Knife crime

Yep another media frenzy on knife victims, I'm sure the publicity surrounding this particular event has nothing to do with the fact that the victim had a semi-famous sister who would draw more semi-famous people in to be photographed, quoted and used to sell more papers.

Jacqui Smith MP took the tough option by appearing on the GMTV sofa this morning and, scary though this may be, she actually talked more sense then presenter Ben whom I'll deal with in a minute.

So things she said included the fact that knife crime has decreased, and this is true given the current statistics, which has been acknowledged to be not reliable; and that the majority of 'young people' don't go around carrying knives.

On the annoying side she said that knife carriers were now more then three times as likely to end up in court. At this point Ben earned his big bucks by complaining that this didn't guarantee a prison sentence. Yep you heard that correctly - GMTV presenter advocates government lays down yet more mandatory sentencing by taking yet more power from the courts. Perhaps we should do away with courts altogether and have send everyone up before the MP; heck that's pretty much how we used to do it.

So imagine all this hysteria ends up along those lines - now read this true story :

A guy walks home from walk with a set of flat carrying pouches across his back when he's stopped by a police officer.
"What's in the pouches?" the policeman asks
"Knives" replies the guy
"What! You can't walk down the street carrying a bunch of knives!" exclaims the policeman
"I'm a chef" states the guy
"Doesn't matter" replies the policeman
"Look I'm just coming back from work and I'm not leaving them in the restaurant. They're my livelihood and they're expensive"

Fortunately nothing came of this, but this is the point - are the police going to be arresting chefs, fishers, carpenters, electricians, heck Boy Scouts for carrying knives? With this wonderful new 'more likely to end up in court' will we see more money spent on time-wasting court appearances in order to bolster arrest statistics and to satisfy the baying media hounds who will have already forgotten this and moved on to the next juicy story?

Back to Jacqui and the measures taken to 'educate' the young she said that carrying knives doesn't make you safe, makes you more likely to get hurt or hurt someone else and that they will get caught. Once again my slapping hand is poised both for politician and presenter for not grabbing that and ramming home the question "But why do some people carry knives in the first place?" - because it makes them feel safer perhaps as per the very first point Jacqui is advocating against.

Why would that be? Hmm perhaps the old rebellion against authority; perhaps that 'the young' feel persecuted by the police (at the instigation of adults); perhaps because of that they feel they have no-one to turn to if something should happen, take the latest incident where the Ben Kinsella called his friend on the mobile for help while being chased, it has yet to be mentioned that he himself called the police first or even after.

Perhaps because they're bored and thus form social groupings that it turn, thanks to our species delightful territoriality streak, automatically opposes other such social groups and thus requires defence against them. That, of course, has nothing to do with the disconnection in geography whereby each estate has its own established borders with its own local shops and play areas.

Again it's a minority that can sweep in the unconnected majority, but once again in both politics and media we see the easy attack on the symptom and not the difficult attack on the cause.