What's happening in London? Brawl involving 100 people?

[AllTheCarsForMe]

I've just seen on Sky News that a teenager has passed away after a "brawl" involving more than 100 people! What on earth is going on?

@Cam22 Troll?

I agree all major cities have problems. I usually assume it's drug related - and it usually turns out that way. :-(

Those of you itching to get out of London. Why haven’t you then?
London is literally like a collection of villages/small towns. Lived here for 60 years. Brought up 2 sons here. Had our fair share of muggings etc but this sort of violence is gang related and rarely involves outsiders.
Also wouldn’t have a clue what was happening in other areas unless checked the internet constantly

Not defensive. Just pointing out that if you don't live here you know fuck all about it.

Tabloid news lives by the old mantra 'if it bleeds, it leads'
Paints a really distorted picture of what life is like here

I should have added that I agree that the majority of people in London are peaceful and just want a quiet life, including in the boroughs which are little bit more deprived.

But we have a minority of people who are allowed to ruin it for everyone else and who simply don't fear the police anymore and think they can get away with anything.

@Redqueenheart

But that's true of most large cities. I lived in Manchester when I was younger and drug-related gun crime there was so bad for a period that certain neighbourhoods were more or less off limits to the police.

There are certainly pockets in deprived parts of London where there are big problems with drug crime and this leads to stabbings and (occasional) shootings.

But a) this affects a very small fraction of the population. It's no less a tragedy for the people whom it affects but it just doesn't touch the lives of the vast majority of Londoners. And b) this problem exists in pockets of all of the UK's large cities.

But you don't get screeds of stuff on here saying "OMG I'd be terrified to live in Manchester/Birmingham/Leeds/Belfast/Glasgow". It's always London.

None Taken
I am 57 and although, in the 80s , we had Steaming (groups going into usually a clothing shop and mass ransacking and running with the goods) but back then People on the whole still fought with fists .

Its very scary there now and I have not been to Central London for about 5 years. Don't intend too anytime soon either

Certainly seems to be true.

I don’t read tabloids for my news. (Presumably you do.)

I’ve lived in London for twenty years and think I’ve seen one fight in all that time. People who do not live here and base their perception on news reports never have a clue.

www.grunge.com/830652/the-most-dangerous-cities-in-the-united-kingdom/ Some actual figures on crime rates are available here (taken from the ONS). You hear more about crime in London because absolute numbers are higher (obviously) and because events in London are more often reported by (London-centric) national media.

Misrepresenting this stuff is annoying for Londoners but also extremely unfair on residents of other cities, where police are even more under-resourced than they are here, partly as a result of this sort of misrepresentation. Worth bearing in mind if you’re just here to have a pop.

Well that depends what part of London you are lucky enough to live in !

PS Could you be any more condescending to the OP at all ??

Oh another one who probably lives in a naice part of London .

It's not just London though. Birmingham Manchester Newcastle to name just a few.poverty few life chances and so on.london gets a lot of publicity I think

“Scarily lawless”??

Do you actually live in London?

I wondered when someone would be along to blame the Conservatives 😁. When in doubt, blame the Tories.
God forbid we remind ourselves that Sadiq Khan (Labour) is mayor of London.

Who are people going to blame when the Labour government get into Westminster?

But I digress.
I’ve never felt unsafe in London. There’s lots of gangland warfare but they tend to target other gangs. As I and most others are not part of a gang, most peoples’ odds of being a target are fairly slim.

This is one one of the reasons we left London 20 years ago. Whenever we got back from a holiday or weekend away, we used to feel a growing sense of unease as we approached our house in North London, wondering what on earth we would find at home. During our 20 years living there, we had cars stolen, burglaries, muggings, machete fights in the streets, police helicopters hovering over our gardens at night, drug dealing in the school grounds opposite.... I could go on.
We moved to a home counties market town where we never lock the front door till 11pm, neighbours will be keeping an eye on the house and our young adult sons can walk safely home from the town at 4am if they want to.
I hadn't realised that the high alert state of life we were living in London wasn't normal. Only normal for London. I know lots of Londoners will tell me they don't live in that constant wariness but, it becomes normalised and you can only really recognise that once you move out.

Threads like this always bring out the people who've been itching to get some things off their chest they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

@Trinity65

PS Could you be any more condescending to the OP at all ??

Why is this condescending? the poster is pointing out that most of these people wringing their hands about London don't live here and base all their perception on news stories about extreme outlying situations which are not reflective of day to day life for most people who live here.

People are really quick to come on here and bang on about how dreadful London is, invariably people who don't live here, and those of us who are are tired of the distortion. A young child was shot dead in a gang related incident in Liverpool last week and I haven't seen a thread on here saying: "OMG Liverpool is so frightening, why don't people all leave?"

I generally feel safer in central London than any other settlement on the planet. I have been the victim of crime more in rural areas than I have ever been a victim in central London (which is nil).

I believe a lot is to do with CCTV. I bet where this occurred CCTV is poorly covered or broken or not manned half the time. When witnessing a mugging near SOAS a couple of years ago, within 120 seconds, two plain clothes police cars had pulled up either side and the mugger was on the floor.

Car into his scooter - bang!. On the floor, handcuffed- snap! Two minutes. All because CCTV had spotted him on his way, tracking his movements, allowing the cars to get into place. Bang!

It's not just London, gang violence is everywhere now, not to mention teenagers running round with knives and drugs. I live in a very nice village where someone was recently murdered by a gang in connection with drugs. Needless to say, the gang members don't live here, they travelled in from a very rough part of the city. Wherever you live, the violence is slowly creeping in. Its much, much worse than it was 20 years ago, and I suspect in another 20 years it will be worse still.

I don’t know the ins and outs of this particular incident, but I wouldn’t write off every large scale incident of youth violence as ‘gang / drug related’. Social media has contributed to a real rise in brawls and mass fights among young people in London. I’ve dealt with three separate incidents in my professional role last academic year. We’d deal with maybe one every few years previously. In all cases the fights were filmed and circulated widely on social media. These sorts of incidents seem to fuel a) a certain desensitising among young people to violence (especially violence against girls) and b) copycat incidents as a way of usually vulnerable kids getting some attention/validation from their peers.

In none of the incidents I was involved with were drugs or gangs an issue. All were incidents between a couple of kids where a situation was hyped up on social media and other kids congregated to watch a fight and then piled in, with really horrible levels of mob violence ensuing. Shocking to view the footage, and I’ve worked with teens for nearly 20years so not much shocks me.

Serious youth violence is a growing problem. It always spikes in periods of political or economic instability (2011 riots, anyone?) but the added element of social media makes it more attractive and contagious.

It’s not just a London problem, either. We just experience these problems on a bigger scale because close to 10 million people live here. Smaller cities and towns aren’t immune.

Lol. I live in Lewisham. I used to live in Brixton and New Cross. Where do you live?

I’m not downplaying drug or gang related violence btw. That’s a real problem, too.

Same around here. Two young males killed in local villages due to drug feuds in the last 5 years. 2 miles away. A local farmer held up at gun point and robbed of equipment. 3 miles away. Sleepy Oxfordshire.

There was a mass brawl in Birmingham a few weeks ago also
metro.co.uk/2022/08/13/birmingham-man-stabbed-during-mass-brawl-in-sparkhill-park-17179139/

Yep, and in addition the Tories have gutted funding for so many services and earlier intervention programmes.