To wonder who is actually responsible for rising murder rates in london

[SaucyJane]

So slimy frog faced Nigel Farage is blaming Sadiq Khan as mayor and particularly for reducing stop and search. There are also other calls for Khan to resign.

But surely there is only so much Khan can do if the government makes huge cuts to the police. And weren't those cuts made under Maggie May?

I didn't vote for Khan to be the mayor, and I am no fan of his, but it seems to me that it is unfair to blame it on him, and that the answer is probably partly government cuts and partly some of his changes since being mayor.

AIBU?

One of the key reasons it’s necessary to face the fact that there is a race element is that as long as it’s mostly young POC being killed, the majority population won’t see it as their problem.
The BBC has just published names and faces of those killed in the capital this year. Look at the % that are minorities. Yes, there are a few older and white, but the vast majority are not. So it’s Someone Else’s Problem, and as the late great Douglas Adams said, that makes it invisible to everyone else.

There's some really interesting points here and it's clearly a very complicated issue - certainly not as simple as blame Khan or blame the tories, which was what I was sort of getting at.

I too have to question the community stuff - does anyone know why/how that makes a difference? My limited understanding of why young boys (and to a lesser degree girls) get sucked into gangs, i.e. prestige, security, glamour, money, no choice/peer pressure means that the same boys would be unlikely to make use of those facilities anyway? It would be really interesting to see any views that disprove this assumption.

Young ethnic minority males looking to make a name for themselves and earn respect from others apparently. Somehow it won’t be their fault though it will be everyone else’s that they picked up a knife and stabbed someone.

This.

And blaming the govt /mayor is a lazy response that is making the problem worse.

There was a thread in the 'London' topic a little while ago, but discussion there didn't really take off. In part I think because noting the rise in serious knife crime that occurred after Jhan's major initiative was panned as 'oh, you just want to bash Khan'

That sort of party politicking doesn't help discussion.. Khan's initiative didn't work and has made things worse., and people do need to consider why they got it wrong and what needs to change.

The thing that does work - stop and search - also wrecks community relations, so it won't become widespread.

There was an interesting piece on the Beeb earlier this week, about how teens are groomed into this level of violence. Music genre and song lyrics receiving more focus than I would have expected.

The murderers
The gang violence culture
Their parents
Austerity measures
To some degree their schooling
The societal norms in which they dwell and which we are all

Not SK though

I don’t think it’s got especially worse , but admittedly no one has made a concerted effort to improve it

And what minifingerz DD said basically .

It’s a fashion . Like her DD there are some little boys and with some you know they will sadly choose this path . Some won’t god love them . Despite an absent Dad and a single Working Mum they will get their education and go to to college . And often it’s the good boys that get stabbed which is even more heartbreaking

It’s a very interesting thread . I do think the fatherless /male role model issue is key . If I look at the peers (yes BME) in my DS class they don’t have present fathers . And yes their Mums are working all hours in fairly low paid jobs. The very idea that these little fellows might turn to this is heartbreaking

"but admittedly no one has made a concerted effort to improve it"

So the London Knife Crime Strategy, and the £15 million (or was it more) wasn't a sufficient effort?

Or was it an effort which did not work as intended, as rise has continued since it began, in which case it needs urgent evaluation and new recommendations. Because it's not working.

But it's very much identified with the Mayor, and I think that's making it untouchable in the wrong sort of way.

I work in a similiar field to nightmanagerfan and agree with a lot of what she says.

The roots of this go back to when today’s teens were tiny children. Policing cuts are one issue, but by the time you need police to sort it out, it’s arguably already too late.

The loss of youth services doesn’t just remove activity that keeps kids off the streets, it removes access to a dependable strong adult, and takes away a layer of adults in the community who know what is going on. Often well meaning amateur volunteers don’t have the skillls, experience or resources. There used to be intensive gang exit programmes. To be effective they are expensive. The voluntary sector find it harder and harder to raise sustainable funds for this kind of programme.

Academies have no obligation to keep troubled kids in school. League table chasing means schools exclude pupils at the first sign of trouble. Where do you think they go?

CAMHS is scandalously under resources and over-stretched. Mental health issues amongst black males are statistically high.

People cart on about London privelige and forget that much of London lives in acute poverty. And the huge cost of housing makes it impossible for people to move, taking their teens away from trouble.

The polarisation in wealth is massive now. The huge flashy cars, the gadgets. Gentrification. The effect on communities and social cohesion is tangible in places like Peckham and Brixton and Stratford, and has not relieved poverty on tne inner city estates. We all read The Spirit Level a few years ago, did we not?

"League table chasing means schools exclude pupils at the first sign of trouble."

They changed the rules on this a few years ago, and the excluded pupil's outcome is still counted in the expelling school's statistics. There is no incentive for the school to exclude lightly, especially as they have to pay for PRU placement (the likely destination for excluded teens)

Freudian yes, there have been programmes for young people, studied and evaluated, that have been proven to support them to make different choices, exit gangs, stay out of difficult situations.

Really patronising of you to dismiss this kind of work as tea and ping pong.

Farahilda: they do chuck them out, very quickly, though. For quite low level disruption. I have seen it twice at DCs school, kids that they were at primary with. For not especially heinous behaviour, just difficulty with authority.

"Stop and search does not help when its the same subsets stopped again and again. Not everyone with brown and black skin is in a gang ...."

"One of the key reasons it’s necessary to face the fact that there is a race element is that as long as it’s mostly young POC being killed, the majority population won’t see it as their problem.
The BBC has just published names and faces of those killed in the capital this year. Look at the % that are minorities. Yes, there are a few older and white, but the vast majority are not. So it’s Someone Else’s Problem, and as the late great Douglas Adams said, that makes it invisible to everyone else."

The juxtaposition of these two posts show the difficulty. There is a community which is disproportionately both perpetrator and victim. And that is exactly the community which rejects stop and search.

Of course the majority of that community (and all communities) are normal law abiding people. But if you were looking for those who are heading for trouble, with the aim of diverting them away from it, where would you look?

The entire social ecology of London has been destroyed in a fairly short time span.

To be a youth on a megalithic Council estate, with its own drugs and gang based society and distracted, careworn parents must be an experience that creates a risk of criminality for some.

Healthy, productive adults come from strong roots and good examples.

Tammy

It is expensive for the school to exclude (as they still have to pay for that pupil) and somewhat risky for its league table standing (as they have no ongoing say about what happens to that pupil, but still have their results as part of their stats). But yes, they can still do it, and each school has its own threadhokds of tolerable and intolerable conduct.

I don't dispute what you say, but given the extra costs and league table impact since the last set of changes, my first reaction was to wonder if the wider school community had actually been fully informed about reasons (it's not usual, for reasons of confidentiality) for full reasons to be made public (unless there's has been a blatant incident that cannot be left unconnected on)

I think the relevance of the race element is greater average poverty in the PoC community (and in some cases shallower social roots, eg 1st gen migrants).

One of the reasons the term “ethnic minority” has fallen from favour is that it no longer makes sense to use it in London, where White Brits will soon be the minority, and amongst the youth they already are.

It’s particular areas, particular micro-societies, particulary deprived communities that bear the brunt of the dysfunction.

"One of the reasons the term “ethnic minority” has fallen from favour is that it no longer makes sense to use it in London, where White Brits will soon be the minority, and amongst the youth they already are."

That's too sweeping a statement. If you look at the demographics of say Tower Hamlets v Wandsworth, you'll see that white Brits are in the minority only in one. But if you look within Wandsworth, you will find that within it, there are areas where it that's true even though across the whole borough it's not. And the So Solid Crew area is utterly different from the between-the-Commons area, even though they are pretty close to each other.

(Example chosen at random, I used to live in Wandsworth, which is why it occured to me)

TrojanWhore
"Stop and search does not help when its the same subsets stopped again and again. Not everyone with brown and black skin is in a gang ...."
The juxtaposition of these two posts show the difficulty. There is a community which is disproportionately both perpetrator and victim. And that is exactly the community which rejects stop and search.

Could that community reject stop and search because:

It's almost always nesr yop of the first solutions touted by outraged of leafy UKIP

Despite it all only something like 17% of searches found anything criminal (usually small amounts of weed) and 14% lead to an arrest.

In what other situation would an action that was to be between 83-86% ineffective and be proven to wind up the very races you want to support the police be the go to response?

A reminder, stop and search is still a legitimate policing tool. The law just expects more cause for the search than walking or driving while black. If certainty types find the equal application of the law to people of colour to be problematic, it says more about you and your need to explore your internalised racism.

The papers this morning are reporting clashes between youths and the police at the spot where the teenagers were shot.

Obviously mistrust of the police is another issue here.

saucyjane indeed. There are a lot of rediculous conspiracy theories floating about, including that the police put the guns on the street, ergo the shootings are their fault. Mark Dugan's family publicly said this.

That's too sweeping a statement. If you look at the demographics of say Tower Hamlets v Wandsworth, you'll see that white Brits are in the minority only in one. But if you look within Wandsworth, you will find that within it, there are areas where it that's true even though across the whole borough it's not. And the So Solid Crew area is utterly different from the between-the-Commons area, even though they are pretty close to each other.

(Example chosen at random, I used to live in Wandsworth, which is why it occured to me

Handy for me that you did, because I lived there for several years too. So I have a handle on Wandsworth.

The thing is, in terms of street life and certainly estate life, the difference from, say Hackney, isn’t as big as it looks from the raw demographics. A large proportion of the white youth in Wandsworth are private school pupils and tend to spend their time in their own, private, spaces. It’s a very polarised community and rapidly getting more so.

Tower Hamlets is a bit unusual amongst the London boroughs for various reasons, so I might leave that one alone

Fara: yes, confidential issues are a possibility, and it should be confidential, of course. Teen Telegraph is usually pretty good though . Horrifically, one of mine knew the lad who died on NYE. And all the details that were later reported in the press, before breakfast. Dreadful stuff. Once they are involved they have very little option but to engage, for self protection.
I didn’t know that the results of excluded pupils were counted within tne excluding school. Does this still apply if they are excluded in Yr 7 or 8?

WRT race, it is a simple fact that the vast majority of estate-based gang related violence, victims and perpetrators, are young black males. That doesn’t mean more crime as a whole is committed by this group, or that white criminals do not do horrific things (including appalling race-hate violence. Look at the multi/generational network and wide criminal activity of those who murdered Stephen Lawrence). It isn’t because these young people are black that they are caught up in gang related violence but because of the environment that they, specifically, are caught up in. I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend that statistically everyone is at risk of the same kind of involvement. Especially when racism has played a part (the missing fathers having come from a generation where institutional racism allowed them to under-achieve at school, racism in the workplace, racism in the police -see the Macpherson Report - led to mistrust of the police and all authority).

Yes, I agree with all your reasons as parts of the issue. And would add legacy issues into the mix. And I completely agree that the effect in the community is important

But it still needs to be thought about, and not just put beyond discussion by tarring it as 'UKIP'. The difference it makes may not be great, but it is about the only thing known to make any difference at all. And the debate about stop and search is an important part of working out the whole policy. It shouldn't just be discarded - it is, as people said upthread, much researched (unlike other initiatives) and does have an effect.

Is there any evidence of effect of any other components of the current Strategy! (Genuine question btw)

The majority of murder victims were young black males. Your average white middle class MN user and their children are not generally likely to be affected by a drive by shooting.

I have no idea what the solution is. But it's very sad.

"Growing up in a fatherless home" per se probably has no impact on criminality in and of itself. It's been known for decades that widowers' children (as a group) have very different statistical outcomes to the children of divorced/separated parents and children of absent fathers who just pissed off and can't be bothered. And as the data has started to come back, sperm donors' kids also appear to be doing just as well as those from two-parent homes.

The correlation between fatherlessness (due to divorce and absent fathers) and criminality is more likely to be about the fact that divorce/separation and absent fatherhood are more likely to occur in parents who have certain types of personality traits, and the fact that these families are much more likely to live in dodgy neighborhoods.