What's with Britain and knife crime?

Choose your own Youtube adventure.

You're a young black man in London towne, faced with the choice of bringing a knife to show off your mates. If you're like me and do what I did the first time around the cops will stop you for no reason and stick you with 4 years for possesssion.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

If this is legally accurate, Britain is seriously fucked in the head.

If you're in possession of a knife and happen to be unlucky enough to be around when a fight breaks out, regardless of your actual actions, you're automatically part of whatever gangs were in the area and liable for a life sentence for murder instead of just the 4 years for possession of a knife.

It also seem to hint that police pat downs are a regular occurrence on the street. Maybe its just because you're black.

Most amazing jew boots

The outcome is the same if you went to the fight unarmed.

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

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.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Big Gay Chulo

And if you're carrying a knife in the street then you deserve to go to jail for a long fucking time anyway.

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

I was speaking idiomatically.

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.

Most amazing jew boots

What you believe isn't important, and the intent of somebody in possession can't be proven. What if your friend wants to borrow a knife?

Even if your courts are a joke it's pretty obvious that these propaganda campaigns are part of a concerted effort to force kids under suspicion for knife crime to accept bargains for admission of guilt.

FELIPE NO

I have been rewarded with motivational speaking and £1 pizzas for going to my friend's place.

Yay!

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

What qualifies as a knife? I mean what if I had a Swiss Army Knife b/c you know sometimes I like widdling sticks and it has a few handy tools on it as well? Would I get thrown in jail because of possessing that thing if I happened to walk by where someone had recently gotten shanked and the police were just corralling people off the streets?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Apparently you have to carry your tools in a bag or you're going to use them to fight.

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

I'm mainly irritated at the fact that the metropolitan police are only too happy to portray themselves as middle-class whities who'll forcibly stop and search a black youth on the street and arrest him for holding a knife he might not have any actual connection to beyond having received it in a wrong-place-wrong-time situation.

Seriously, how is broadcasting the fact that the police will stop you based on the colour of your skin supposed to be a good message?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

What you believe isn't important, and the intent of somebody in possession can't be proven. What if your friend wants to borrow a knife?

Even if your courts are a joke it's pretty obvious that these propaganda campaigns are part of a concerted effort to force kids under suspicion for knife crime to accept bargains for admission of guilt.

While I agree, the intent could be non-violent I think it's a bit naive to say that most people who are carrying large knives in their pants are doing it to "loan it to a friend"...I don't think that happens, ever. I've never had friends ask to borrow a knife, I've never heard of someone borrowing more then a swiss army knife. Unless this is a new craze among young people I haven't heard of.

Now, before people get all angry at me, racism and police making a point to search black kids for pocket knives is a different issue. So I wholeheartedly agree that's no good.

I'd say in this case, police paranoia, not necessarily searching every kid on the street, but assuming that the kid with the big fucking knife is probably not carrying it for the best of purposes is justified. There are always going to be exceptions that prove the rule, but what's important is sending the message that the high level of knife crime is a bad thing.

But if the court system is really as bad as people have hinted at then the whole thing is kind of pointless anyway, but borrowing a knife? Naaaaw.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Exactly how big of a knife does it have to be before it becomes a problem over there anyway? I know quite a few people in this area myself included who carry a pocket knife at all times just as a general purpose tool. And I can safely say in my oh 15 years of doing so I've used it to cut packaging, eat meals, and pry stuff open but never to shank anyone. That seems to be the common experience with the matter as well.

Never mind the problem of trying to get rid of everything you could possible kill someone with being aggressively ineffective. At least until you start confiscating peoples hands and then there'll still by some psycho who becomes skilled at killing with his stumps alone.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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.

FELIPE NO

Yeah, it does make sense to go after statistically likely suspects; it just seems a little obtuse and insensitive to proudly broadcast that fact in a PSA aimed at curbing these kids' antisocial tendencies. I'd certainly be pissed at being profiled if I was a south London black kid!

Also - a knife is a general-purpose tool. A gun is a general-purpose killing instrument. A lorry heaped with fertiliser, bleach and car batteries sends off all the obvious warning signals in the book.

Don't put up a strawman, lest it turn out to be made of bricks and collapse upon you.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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.

How ya doing, buddy?

Shin, I think more importantly you should be taking knives out of the hands of the really hardened criminals. lol nanny state.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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.

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

Originally Posted by Timberwolf8889

While I agree, the intent could be non-violent I think it's a bit naive to say that most people who are carrying large knives in their pants are doing it to "loan it to a friend"...I don't think that happens, ever.

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?

Quote:

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.

Institutional racism. The "sensible way to catch the criminal."

It's real easy for you to be accepting of being profiled for white collar crime, nobody carries falsified tax records on their person.

"A quarterly report! He's got a quarterly report! I am putting you under arrest, I believe you've been involved in tax evasion."

Quote:

How does that logic apply to potential terrorists?

Well, it's a lot easier to prove conspiracy to commit mass murder or conspiracy to commit a destructive act for possessing a truck full of fertilizer and detonation devices than it is to prove conspiracy to murder for possession of a knife.

Of course, if you were simply in possession of a truck full of fertilizer then there shouldn't be much cause for suspicion.

Conspiracy cannot be proven by possession ipso facto. It also requires past history, clear evidence of a plan, political affiliations, published material, etc. And no, being a South London black is not sufficient evidence to prove conspiracy to murder.

Quote:

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.

It's idiotic to assume that kids commit knife crime because they're stupid or don't understand that stabbing a person is wrong or will land them in jail. Only one of the situations in this campaign involved a stabbing, the vast majority of end games with the knife end in a possession charge.

What's stupid is that the government thinks that an ad campaign is going to tell kids what they already know and unravel the complicated system of social obligations and implications that people become trapped in. It's convenient that the guy lives happily ever after and the strung up knife pusher doesn't fuck him up later for being boyed off.

You can't just assume that people will do the proper thing because you tell them to. People engage in risky behavior all the time for good reasons.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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?).

I was speaking idiomatically.

It really makes me wish we had macrawave kebabs

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I guess thin-slicing is still largely built into us, no matter far are we into the evolution chain. But the probabilty of failing to thin-slice correctly, is not restricted to police officers.
From the Book: blink

Quote:

Gladwell explains how an expert's ability to "thin slice" can be corrupted by their likes and dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes (even unconscious ones), and how they can be overloaded by too much information. Two particular forms of unconscious bias Gladwell discusses are Implicit Association Tests and psychological priming. Gladwell also tells us about our instinctive ability to mind read, which is how we can get to know what emotions a person is feeling just by looking at his or her face.

It's very innate I believe. But anyway its difficult to be a police officer these days too. Those decisions you make.

definition of thin slicing:

Spoiler:

our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(book)

FELIPE NO