Justice on a knife’s edge

The cooler the boys, the cooler the toys

Knife crime is in sharp focus, as it were, with 279 people stabbed to death last year.

Applying the standard wartime ratio of three wounded to one KIA, the total number of stabbings must have been at least a thousand.

Hence the pile of newspaper pages devoted to the problem, with words like ‘crisis’ and ‘pandemic’ bandied about, complete with superlative adjectives. Most commentators regard the problem as difficult, if not impossible to solve.

So it is – within the confines of the ‘liberal’ bilge that now functions as a surrogate theocratic religion. (I often put the word liberal in quotes because its most common usage actually means ‘illiberal’.) Dropping those shackles, however, would put an end to routine knife crime in short order.

Much of the problem is due to Mrs May’s tenure as incompetent home secretary, from which she naturally graduated to her present position of incompetent prime minister. Acting in her previous capacity, she practically withdrew the power of stop and search from the police.

This was done in the name of multi-culti ‘fairness’ (this word too means its opposite the way it’s commonly used). For, supposedly driven by their febrile racial hatred, policemen were stopping and searching mostly non-whites.

How unfair was that? If they stopped a black youth sporting a hoodie and a feral scowl, they were duty-bound to search, say, my wife who looks, speaks and dresses like a prettier version of Princess Anne.

Since we can’t afford many cops on the beat, the conclusion made itself: if it was impossible to stop and search everyone, the police should stop and search no one. Even putative racism is a crime much worse than slitting someone’s throat.

Those dissenters against the ‘liberal’ ethos point out that the police have to act on the balance of probability. This isn’t hard to calculate, considering that two thirds of knife-possession offenders under 25 in London are non-white (38 per cent nationally).

But statistics shouldn’t affect principles, and Mrs May stuck to her guns and, evidently, knives. As a result, we’re regaled every day with gruesome stories about this or that 17-year-old A-pupil stabbed to death, for no apparent reason.

Have you noticed how the victim of every murder receiving national attention is an upstanding pillar of society boasting high academic achievement, sunny disposition and universal love?

One is almost compelled to infer that cutting the throat of a ne’er-do-well would somehow be less objectionable. Now I don’t care about the personality of the victim – every human life is equally valuable, and the wanton taking of it equally reprehensible.

It’s the personalities of the murderers that interest me, or especially how they are described. For example, in his sensible, if slightly self-serving, article, Boris Johnson refers to his success as mayor of London in promoting stop and search powers of the police.

As a result, he writes, knife crime went down, and I have no reason to doubt his claim. What I find actively irritating is his non-stop referring to knife-wielders as ‘kids’.

I’ve always been under the impression that, to produce a kid on this side of the Atlantic, one has to have sex with a goat. Though experimental attempts are doubtless made all over the countryside, none of these unions has so far been blessed with offspring – unless of course Jeremy Corbyn is lying about his ancestry.

Mr Johnson, educated at Eton and Oxford, knows this as well as I do, and I bet he never refers to his own children as ‘kids’ in private. He does so in public because he wants to come across as ‘cool’, probably to offset that Eton and Oxford bit.

But he must realise that the same desire to appear ‘cool’ takes ghetto youngsters into less innocuous areas, those in which consuming and selling drugs is as cool as carrying and using a knife.

Youth gangs are overrunning vast tracts of urban real estate, and many use random killings as initiation rites. But even those that don’t still attract countless youths who are evil by nature and have no social, cultural or religious counterweight to their evil.

However, the whole ‘liberal’ ethos, and the justice system as its subset, is based on the a priori assumption that no one is innately evil.

This goes back to Rousseau, with his arrant nonsense about every person being by nature a noble sauvage impeccable in his primordial virtue. And if some people demonstrably act in a less than impeccable manner, they are victims of correctable social conditions.

What I describe as arrant nonsense is to our powers-that-be a sort of secular scripture, with no heresy or apostasy permitted or tolerated. Hence the derisory sentences for criminals caught with knives in their possession – or for criminals in general.

The prevailing article of faith is that all of them can be rehabilitated by having their heads pumped full of New Age inanities. Ideally, this should be done not in prison but ‘in the community’, whose safety is thereby sacrificed at the altar of the new cult.

That’s why the death penalty has become unthinkable everywhere in Europe: it’s seen as what it isn’t, the denial of the sanctity of human life, rather than what it is, the assertion of that very sanctity.

By imposing the death penalty a society communicates with resolute finality that each human life is so sacred that no length of prison sentence can redeem its arbitrary taking. The secondary message is that some people are so evil that they can’t be redeemed, in this world at any rate.

You understand, of course, that I have in mind not our society, but one that has still retained the last vestiges of sanity and common sense. In such a society, the solution to the knife crime pandemic would offer itself.

First, the numerical strength of our police forces should be increased to a level necessary to combat crime. This being one of the few legitimate functions of the state, no expense should be spared.

Second, policemen should be authorised to do their job properly, with no regard for multi-culti perversions. If most people who are stopped and searched are off-white, then so be it – and so it should remain until such people no longer commit most knife crimes.

Third, our courts should pass much stiffer sentences. I’d suggest a mandatory, no-tariff sentence of 10 years for any crime whose perpetrator had a knife on him, even if the weapon wasn’t used; 20 years if it was used; and the death penalty if it was used fatally.

Again, we shouldn’t penny-pinch when it comes to building as many prisons as necessary and filling them to the gunwales.

I’d confidently suggest that only such measures could ever stop knife crime. However, I predict with even greater confidence that no such measures will ever be adopted. Instead we’ll be treated to more stories of ‘kids’ who are out to murder just for the hell of it.

A friend of mine once interviewed in a remand prison a chap who had fatally stabbed a man in the stomach. When asked how he felt about that act, the murderer admitted aptronymically to being ‘gutted’.

I don’t know what happened to him next, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, had he repeated that claim with sufficiently lachrymose passion at his trial, the evil creature got off with a light sentence.

By now he’s roaming the streets again, his trusted combat knife in his belt. The god of ‘liberal’ bilge has to be served.

12 thoughts on “Justice on a knife’s edge”

    1. Glasgow they used to have the razor slasher. Sir Percy Sillitoe put them in their place. Sir Percy where are you now??

  1. “If most people who are stopped and searched are off-white, then so be it – and so it should remain until such people no longer commit most knife crimes.”

    The fear behind the political inaction on this one is, I think, two-fold. First, that non-white communities might rebel on a large scale, and the government would be incapable of appropriate response. Riots are crises, and our current political class lack the good sense and robust purpose required to deal with crises. They probably lack the manpower and equipment as well, and the inner cities erupting with indignation that they are equally subject to the rule of law would leave our current government badly exposed.

    Second, ethnic minority resentment at being treated like the rest of us might be reflected in voting behaviour. Migrants and their descendents are concentrated in inner-city constituencies, and although they are mainly solid labour, there are some marginal ones where there is everything to play for. As the blessings of multi-culturalism increase, there is an increasing Danegeld to be paid.

    I expect this news story to go off the boil when some cosmetic changes are made and a “Knife Czar” is appointed, but the reality of murderous violence will probably be little changed.

    1. If 90 % of the persons committing knife crime are black I would expect 90 % of the persons stopped and frisked for knives to be black.

      If they aren’t carrying a knife then they will carry a box cutter. And if not a box cutter then a piece of jagged glass one end embedded in a bar of soap. Etc.

  2. “each human life is so sacred that no length of prison sentence can redeem its arbitrary taking.”

    Even life and life without the possibility of parole as punishments are lacking. Life in most places means twenty years and life without parole means twenty years or more but without the normal parole process. You will stay in longer than twenty years but still get out sooner or later.

    And as for an individual already serving life in prison how do you further punish when that bad guy kills another inmate or a member of staff? To such a question the anti-death penalty suggest usually taking away weight room privileges or such.

  3. Whoa! Mr B!

    Whilst I agree with the general thrust of this article, this paragraph pulled me up short:

    ‘I’d suggest a mandatory, no-tariff sentence of 10 years for any crime whose perpetrator had a knife on him, even if the weapon wasn’t used; 20 years if it was used; and the death penalty if it was used fatally.’

    The last clause I can agree with – but a knife is a tool. In fact it is our species most basic tool and is only a ‘weapon’ in the hands of those who choose to wield it as such.

    It is surprisingly easy to kill another human being with a cricket bat, or even a ball-point pen, given the element of surprise – how long before we proscribe the carriage of those, given your logic?

    Woodsmen, woodworkers, recreational carvers, chefs, tradesmen (with boxcutters?) would all fall under the umbrella of your – dare I say, given your background – totalitarian solution.

    I subscribe to the NRA’s maxim that it is not the tool (or gun, in their argument) that kills – it is the person who wields it, for that purpose, who does so.

    A society that targets the tool, rather than the person using it for nefarious purposes is guilty of restricting liberty – and, there lies the road to totalitarianism.

    1. You must have misread me. I didn’t suggest a 10-year sentence for carrying a knife — only for carrying it while committing a crime. If, say, burglar has a knife on him, one assumes it’s no longer a tool but a weapon. If a law-abiding gentleman carries one, it’s either a tool or a potential weapon to be used strictly in self-defence. Sounds reasonable, no?

      1. Yes I do see your point…But what if said burglar had the knife on him to cut the wires of an alarm? Or to jemmy open a window?

        As things stand, the mere carriage of, say a lockable folding knife with a blade 3 and a half inches long, or longer, without a ‘reasonable excuse’ (definition please!) is an imprisonable offence. And if you take it out to slice your lunchtime saucisson, say, and it causes ‘alarm and distress’ in others, the starting point for that prison sentence is 1 year and 6 months. By targeting the tool in this way, government has made it far too easy for the naturally law abiding to be caught out.

        The laws on intent need tightening up in my view – and if intent is proven, then do, by all means, throw away the key.

  4. Death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crimes, shown clearly by statistics. What is a deterrent though is the probability to get caught. The higher the probability, the lower the crime rate. That’s where the resources must be targeted.

  5. Death sentence is no deterrent to violent crimes, which is clearly shown in statistics where this punishment is practised. Look at USA for example. What is a deterrent though is the probability to get caught; the higher the probability the lower the crime rate. That’s where the resources should be focused, to catch the criminals. That is not to say that violent crimes should not be punished, it should be severely punished but a death sentence is not the answer.

  6. Most youths who carry knives – the type that might be revealed by increasing ‘stop and search’ – would truthfully say they are doing so in self defence.

  7. Ignoring crime is a step we have not taken yet here in wild and wacky California, but that is probably coming soon. For years we have been voting in new statutes that change felonies (jail time) to misdemeanors (a fine). As neighboring states still lock up their criminals, said criminals have now taken to flying to California to commit their crimes, then flying back home to spend the loot.

    One recent example is a gang of approximately 100 thugs who fly to Los Angeles from Houston, Texas. Once here, they watch the bank ATMs and rob customers (mostly women) – usually following the victim and waiting to rob them at their next stop. Just yesterday two men were with $17,000 in their possession. The resulting penalty will be some minimal fine.

    And they say California is not friendly to business! : – )

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