Law and order: “a group of men”

By Richard North - June 4, 2021

I know that I’m very far from alone in wondering why the BBC and much of the rest of the legacy media are obsessed with the prospects of going on foreign holidays. Given that many people have suffered serious economic damage as a result of Covid (to say nothing of Brexit), the focus should surely be on rebuilding the economy. Holidays, and particularly foreign holidays, can wait.

There is also a sense that this obsession is a massive exercise in displacement activity, diverting attention from more important and pressing issues – not least the growing carnage on our streets which has been the focus of our blogposts recently.

I have to say that one of the reasons why Pete and I invested in the new Turbulent Times blog was to enable us to write about such things. For me, after sixteen years largely focused on EU matters (although with a few years of intensive writing about defence), it was time to move on and take a broader view of the world around us, and political developments in the UK.

When it comes to the “stabfest” issue (as I called it yesterday), I am playing catch-up. I have not written on this subject before and what drew me to the subject was the incident in Hyde Park which I saw – and still see – as a turning point.

Some sense of this being a special event comes not from the UK media but from the Washington Post, which actually gave the incident more coverage than many UK newspapers.

This, perhaps, is a good example of how others see us – the outsider noting things with a clarity which we, closer to the action, do not see. That notwithstanding, I enjoyed the newspaper’s “gentle dig” at London Mayor. Khan, the paper said,

… has long faced criticism and fluctuating approval ratings over the capital’s persistent knife crime epidemic, a threat Donald Trump frequently cited during his tenure as US president, accusing Khan of doing a “terrible job” and saying at a pro-gun rally that stabbings in Britain had turned a London hospital into a “war zone” – although it was unclear which hospital he was referring to.

That said, it is not as if the UK media has not been writing on the subject of knife crime. As I gradually read myself into the subject, I’ve seen a couple of interesting archive articles from the BBC. One was in late 2017, headed: “On a knife edge: The rise of violence on London’s streets”. The other was from December 2018, headed: “Is another year of rising knife crime ahead?”.

Then we have a general piece from January 2019, which reports: “Violent crime recorded by police rises by 19%”. The piece records that fount of all wisdom, Diane Abbott, saying that, “Serious violent crime continues to rise yet the government remains in denial about the effects of its own policies”.

In terms of hard data, what we saw were police-recorded figures on violent crime, set alongside information from the NHS, which showed there had been and eight percent increase in the number of offences involving knives or sharp instruments and a 15 percent rise in the number of admissions to hospital in England for assaults involving a sharp instrument.

These data did not just relate to London, and there were other areas of concern when it came to knife crime. For instance, in August 2017, the Guardian was writing of an “epidemic” of knife crime in Birmingham, after a spate of stabbings in the city.

The tenor of that piece seems to typify the general media coverage, where the papers and broadcasters tend to dip into the issue and then forget about it for long periods. Thus, nearly four years down the line, we have today’s Guardian headlining: “Teenager stabbing: Birmingham suburb voices alarm at ‘worsening’ violence”.

Six people have been arrested over this incident and, as the Mail tells us, the perpetrators were white, retailing this witness account.

They were like a pack of feral animals the way they were swarming around him. Apparently a gang of white lads just jumped him, I don’t know how many had knives but it is just terrifying. He was only a child.

It seems we are allowed to know the ethnicity of assailant if they are white, which tends to obscure data which unequivocally point to a growing ethnic element in knife crime. And although there are those who would reject race as a factor, arguing that the level of violent crime is a function of impoverishment, Home Office research does not support this view.

In a report published in March 2020, entitled, “Trends and drivers of homicide”, it looks at the influence of ethnicity and country of birth on homicide rates.

Ethnicity data, it seems, is only available from the year ending March 1997, with the data showing that most victims and suspects are White, although though these proportions are falling. In the year ending March 1997, it says, 83 percent of victims and 82 percent of suspects were White. In the year ending March 2018, the figures were 74 percent (victims) and 67 percent (suspects). However, the report tells us:

Rates are disproportionately high for Black victims (4.7 times higher than Whites in the year ending March 2018) and suspects (8.0 times higher). The disproportionality tends to rise in line with overall homicide. From years ending March 2014 to 2018, numbers of Black suspects rose 41 percent. Numbers of White suspects fell. The disproportionality exists at all ages and for both sexes but is largest for young men.

It nevertheless concedes that the homicide rate is affected by deprivation, stating that more than half the White population live in the most affluent half of the country, whereas just 17 percent of the Black population do. Having shown a strong relationship between deprivation and homicide, it concludes that “it seems likely that deprivation explains some of the disparity between Black and White homicide rates”.

In terms of detail, the Black-to-White ratio reduces to just under three in the most deprived 50 percent of Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) and reduces further, to under two, in the most deprived decile. However, the report then says, stratifying by deprivation at this level of geography does not remove the disparity completely:

Black homicide victimisation rates in more affluent areas are more than five times higher than White rates. The Asian population is also disproportionately distributed towards deprived areas, but Asian rates of homicide are comparable to the rates for “White” and “Other”. These facts arguably suggest other factors are also involved in the Black/White disparity.

One media source ready to offer an explanation is The Sun, which is one of the few national papers which is reporting in detail on the current round of carnage. In one piece, under the heading: “BROKEN BRITAIN”, it records: “18 stabbings in a WEEK as knife violence erupts across UK after ‘perfect storm’ of heat and lockdown lifting”.

Britain, the paper says, is experiencing an explosion of violence, “with the recent heat and lifting of lockdown sparking a ‘perfect crime storm'”. We are then told: “Tempers have boiled over during the past seven days after Brits spent months cooped up in lockdown – resulting in a number of deaths and serious injuries across the country”.

Thus, it is us “Brits”, under the weight of a few warm days are taking the opportunity afforded by the lifting of restrictions to murder each other. And, contrary to the candour of the Mail, when a still is published from a video showing four Blacks fighting each other with knives and machetes, they are described as “a group of men” (pictured).

In a second analytical piece – written by the same dismal journalist who did a “fake news” piece on an Israeli missile – the word “Black” is not mentioned once.

However, “middle class cocaine users” come under fire for helping to fuel this increasingly violent battle in “Lawless London”. This is Cressida Dick, who tells us that growing demand from well-off users for the Class A drug was leading to a surge in violent gang crime.

The Police Federation of England and Wales is not much better, with chairman John Apter saying that people were treating “life as very cheap” after a series of stabbings, shootings and violent fights.

Such is the level of commentary and it thus strikes me that, if the media aren’t even prepared to talk openly about the full extent of the problem, we will be seeing more headlines in four years’ time, bemoaning the continued increase in knife crime.