-flattering liberal middle-class types who fantasize about how brilliant they'd be at being poor, without even the faintest inclination of how many opportunities and structural advantages they take forgranted. Believe it or not, but kids who are made to feel unworthy and unwanted their entire lives by media, by government, or even any time they enter a shop - in the manner displayed by so many posters on this forum - do not instinctively feel comfortable using even public spaces designed specifically for them - which is the entire point of maintaining programs that provide guidance, structure, confidence, and accountability.

This is horribly-patronising superior stuff from you. You're not giving the working class any humanity at all. I come from the working class, we were breadline for a few years, and we were quite capable of not acting like gang-warring idiots, and no one wants to be treated like lost children who don't know any better.

I know the small Daily Mail chorus on here can always be counted upon to rise to the occasion, but it's pretty off-brand for you Bruce. At least pretend like you've spent a moment actually thinking it over first....

Another judgemental call from yourself, without grounds...just to artificially strengthen your own position.

Here are pieces from The Guardian, The Indy, and the Beeb...all considered left-leaning:

Warnings of 'public health emergency' as violent crime surges - Murders and knife crimes soar in England and Wales as police detection rate hits record low

after falling for several years, knife crime is rising again.

It is not just London. Rising crime in Greater Manchester means that people in the Northwest are more likely to be crime victims than anywhere else in England and Wales.

The Telegraph obtained via the Freedom of Information Act statistics which tell us UK, and in particular London, is descending into American-levels of black-on-black crime.

Have you heard of drill music? Now as an electronic musician myself I can appreciate some of that on a musical level, and support all of it as an outlet of creativity. Oh look they have something to do now! So what do you know of that culture and which American subculture does it remind you of (where guns replace knives)? As I said earlier, knives as a deadly weapon are part of the accepted culture (as are gangs). This wasn't the case in previous decades.

You have to be able to answer the question: why aren't similarly-disadvantaged working class kids from all sorts of enthic backgrounds rebelling in the same way as those involved in knife-happy gang culture? The answer is plain: it's because these other subcultures haven't accepted knife-carrying gang culture as being something that's socially acceptable. Ok, so why is that?

@Bruce Wayne answered this when he noted the absence of a father figure (this is also backed up by research: black kids are disproportionately raised without a father while growing up). So now that we're here, can we really blame Tory policy for this? USA betrays a very similar problem, do we blame Trump for that?

Disclaimer: while I accept USA has an awfully-hateful racist problem which adds to the nuances, UK does not.

No, we can't blame the political bogeymen. But at least we've very likely identified the root cause of kids from a black ethnic background resorting to gangs: namely lack of positive male role models in the family while they're growing up. Political social policies would first need to catch up to this reality (political-correctness is a bit of a shield against admitting such an issue), then it can think about what the system could do to help.

 

[Number_25]

Diane Abbott wrote an excellent piece for the New Statesman in January:

These more harmful categories are often the crimes that the public cares about most: violent crime including knife and gun crime and sexual assault. Almost two years ago, Theresa May told a conference on the issue that “knife crime has a devastating impact on victims, families and communities, and I am determined to do all I can to prevent it”. Total crimes where a knife was used have risen from just under 30,000 to almost 37,000 since she made that claim.

It is time for the government to end its denial on the issue and to act. But their current actions are only exacerbating the situation. Police officer numbers fell again in the latest 12 months, by around 900. More than 21,000 officers have been cut by the Tories since 2010. We now have the lowest level of officer numbers since comparable records began in 1996. Police commissioners and acting chief constables are clear; they are over-stretched and under-funded.

The underlying causes of crime are varied and complex. But they include the lack of social outlets and decent work opportunities for young people as well as the decline in community policing. All of these have suffered under Tory cuts and its austerity programme, from local authority youth funding to the growth in zero hours jobs as well as police cuts.

I also think we need to learn from what works. The evidence in Scotland of falling knife crime after treating it as a public health issue deserves more attention. In 2005, the United Nations named Scotland the most violent country in the developed world. Since then, the police response has been accompanied by co-ordinated efforts by other public services to change the culture of violence. It is reported that, of the 35 deaths of young people from knife crime in 2017, none were in Scotland. Progress on this has also been made in the Netherlands. Maybe there is no universal remedy, but these experiences are surely worth studying.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Diane Abbott wrote an excellent piece for the New Statesman in January:

Not disputing what she's said, but what are her sources for the claims she makes?

 

[peteblue]

Diane Abbott wrote an excellent piece for the New Statesman in January:

Unfortunately she was quoting numbers and we know she has a difficulty with this. But putting that aside for the moment, she mentions Police cuts numerous times, so is there any chance of explaining how more or less police would have had any effect upon black gangs stabbing each other like yesterday. If she’d pushed for stop and search or maybe suggested that the parents do something then fair enough, but no, it’s all the governments fault, or society, or anything really apart from the gangs who actually do this......

 

[Number_25]

Not disputing what she's said, but what are her sources for the claims she makes?

Total crimes where a knife was used have risen from just under 30,000 to almost 37,000 since she made that claim.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-knife-crime-rises-16-12944968

. Police officer numbers fell again in the latest 12 months, by around 900. More than 21,000 officers have been cut by the Tories since 2010

https://fullfact.org/crime/police-numbers/

But they include the lack of social outlets and decent work opportunities for young people as well as the decline in community policing.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-5113-6_12
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/bp.2008.40

Public health: Scotland

https://www.theguardian.com/members...tland-reduced-knife-deaths-among-young-people

 

[Number_25]

Unfortunately she was quoting numbers and we know she has a difficulty with this. But putting that aside for the moment, she mentions Police cuts numerous times, so is there any chance of explaining how more or less police would have had any effect upon black gangs stabbing each other like yesterday. If she’d pushed for stop and search or maybe suggested that the parents do something then fair enough, but no, it’s all the governments fault, or society, or anything really apart from the gangs who actually do this......

You telling me that police outreach projects don't work?

 

[Bruce Wayne]

But they include the lack of social outlets and decent work opportunities for young people as well as the decline in community policing.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-5113-6_12
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/bp.2008.40

I don't have access to anything beyond the abstract, what do they say?

 

[Number_25]

I don't have access to anything beyond the abstract, what do they say?

I don't want to get the forum into trouble, but look at something that starts with an S and ends with ciHub.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

I don't want to get the forum into trouble, but look at something that starts with an S and ends with ciHub.

I'm going to get hacked by the Kremlin aren't I?