Murders in London

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AIBU to think that if the police had back the powers to stop and search anyone ,and to arrest any persons with a knife ,our country would be a lot safer..
I know it's not quite as simple as that ,as we need more officers on the street to do so ,and more prisons to house people caught with a knife .giving them a lengthy Sentence as well.
But would it not be at least a start? And if it saved one person from dying it would be worth it..
Plus if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind the police stopping you ,as you will understand they are just doing their job..

I can't see how a woman with a different skin colour than mine would want anything different from me..where I live there is knife crime ,knives need to be off the street .i would have no problem with police stoping and searching my sons .none what so ever.

Yeah well that's easy for you to say when you haven't experienced your innocent children being racially profiled isn't it don't you just love it when white people decide for you what PoC should have a problem with and what they shouldn't

Aquathest the point is stopping someone & taking that knife off the street could save a child this afternoon, everything else suggested should be done, put it all in place, but it takes too long to save that kid that might get stabbed today

Our society has become more and more unequal with conspicuous displays of wealth and the top 1% earning more than everyone else put together. If you have little stake in society, is it a surprise when you go off the rails?

You sound a bit like Stalin, promising a bright crime free communist future and see how well that worked out.

Actually nancy75 the OP stated the streets would be a lot safer with increased stop and search and as PPs have pointed out the evidence simply does not back that up.

If police have reliable intelligence of a crime that is about to take place and stop individuals identified as potentially being involved that is one thing but general stop and search based on profiling is not the answer and unfortunately does not guarantee stopping a child that might be a victim today.

What it does guarantee is alienation of those who are not involved in criminal activity but still treated like one.

I still remember how ashamed, angry and violated I felt from when I was stopped and searched 20 years ago for smoking cannabis on a train station platform even though I had got off a bus 10 minutes earlier and been waiting outside the train station for a friend and not been into the station itself. The police were nothing but polite and I had nothing to hide but the fact I can still remember the exact circumstances and feelings of being searched despite having done nothing wrong is very telling. I can't imagine what it is like to be in a group that was regularly targeted for stop and search for no other reason that the colour of their skin or where they live.

While we're on the subject of Stalin, he was pretty fond of targeting people because of what they were rather than what they'd done. Forced deportations of entire ethnic groups, liquidation of kulaks, the planned action against Jews that he died before getting chance to carry out... the list is long.

Now we've established that both sides of the argument can make unhelpful accusations of Stalin resemblance, let's move on.

Unless I've missed it, I'm surprised nobody's pointed out that whatever "activities" are offered, whatever what the investment in education, nothing - absolutely nothing - will offer the apparent quick rewards which criminality does, be that drug running or something else

The same applies to the claims about poverty, in that even a moderate standard of living will never match up either money-wise or in the perceived "glamour". It also ignores the point that there's always been poverty without it necessarily meaning violence, but I guess that's a bit of a tangent

In the end it's down to culture, and while tinkering might catch a few before they descend into crime, it'll never touch the hard cases. To do that requires a much harder approach than many would tolerate, and so the problem spirals depressingly on

I suspect that poverty has always meant violence but it's only recently that it has affected the non-poor so much, either directly or through what they see on the media.

@nancy75 explain what you mean by "community".

I get fed up of people stating "community" and "communities" when they have absolutely no idea that the people who intervene and help each other out in London tend to be your neighbours who are from different ethnic backgrounds with different religions and different educational levels to yourself. So you will get pockets of people like mine and my siblings where we would happily talk to the police and others to sort out crimes, and pockets of people that don't. So when a child gets stabbed - and yes a 16 year old is a child - it isn't surprising that some pockets will demand the police help them, while others don't engage.

@Puzzledandpissedoff you get to kids and engage them with these activities long before they get to secondary school age.

They then belong to something and have at least one other adult who is not related to them who they respect.

When teachers weren't over worked and people had more respect for them there would be some who would go out of their way to help with extra-curricular activities for children including sport. One guy I know was dragged to an athletics club by one of my primary school teachers, the teacher helped him get to competitions as his parents wouldn't take him and he managed to get to the Olympics.

The sports I'm involved in rely on volunteers to coach and do everything else. Lots of the volunteers are ex-teachers.

TwoRoundabouts the kind of community that when a 5 year old girl in Stockwell is shot & paralysed and people put out leaflets saying don’t go to the police. I grew up in deptford,most of my family live in Peckham, I know what poor London looks like.

TwoRoundabouts I agree that "getting them young" can sometimes help, but IME it's all too often a delaying tactic

Despite the endless whining about "cuts", there's a great deal of this being done in my own area. One initiative in particular was lavishly funded to provide equipment, outings, mentoring schemes, you name it

Sadly, the culture came to the fore yet again when all of the expensive equipment was stolen to pay for drugs ... by older siblings of the very kids attending

TwoRoundabouts I’ve just realised you probably thought by community I meant black? I didn’t - I mean people that live in a place & turn their back on the police, whatever colour they are (I’m well aware there are plenty of non black people that see the police as the last resort with solving any problems)

Am I right in thinking that the murder rate in New York dropped by a dramatic 70% in the early 90s (Malcolm Gladwell , The Tipping Point).
Didn't Mayor Giuliano's Zero Tolerance approach involve toughening up penalties for failing to buy a ticket on the public transport. This had a dramatic effect on crimes of all types. It may have been discredited now but it did seem to present a series of measures to lower city crime including murder rates.

mrsmuddlepies New York introduces zero tolerance for everything from chewing gum upwards! Kids in London get free/very cheap travel so not buying a ticket isn’t really something to target them with

Plus if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind the police stopping you

This kind of utter utter utter utter shit is only spouted by people who have never been stopped and searched.

Am I right in thinking that the murder rate in New York dropped by a dramatic 70% in the early 90s (Malcolm Gladwell , The Tipping Point)

There was quite a lot of evidence that (a) the murder rate was falling anyway and (b) (^much more contentious) that Roe v. Wade from the 1970s had a profound effect.

pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf

With the caveat that it's not directly comparable in the UK for all sorts of reasons.

Despite the endless whining about "cuts"

mysteriously money can always be magicked up for settling court cases with Eurotunnel (£33 million - how many youth schemes would that have funded ?)

mrsmuddlepies Giuliani did indeed preside over a huge drop in the New York crime rate, though how much of it was down to his policies is still a matter of debate, sometimes influenced by the debater's politics and what they thought of Giuliani himself

@ChardonnaysPrettySister - You're right any attempt to alleviate poverty or have even a slightly fairer society must immediately be linked to communism and personal insults

No, I'm just pointing out that it has been tried and it didn't work. Not sure what the personal insult is.

Anyway, of course attempts to alleviate poverty are a good thing, but it doesn't help just to offer money/help and so on.

We have thousands of immigrants who come here and manage to have a good living and who didn't have access to British education to start with, some of them don't even speak the language yet they manage.

Most of the young people involved in the current crime wave have access to housing, education and health care. They have access to the job market. Shouldn't they have some responsibilities in the fairer society you speak of?

My family was bitterly poor, I know how it.

Rossetti the argument that Roe vs Wade was responsible for the fall in crime rates is quite sobering. Has no one done a similar study here?

Can’t there be a punishment for carrying a knife. Something gross like having to go into the sewers to clean the fat off the walls for 100 hours for anyone over the age of 14.
I understand that there are all sorts of problems from not enough police to how do you make sure someone turns up etc, but we can’t keep putting people in prisons ot YOI. And it doesn’t answer the part about educating those that carry. But maybe cleaning fat out of a sewer wouldn’t be a status symble like ‘going inside’ is?

Rossetti the argument that Roe vs Wade was responsible for the fall in crime rates is quite sobering. Has no one done a similar study here?

I don't think the results would be comparable - when considering the enormity of the US, England is really just a smaller state.

@nancy75 I actually thought you were going to say [insert ethnic group/skin colour] community or [insert religion] community.