Years ago physical arguments were sorted out with fists. Today it's more often sorted out with knives. It's a scary world we live in.
I watched a documentary recently called '24 Hours in Police Custody'. It was about an incident in the knife crime epidemic that seems to be sweeping our country, a stabbing in broad daylight. I watch the news. I see what is happening, but I found this programme harrowing in the extreme. It showed CCTV footage of two stabbings. I've never, thankfully, seen anyone stabbed in real life. This was close enough to make me put my hand over my mouth in shock and disbelief. To see someone physically attack, with speed jabbing and jabbing at someone's body until they collapse in a pool of blood, is quite frightening. One of the episodes happened in a shopping centre with people casually walking around the fight. Most people didn't have a clue what was going on until the police and emergency paramedics arrived. The fight had been silent and deadly quick. The second fight happened in the road outside a house. I found that one very hard to watch. It was as graphic as any cinema film you could watch. The person who was stabbed died.
I really don't understand, and wish that someone would explain to me, why some young people feel the need to carry knives? They are very obviously dangerous, and if you carry one surely you are prepared to use it? If you are prepared to use it, then surely you must realise you could kill someone? If you kill someone and are caught you will go to prison. Surely these young people don't want to go to prison? Are they carrying it to actually deliberately hurt someone? I am confused.
I am confused I suppose, because in my life carrying a knife is not normal. I wouldn't dream of carrying one right now. But I am also not scared for my life. or a gang member, or trying to hurt anyone, or trying to be 'big'. I've read a few interviews with people who carry knives, and on the whole there doesn't seem to be a particular reason for doing it, although most cite it's for protection. Somewhere, somehow, this cycle of carrying a knife because someone else is carrying one and may use it needs to be broken. I cannot imagine how. The police seem powerless to stop the knife crime, and no amount of 'stop and search' procedures seem to help. Knives are easy to buy. They are easy to get. In a supermarket there is an age restriction to buying one, but online you can just state you are 18 and order it. You don't need to prove your age. Everyone has knives in their kitchen. Knives are easy to access. They are easy to hide and, it seems, easy to use. They are the deadly weapon of our age.
In that documentary the police did everything in their power to bring to justice the perpetrators of the stabbings. The end result was satisfying only in the fact that those guilty of the crime got prison sentences. Those convicted of the murder got extensive long sentences. Justice was served. But not everyone is caught, and still stabbings happen. Innocent people have been killed for simply being in the wrong place. I don't know if it is because we have wildly available media to tell us what is going on that we understand it is happening more and more. Has it actually always happened, and we just didn't know about it before? The statistics show that knife crime that is recorded has escalated. Note I say 'recorded'. I am sure it happens under the radar. Not everyone reports this sort of crime, and if that is the case then this really must be an epidemic of knife use for the wrong reason.
So how do you stop an epidemic? You tackle the source. That means education in schools, and shock tactics at an early age? Start young, and carry on that education through the school years. Work with the community. Take this strategy in Glasgow, Scotland last year-
Specialist officers began working with both community leaders and ex-offenders, and they decided to treat violence as a public health problem. Rather than trying to prosecute their way out of a crisis, they focused on trying to prevent so many people carrying knifes in the first place. Initially the strategy involved a dramatic intervention. Hundreds of Glasgow’s most hardcore gang members were gathered together at the city’s biggest court and told they would be heading to jail if the stabbings did not stop. But alongside the threat of action, they were offered alternatives to violence – job training, education support and even relocation, if necessary." Since then, the carrot approach has been much more important than the stick for us in Scotland," explains Will Linden, acting director of the VRU. "We’ve been less focused on stop-and-search, for instance. And the evidence suggests scare tactics don’t work. It’s mostly about working with young people, having proper, ongoing conversations with young people about what it’s like to live in their area, what’s going on in their lives and trying to help them."
It seems to be working. Their model is based on one used in Boston, America in the 1990s for gun crime. The police used the community leaders and church ministers as mediators. Their crime dropped quite dramatically, the same as in Glasgow. They offered alternatives to the way of life the perpetrators had been having. Positive life choices, job apprenticeships, education. It really worked.
I'm not saying this is the perfect solution for every area, but something needs to change. Maybe, just maybe, this police communication with the community will help. I think we need to bring back 'bobbies on the beat'. The policeman who knows the area he works in, and the people who live there. Who is welcome in their home because they know him. There needs to be more money put in to our communities and police, and I suppose there-in lies the problem? Money is tight. Time is short. Communities have got larger. But someone, somewhere could take the first step to build those relationships. People want this to stop, and I think deep down those young knife carrying people want it to stop too.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/may/18/ukcrime2
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