What’s up in London? Murder rate surpassed NY

The Independent's report you quoted partly, gave some answers in the part you'd left out.

This is a topic in England and Wales since months, and has been discussed in Parliament a couple of times: Recorded crime. In the year ending March 2017, there were 34,700 (selected) offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in England and. Wales.
http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04304/SN04304.pdf

I'm waiting to learn what Hillary Clinton has to do with it.

Well, that will be interesting.

But Lash has started several threads and soon lost interest.

I think this is news.

You guys seem to be immediately calibrating your expected political positions.

What’s driving the dramatic increase in knifing murders in London?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/london-murder-rate-beats-new-york-as-stabbings-surge-f59w0xqs0

London overtook New York in murders for the first time in modern history in February as the capital endured a dramatic surge in knife crime.

Fifteen people were murdered in the capital, against 14 in New York. Both cities have almost exactly the same population.

London murders for March are also likely to exceed or equal New York’s. By late last night there had been 22 killings in the capital, according to the Metropolitan police, against 21 in the US city.

Eight Londoners were murdered between March 14 and March 20 alone and the total number of London murders, even excluding victims of terrorism, has risen by 38% since 2014.
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Gun crimes up 42% in London. But, how? The good guys can’t own guns.

Knife crimes are skyrocketing.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-41822965

After stopping at traffic lights, his moped was surrounded by five other motorbikes, two riding on the road, three on the pavement.

With the lights on red, he was pushed off his scooter while being threatened with a knife. In a matter of seconds the bike was gone.

"My money has gone, my bike has gone, my job, everything," he said.

"I don't know what I'm going to do."

With only third party insurance, he estimates he's had £2,500 stolen from him.

He is far from being alone.

Across England and Wales an incident involving a blade or sharp object takes place, on average, every 14 minutes. Of the 37,000 incidents in the past 12 months, more than 13,000 offences were committed in London.

'Thousands' of knife crime victims aged 18 or younger
The moped and scooter crime wave that has swept London
Reality Check: Is crime up or down?
We filmed Abla's bike being stolen. What is striking looking back at the footage is how small the robbers look on their mopeds.

But the police say this is not a surprise, with the average age of moped criminals at just 15 .

Just weeks later we encounter the aftermath of another attack - this time a woman in a wheelchair assaulted in her local park after a man tried to steal her bag.

Her head and arms covered in blood, she is confused and distressed.

"I couldn't see anything", she said. "He just said 'give me your bag'... I just don't know why people have to do these things."

The violent robbery was witnessed by a group of teenagers. One of them told us he saw violence every day and now felt hopeless.

"It's scaring people because things are happening so often, to the point where people are fearing for their lives every single day."

The capital has seen a staggering 34% rise in knife crime over the last year.

'Carrying a knife changed my life'

Paul McKenzie has spent all his life in Tottenham.

When he was 15 years old he was stabbed in the hand with a machete.

Shortly afterwards he decided to start carrying a knife to protect himself.

But just months later police caught him with the weapon, and he was sent to a young offender's institute.

@ Walter
Seems like American wingnuts just love pontificating about matters British, -- their inferiority complex maybe -- e.g. how Stephen Hawking would have died if he had depended on the NHS, or how we're all going to be lived under Sharia law. It's kind of tedious. Nothing to see here. Movie at 11.

Amazing.

A news story is released about a dramatic increase in murders in London, and all you guys can do is attack the person who brought those stories here.

What are you afraid of?

I think they're afraid of all non conformist voices. Snowflakes are like that.

I found your cited material very interesting and, apart from a vague awareness of increasing crime levels in London, was unaware of this issue.

Perhaps the UK will ban knives.

I never figured London for high homicide rate.

I think the surprise factor is why the story is newsworthy.

I've noticed the British, or at least the English, are quite sensitive to anything might be taken as criticism. That doesn't seem to inhibit their expressions of opinion on anyone else.

That's somewhat true of Canadians as well. Perhaps it is a result of residual delusions about the British Empire. I also suspect that envy is a part of it.

UK.gov.: Selling, buying and carrying knives


Police.uk.: Possession of weapons

In Austria, you got an 75% increase of knife attacks last year.

In Germany, it is even a lot more, up to 300% in some districts.
In absolute figures, Germans are the largest group of all suspects here in Germany. One group of foreigners stands out: Afghan men, who are disproportionately often included in the lists of identified suspects in relation to their share of the total population.
However, we don't have secure statistics: knives aren't noticed in police reports like guns. ((My state will change that from 2019 onwards)
Police in all states is demanding stronger knife laws.

I'm just wondering.
You started threads about Catalonia and Brexit, for instance, and lost interest in these "news" quite soon - topics not only still on the frontpages but becoming even more "dramatic" in recent times.

As an aside: under allied-powers law it could have been a capital offen for a West Berliner to carry a kitchen knife (and any other knife) until the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany became. effective ... on 15 March 1991. [Control Council Law Law No. 43, article VI: ... "(c) in serious cases hard labor for life, or death" )
That law came into force in December 1946 and lasted (officially) until 1991.]

Not at all, just waiting to see what your point is. I haven't said anything remotely political about the issue. A rise in crime can be due to a lot of factors and I don't know enough about London's culture and economy to hazard a guess as to why the knifings increasing. The material facts must precede the political interpretation.

I do remember participating on a British forum years ago where someone was adamant about the need to make pointed knives illegal. Slicing is okay but stabbing, not so much.

Lately, I've noticed a recurring rhetoric from armchair internet pundits in the United States, mainly, I suspect, people with a pro-gun agenda, who seem to be under the impression that Britain is some sort of socialist hell-hole filled with knife-wielding, rioting youths and burka-clad Muslim terrorists taking our homes and jobs (and even on the brink of taking over our country). The actual fact, other than the clear disconnect when discussing the quite ridiculous gun-control issue, is that we're not that different from Americans, just another western nation getting by with many of the similar challenges that you guys have in the US. It's well known that London's only real comparable city on the planet is New York. There are about 1600 knife murders a year in the USA; there has been a recent uptick in knife murders in the UK, in the year up to April 2017, there were 215 homicides currently recorded using a sharp instrument, including knives and broken bottles. The US population was around 325 million in 2017; in the UK it was around 65 million, thus adjusting for population the ratio of knife deaths in the US compared to the UK is about 4.9 (US) to 3.3 (UK)

An important point is that Britain isn't just London.. Most of the knife crime uptick has been in London, which has around one-eighth of the UK population.