|
London's season of the knife
Never thought London can be such a dangerous place. George, give us some insight into the situation.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/serv.../International/
| quote: |
London bleeds for victims in season of the knife
DOUG SAUNDERS
Frm Tuesday's Globe and Mail
E-mail Doug Saunders | Read Bio | Latest Columns
July 8, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
LONDON — Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez died in pain and confusion. Somebody broke into the south London apartment of the two 23-year-old French university students, tied them up and stabbed them 240 times, apparently torturing them for their bank card passwords, before setting their dying bodies alight.
Shakilus Townsend died in terror. The 16-year-old boy was chased through the streets of London by half a dozen hooded men and one woman who cornered him behind a building and stabbed him four times in the chest.
Bleeding to death, he cried out repeatedly for his mother.
In London, this has become the season of the knife, and the stories of Laurent, Gabriel, Shakilus and at least 16 more victims have blotted out all other topics, leaving the city bewildered by weekly reports of stabbings, each more horrific than the last. Street corners across London are garlanded with memorials to the victims.
Yesterday saw a burned man turn himself in to the police in an apparent confession to the murder of the French students. A badly bleeding man was found dying of stab wounds on a south London street. And David Idowu, a 14-year-old schoolboy who was stabbed in the stomach and chest after being chased across a soccer field three weeks ago, died in hospital, making him the 19th knife victim in the city this year.
So serious is the epidemic that the Metropolitan Police, Britain's major police force, told officers this week that their top priority had shifted from Islamic terrorism to knife crimes.
The spate of stabbings exploded into the centre of politics yesterday as the leaders of Britain's three major parties leaped to demand solutions: longer sentences, larger police forces, a push for more active parenting.
Hooded men with knives have been part of London's street culture for centuries, but rarely in recent history have the victims been so young, the motives so pointless or the killings seemingly so frequent.
In some respects, Britain's knife terror is a fear without an underlying story: The number of knife crimes in Britain has not actually increased, even if this year's London stabbings are included, and violent crime across the country and in London is at its lowest level in two decades; in fact, violent crime rates dropped by another 9 per cent last year. On the whole, the country remains far safer than North America.
But the particularly tragic and apparently innocent nature of London's latest victims has added to a sense that the knife has become a staple of teenage life.
School and police officials agree that the carrying of knives has become epidemic, not just in deprived neighbourhoods but also in better-off communities. The London killings have occurred in a wide range of communities, though relatively poor areas dominate. According to the Home Office, the number of children under 16 seeking treatment for stab wounds rose 88 per cent over the five years leading up to 2007, and among 16- to 18-year-olds, the increase was 75 per cent.
But while politicians rushed to the TV cameras yesterday to urge tougher approaches to the knife problem, there was little sense of a feasible solution, since Britain already has one of the toughest police and penal systems in the Western world on violent-crime issues. Police earlier this year were authorized to stop young people without cause and search them for weapons, and such searches have become commonplace in London.
David Cameron, Leader of the opposition Conservative Party, yesterday accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of being insufficiently tough on crime, and on the poverty that he said is the root cause.
But Mr. Brown's Labour Party has imprisoned young offenders to a degree not seen in any other European country, increasing the length and number of prison sentences since it came to office in 1997 to the point that Britain's 80,000 prison spaces are full to overcrowding.
“We have doubled the maximum sentence for carrying a knife, and anyone over 16 caught with a knife should be prosecuted,” Policing Minister Tony McNulty said yesterday.
“When they get to court, they are now almost three times as likely to go to prison as 10 years ago. The Tories have consistently voted soft on law and order.”
|
___________________
Whenever you go and buy something, you are affecting someone somewhere, be it environment, a person, or a community - you're making a statement with what you buy. So make it a smart choice ... Its a big picture
|
