What's with Britain and knife crime?

The reality of the British legal system is that there wouldn't be enough evidence to charge anyone with murder and despite all the government media crap about carryng a knife leading to a mandatory 4 year jail term, the case would be unlikely to even get to court and even if it did you'd get let out after two years, 18 months if they needed space for a more serious criminal.

The government can act all Big Brother all they want but the reality is our courts are a fucking joke and you have to seriously try hard to actually go to jail over here.

And if you're carrying a knife in the street then you deserve to go to jail for a long fucking time anyway. Knives are for pussies, learn to fight like a real man.

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Haha, and as one of the comments on the "good" ending says, I'd rather get arrested than listen to Chipmunk.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Bradylama

I don't believe people should be thrown in jail for hurting no one.

I don't believe there's any reason to walk around the streets carrying a knife unless you intend to hurt someone with it.

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Ha ha, you paranoid fuck. These ads are designed to stop kids going out with a knife. If someone wants to borrow a knife that's something different from taking one out to see your mates. These videos aren't saying "If you leave the house with a knife you're going to jail", they're saying don't take out a knife for no reason.

If someone borrows a knife off me and got stopped and searched my the police and had, for some bizarre reason chosen to stick it in their pants rather than carry it in a bag, the police would most likely come and ask me to back up his story and that'd be the end of it. My chef mate regularly carries a bunch of knives around and on the couple of occasions he's been stopped by the police he's told them he's a chef and been let on his way.

I can only imagine the police where you live are completely inflexible and looking for an excuse to lock people up for you to have that attitude. Here the police can generally tell the difference between someone borrowing a knife and someone carrying one to fight with.

You don't get "under suspicion" for knife crime as a rule. If the police catch you carrying a knife in the street for no good reason, chances are you'll get done for it. Equally the chances are you'll get let off with a warning.

These adverts are getting treated with the contempt they deserve anyway. I think you're forgetting the almost complete lack of respect for the law we have over here and the completely ineffectual police force we have and ridiculous legal system.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Any blade longer than two and a half inches is considered beyond a pocket knife and into the realms of weaponry.

In so far as searching black kids for knives, they stop and search a lot of chavs too. Sure it could be seen as racist or chavist or all sorts of other thingsist but they focus their searches on the most likely suspects. Racist or not, it's a statistical fact that black on black knife crime is far and away the most common cause of fatal stabbings in parts of London. If there's a black kid lying with ketchup pouring out of a stab wound in one of those areas, then the most likely person to have stabbed them is another black kid so they get searched first. If this video was set in Birmingham they'd have searched an Indian first probably, in Sheffield a white chav and in Manchester it'd be a gunshot wound and the police wouldn't even turn up.

If someone was perpetrating massive white collar crime near my location, I wouldn't object to the cops searching me because I'm a white guy in a suit before they picked up the scruffy looking wideboys wearing hoodies over the road because that's a fucking sensible way to catch the criminal.

Originally Posted by Brady

I don't believe people should be thrown in jail for hurting no one.

How does that logic apply to potential terrorists? I mean, if you were the powers that be and one of your patrols stopped a bunch of people in a van loaded up with fertiliser, bleach and car batteries with a map of the local airport and a list of flight times with certain flights to the US circled in red, would you just leave them to go on their way because they've not hurt anyone? Would you wait for the plane to get blown up before you searched their flat? In the same way that conspiring to commit terrorist acts is a crime, so is going equipped to stab someone. If you know carrying a knife is illegal and you're going out of your way to conceal a knife about your person then chances are you're up to know good or very, very fucking stupid. The actual chance of you going to jail is miniscule but you will get taken to the police station and most likely have the knife confiscated and I fail to see why this is bad.

I assume knife crime isn't that big a deal over there but I keep getting told that carrying a concealed gun is illegal there but I don't see you arguing that kids should be allowed to walk around with pistols tucked into their shorts because they've not hurt anyone yet.

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A knife is a general purpose tool, sure, but I would argue that if someone has taken to steps to conceal the fact that they are carrying one, the odds of them using it for a general purpose other than stabbing or at least threatening people diminish pretty severely.

The point I was trying to make about intent to cause crime was that where do you draw the line? Sure the example I used was extreme but what about if they just had bleach and fertiliser? What if they had fertiliser and lived nowhere near a farm? The thing about situations like this is that the context is very important and despite our misgivings about the abilities of the British police force, they are not so rigid as to completely ignore context and follow the letter of the law exactly.

Whilst the Met are rather heavy handed in their use of stop and search powers, it's not like they are going around randomly stopping every other black kid they see and locking them up. If someone's been stabbed and they manage to make it there before the crowd has dispersed, chances are whoever called them would have a description and they'd stop anyone matching that who was in the immediate area. If you happened to out on an innocent stroll after borrowing a blood stained knife from a friend for entirely innocent purposes then you might fall foul of the laws against carrying a bladed weapon in public and you might end up in court for possesion of a knife but I guess what this video completely fails to address is that the police have to actually gather a bit of evidence before dropping a murder charge on you.

The video is designed to shock the sort of person stupid enough to carry a knife in the first place out of doing so because if they stab someone, they might get done for murder. That they need to spell this out is a rather sad enditement of the kind of kids we have in this country at the moment.

As government ads go, there are worse ones out there. That fucking idiotic one about drug driving for starters and the weird ones about noticing if you're having a stroke, that were clearly commissioned just to use up the advertising budget for the year.

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Ha ha, it's that kind of bullshit that's got this country in such a state really. Ridiculous as all these ads are, we shouldn't need them at all. You shouldn't need youtube ad campaigns to tell kids not to carry knives on the street and that stabbing people is bad, their parents should have told them that and the fear of going to jail if you do stab someone should be enough to discourage people from doing it but the sad fact is, you're so unlikely to even get caught, let alone do any serious time for a crime like that, it's just not a deterrent any more.

Running a nonsense nanny state to protect people from themselves (Like how we now have ads up telling people to eat before drinking too much booze) is one thing but attempting to nanny people into not breaking the law is retarded. The problem is, this country is run by think tanks and ad-men so this is pretty much all they know and they like nothing better than creating jobs for their mates.

There's a huge divide between the people who set the laws and dictate policy in this country and the people who pretty much ignore all the work of the first group and go about their lives as they please. Westminster spends millions every year on reminding people that drugs are bad for you and illegal and stuff, the rest of the country treats smoking a spliff like drinking a cup of tea, it's less of a social taboo than smoking cigarettes. There are reams and reams of guidelines for the police about how to do their jobs, they spend half their working lives in policy meetings and yet every policeman I know (And I know quite a few, from PCs up to Detective Inspectors) agrees that the route they'll always persue in any case is the one involving the least paperwork.

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Originally Posted by Bradylama

It can happen. Besides that point, your obsession with large knives is fairly suspect. Does a one inch blade like the one in the youtube campaign constitute a large knife to you?

That's one of the other retarded things about the video, carrying a knife that small isn't even illegal.

I do see your point about the inherent racism in the video but I'd be amazed if there were any council estate dwellers who thought it was racist, I suspect it's another case of middle class white folk wringing their hands at the treatment of those poor innocent negroid children driving your displeasure here.

Also, on reflection I'm moderately convinced that this video isn't aimed at chavs at all and is rather aimed at middle class, white kids in an attempt to show them that carrying knives isn't cool, even though all the hoodies in London do it. The whole tone of the video is just far too patronising for anyone to seriously believe that the kids portrayed in it would ever pay it attention. The whole thing is a characature of inner-city life, portrayed by drama school luvvies from Surrey.

I might be wrong, it might really just be completely hamfisted but I suspect that it's Tarquin and Wilberforce who they're trying to talk to, rather than Shaniqua and Tyrone ('sup racist naming stereotypes?).

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