The knives are out in Scotland
There’s this lovely leaflet up in Glasgow about knife crime:
I like this because it has it all, from presentation of a perceived problem to an utterly counter-productive remedy.
Vincent Mullen says he and his neighbours in Royston were left shocked following a murder on their street. Strathclyde has seen a 50% increase in knife murders this year alone.
Vincent woke to find a crime scene at the end of his road. “This is a quiet street with families and pensioners and we were stunned. It isn’t the first time this has happened and we don’t feel safe in our own beds any more. People just want a peaceful life, but we get crime on the streets all the time,” he said.
“That is why I am backing Labour’s tough policy of ‘carry a knife, go to jail’. The SNP are too soft to back the plan. They actually scrapped short prison sentences meaning thousands of people who carry knives escape jail altogether.”
Who is Vincent Mullen and where does he live? Is he a taxi driver? Is there a rough pub with cheap alcohol at the end of his street?
Evidence suggests that the Scottish Labour Party are putting this single issue at the centre of their election campaign and are showing up on the telly with fabricated figures such as £500million per year is spent on A&E fixing knife wounds which, if they have their way, will instead be spent on thousands more jail places for warehousing kids who get stopped and searched at random by the police — because there will be no more knife crime.
Jail, as we know, provides young people with the opportunity to educate themselves about all other types of crime they could instead commit, as well as a hardened criminal record that makes them virtually unemployable in civil society for the rest of their lives.
This really is very poor political behaviour.
What does the professor say?
In the past few years politicians both north and south of the border have steadily increased the penalty for carrying knives, but Richard Garside said there was no evidence tougher sentences act as a deterrent.
Garside’s Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has published some very extensive international research about Young People, Knives and Guns, which involves actual surveys and comparisons of many varied policies across jurisdictions that do give a sense of hope.
Clearly, if Mr Kerr or Mr Mullen actually gave a damn about reducing knife crime in Strathclyde they would begin with the evidence presented in this report and work forwards from there.
But no, their game is to throw the whole lot out, actively and maliciously dis-inform the public on the policy choices in order to get elected. And once elected they will no doubt carry out their wrecking procedure on the current complex and informed policy — because the promised to do so.
And it’s the only damn promise they actually made!
Life goes on.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.