Killer claims to be ill

[Galatine]

According to the BBC Axel Rudakubana is shouting in court that he is ill.
AIBU to say I couldn’t give a shit!

I think the public who moan about lack of police presence would be absolutely flabbergasted at the low numbers of police available. My DH is a special and often would be one of 6 or 8 officers dealing with emergency calls across a large, high crime city on that shift. Often at least 2 would be tied up observing an at risk prisoner or waiting in hospitals. The police need lots of money to increase resourcing

Slightly less convenient for everyone, slightly less profit for Bezos, but that's far more reasonable than expecting Amazon delivery drivers to check ID. What are they supposed to do if they don't think the ID is legit?

I worked for Amazon during lockdown and it was definitely the case that we'd have to refuse delivery, with no passport / driving licence. There were a couple of drivers sacked for it, one told to return to base and go.

It sounds as though they have an over 25 policy now. Thing is, some people are rubbish at judging ages; add in the driver wants their parcel off and not to have to return, so may accept someone who looks 18.

I had an age restricted delivery recently and all the delivery driver asked for was a year of birth. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously look over 25 so i can see why for expedience's sake.

Knives should never have pointed ends. Rounded ends do far more damage.

I think focusing on the knives and how/why he had them is missing the point somewhat. Amazon being prevented from selling them would not have stopped him from getting his hands on one. They're in every house, every business, every school...

What could have prevented this is properly provisioned services. Austerity has crippled this country. The Police are so underfunded they cannot properly carry out their duties, social workers are overworked and underpaid with so many cases they cannot physically see everyone they need to and mental health services are all but non-existent, especially if you are a young person or neurodivergent. The NHS is on its knees.

This minor, his family, and his victims and their families were horrifically and systematically failed on all levels.

Those children did not need to die. There were warning signs and multiple opportunities to step in and prevent this but the services needed just do not exist anymore.

It's true that services have been decimated. The number of psychiatric beds has massively declined. Predicting who, out of a large number of threatening individuals, will kill someone is impossible. The figures are something like you'd have to detain 10, 000 people to prevent one homicide. There isn't the money for this

Mandatory confiscation of phones and gaming devices from children found to be carrying knives. Mandatory supervised transport (either by parents or if they're not available school bus or taxi) to and from school. Helping parent to get rid of knives in the home / lock them up in a locked cupboard.

These things would help. Yes, none of them is perfect but - using a random covid analogy - we need the swiss cheese model where every little helps.

BlueSilverCats · Today 18:28

I had an age restricted delivery recently and all the delivery driver asked for was a year of birth. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously look over 25 so i can see why for expedience's sake.

Ah, we weren't allowed to and often got abuse. It did feel ridiculous and I had to refuse an 86 year old his bottle of whisky, as he had no DL. Another was a woman of 50 calling her 20 year old son to show me his DL!

The court does do this if it thinks it's necessary

They are part of services provided by the state are they not?

From what we already know there were multiple opportunities to prevent this. He was known to be violent, to carry a knife, police and social services had been involved, he was sent to a PRU. Yet ultimately nothing was done.

I agree. Obviously, we’re all just guessing, but I’d put my money on some kind of personality disorder. It’s not just his lack of empathy, there also seems to be an element of narcissistic rage: any perceived damage to his ego resulting in OTT and sustained rage.

As he wasn’t attending his special school unit and was just spending all his time in his room, brooding over all these supposed ‘injustices’ to him, then they grew in his head until he planned ways to ‘take his revenge’.

We need residential Borstals for extreme cases like him, and we need them to be used early in an attempt to mitigate growing anger and anti-social behaviour.

I’d also like to see more efforts to combat misogyny. The reports of him from his early teens suggest he was a misogynist even then, so much so that the girls kept away from him. Misogyny isn’t taken as seriously as it should be. It’s the way of thinking about half the population that’s incredibly disturbing - and it starts young. Most misogynists won’t act like he did, but the strong undercurrent of misogyny in society and online poisons young minds, and adversely affects women and girls.

Honestly you lock them up because they have committed a crime. What would happen to an adult who carried out an unprovoked assault on a stranger with a baseball bat? I assume the police wouldn’t shrug that off, but because it was a 14 year old and happened on school property, they did.

@Saschka Listening to Radio 4 this morning with Kirsty Brimelow KC, she, and the other expert, felt that no one had taken the warning signs seriously enough. They didn’t ask any questions of other services. They also felt that immediately the diagnosis of ND cropped up, the police backed off. In general they thought no one had acted with any urgency or had understood the need to speak to others. They also confirmed brains are not fully formed until 25. So at 17 some appear nearly adult but in effect are very immature.

I've thought about this individual a lot since the case ended. I also run a pub and it's been the topic of many conversations obviously, with most angry and upset that they feel people were once again failed.

The fact is, agencies are now coming out and suggesting efforts were made to rehabilitate this male. That they unfortunately failed.

There was suggestions from school staff that they felt the parents did nothing to help back them up.

It's also been suggested by pupils in his original secondary that the belief he turned at 13 due to bullying regarding his TV advert appearance is incorrect. That he was well known as vile and threatening from Year 7. That they even had a term for being naughty in class that someone was "doing an Axel". Female peers were not shocked he targeted an event for girls, as they say he took sick pleasure in being abusive to them, and using highly sexist "jokes". Teachers were embarrassed to say they feared him.
Even when excluded, and a peer said the school pupils felt a sense of relief they could finally be "safe" in school, he managed to jump a fence in his uniform, attending an assembly with plans to attack pupils in revenge. There is suggestions he had a blade that day but didn't use it.

Maybe we have to admit that some people are just so warped, for whatever reason, that no amount of intervention would help. That at the first instance of violent behaviour, when this one was openly looking up school shootings and Hitler at school and voicing that his heroes were Genghis Khan and Hitler amongst others, moves should have been made to detain him.

This is the latest case of "authority should have seen it coming because it was obvious" where indefinite detainment for the safety of citizens should have been in place. The same could be said of the Nottingham and Reading killers.

It goes further than the failures of care in the community, because this one was known and nothing appears to have been done.

I do think it's interesting that the police when asked about the parents and brother said they are still investigating but wanted to ensure his imprisonment first, but they were looking into "other individuals linked to him" as well. The whole how did he buy so many weapons and pay for taxis angle with no job or income is telling. I know what my teens buy on Amazon as we have one account. Neither has a job as yet as they have a lot of school work. Did it never occur to his parents to check computer history or purchase logs? I'm not convinced his father isn't encouraged his anti female views.

If lessons are truly to be learned it's that a detainment for the safety of others law needs to be passed for individuals like this who really are just sick.

I think to add to the police backing off due to ND, we must remember the young girl who was arrested and assaulted by a Police officer for saying she looked like her gran. The difference there was she was white.

We know that the police felt they had less power to intervene in Rotherham because they feared, along with social services, being called racist.

It isn't beyond the realm of possibilities that the same was true here. If the police can go in heavy handed to a ND white female who said an officer looked like her nan, then they should have done the same to this individual who openly voiced violent plans and carried out assaults and had weapons.

@WillimNot Excellent post!

@WillimNot research and statistics directly contradict your suspicion.

Elaborate?

I think we've all seen threads on here where a parent is suffering as a result of an aggressive and violent child. It's grossly unfair to blame the parents for the child's actions and it's incredibly unfair to blame the father for pushing misogyny on his son without any knowledge at all of what his father was like.

Do you seriously think that will work on a 6ft 15 year old boy who lives with a 5ft single mum and skips school by just waking out of the gates once she delivers him on to the school grounds?

Point is you can do all the confiscating you like but once your adolescent child - which includes girls- is physically bigger and/or stronger than you if they haven't learnt to respect you as a parent or at least one other adult whether that is a neighbour/relative/coach/the local uncles who don't want them going down a life of crime/whoever then there is SFA anyone can go about changing their attitude.

We know in this case there was a 6 month period where the parents called the police 4 times.

If that isn't a call for help what is?

Also remember the offender is ND and extremely violent not mentally ill.

“That at the first instance of violent behaviour, when this one was openly looking up school shootings and Hitler at school and voicing that his heroes were Genghis Khan and Hitler amongst others, moves should have been made to detain him”

Nice idea with hindsight but where are the thousands of similar young people going to be detained on the off chance that they could commit a henius crime? The human right lawyers would (quite rightly) have a field day.

I have just read that he entered his old school, after being excluded, carrying a hockey stick with the names of pupils he planned to attack on it. He managed to assault one pupil and break his wrist before being rugby tackled by a teacher. He was apparently not arrested and charged with assault. Why?

God alone knows

Because the criminal justice system and the MH system are on their knees?
Because it’s not that unusual for school children to commit violent assaults these days so the hockey stick incident didn’t stand out as requiring criminal charges?