What’s up in London? Murder rate surpassed NY

Seems like American wingnuts just love pontificating about matters British, -- their inferiority complex maybe

But some hazy romantic adage about London’s violent proclivities is irresponsible and dodgy.

Lash wrote:

I wonder if outlawing knife length is next...

It’s illegal to:

sell a knife to anyone under 18, unless it has a folding blade 3 inches long (7.62 cm) or less

carry a knife in public without good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting edge 3 inches long or less

carry, buy or sell any type of banned knife

use any knife in a threatening way (even a legal knife)

Does the NHS keep a list of mentally ill so people can be banned from buying knives? [/url]I suppose, they certainly know (although it would be Mental Health UK) whom they pay what for.

This also gives me pause -

Good reasons for carrying a knife or weapon
Examples of good reasons to carry a knife or weapon in public can include:

taking knives you use at work to and from work
taking it to a gallery or museum to be exhibited
if it’ll be used for theatre, film, television, historical reenactment or religious purposes, for example the kirpan some Sikhs carry
if it’ll be used in a demonstration or to teach someone how to use it

A court will decide if you’ve got a good reason to carry a knife or a weapon if you’re charged with carrying it illegally.

What about - if you fish? You need a knife for that. There are so many innocent reasons you might need to carry one. I know it says a court will decide if you have a good reason - hopefully the courts are reasonable in this as I could see it having the potential to get out of hand depending on whom is involved in this decision making. Not to mention costing some poor sap that was on his way to fish hefty amounts of money for a proper defense.

It is illegal to carry any sharp or bladed instrument in a public place (with the exception of a folding pocket knife, which has a blade that is less than 7.62 cm (3 inches)).

A lock knife is not a folding pocket knife and therefore it is illegal to carry around such a knife regardless of the length of the blade (if you do not have reasonable excuse). A lock knife means a knife which is similar to a folding knife, in that there is a spring holding the blade closed. However, a lock knife has a mechanism which locks the blade in position when fully extended, the blade cannot be closed without that mechanism being released. A lock knife is not an offensive weapon per se (because these knives were made with a specific purpose in mind and not as a weapon). However, possession of a lock knife in a public place without reasonable excuse is an offence.

Possession of a multi-tool incorporating a prohibited blade/pointed article is capable of being an offence under this section even if there are other tools on the instrument which may be of use to a person in a public place (screwdriver, can opener).

The ban is not total, it is for the person in possession of such an instrument to prove on the balance of probabilities that he/she had good reason for its possession. It will have to be genuine, for example, someone back packing across the Lake District may reasonably be expected to have a knife for the preparation of meals. It will be far more difficult to justify on the streets of a city or town, but there will be occasions when someone is genuinely going to a martial arts sport or scout meeting (which is easily checked).

The penalty for committing this offence is a maximum prison sentence of four years.

The 'Ask the Police' website was created by PNLD* as a result of a thematic inspection of call handling within the police service by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC ).


*The PNLD (Police National Legal Database) is a business service of the Police and Crime Commissioner West Yorkshire. For over 20 years PNLD has been providing up to date, accurate online legal information, including legislative guidance, case law and national standard offence wordings to the police services of England and Wales. PNLD subscriptions are available to support all those with an interest in law, for more information please visit www.pnld.co.uk

How the US Justice System Works
The United States was founded under the principals of federalism. Under federalism, governing powers are divided between the federal government as well as the state governments. For states existed before the founding of the US, the writers of the Constitution respected the state’s authority by limiting federal powers to only those expressly stated within the Constitution. All other governing powers are, therefore, state powers.

For knife law, the only federal law is the Switchblade Knife Act of 1958 as well as the 2009 amendment to the act (see 15 U.S.C. §1244). The federal knife law only applies to individuals who are traveling internationally as well as between states. If you reside in a federal district (see Washington D.C. knife laws), the federal law is the only law that governs knives for you. If you live in one of the 50 states, the federal law would only apply to you if you are traveling from one state to another or if you are entering federal property, such as a military base.

All states have knife laws (click on the map above to find the knife law for a particular state) but some state’s knife laws are more up-to-date than others and local municipals often pass their own knife laws as well. For example, if you live in Denver, Colorado, you must abide under the knife laws of Colorado as well as the knife laws of Denver. However, if you travel to Boulder, Colorado (30 minutes away) you must conform to Boulder’s knife laws as well. And, during your journey, you must conform to the knife laws of all the municipals in between Boulder and Denver.

This makes knife laws a tricky subject unless your state has a preemption clause. Preemption means that the state government nullifies all knife laws made by municipals. Therefore, when you travel from town to town, you would not have to worry about municipal knife laws.

General Guide to Knife Laws
Knife laws can be divided into these two categories: ownership laws and carry laws.

Ownership Laws
Ownership laws forbid individuals from owning certain types of knives that society has deemed “deadly weapons” or “dangerous.” Most of the time, these knives were once associated with unlawful people such as gangs, the mob, and outlaws. It is for this reason that the Bowie knife has been outlawed in so many states.

Carry Laws
Carry laws forbid an individual from carrying, concealed or open, certain knives. For example, some states forbid an individual from conceal carry of knives over a certain length but open carry of that same knife is legal. Other states forbid the carry, concealed and open, of certain knives. Most knives that are barred from carry are ones deemed by society to have no utility uses and, therefore, their only use is as weapons.

Other Laws
Some states have laws that forbid one from aggravated display of a knife as well as committing a crime with a knife. These laws are usually only enforceable after the fact and, for that reason, allows the state to increase the penalty of a crime. For example, robber is a bad crime but robbery with a knife is viewed as an even worse crime and should be punished more than simple robbery.

What is Generally Allowed
If you want to carry a knife that is usually legal everywhere, I highly recommend you buy a knife that is clearly intended for utility use. For example, most pocket knives and all leathermans as well as multi-tools fit this description. As long as the blade is less than 3 or 2.5 inches, you should be fine. Times where this advice might not be true is at: courts, planes, schools, and special buildings that forbid the carry of blades.

Limits on Carry
It is illegal to carry concealed any bowie knife
It is illegal to carry concealed any dirk knife
It is illegal to carry concealed any butcher knife
It is illegal to carry concealed any switchblade or automatic knife
You may carry any knife concealed if it is concealed in your vehicle, and not on your person.
You may carry any knife concealed if you are participating in a sports activity where such a knife is legitimately used.
You can open carry any knife in Mississippi, unless you are a minor or a student on educational property.

It's quite similar with alcohol (I think, you must be 21 in the USA to buy alcohol, even if it's a present for your parents, isn't it?): if you're 18, there are no restrictions (you must be 17 to buy alcohol in duty free shops), if you are younger, only with a meal and accompanied by adults ... ... ...

I'll bring this up again. What about not selling knives with pointed ends? Sort of hard to stab someone with one of these.

Hunters, butchers, and woodcarvers would be allowed to buy pointed knives.

What about someone that cooks?

[...]
So is it really true that London’s murder rate is now higher than New York’s?
Yes, but only if you look at the last two months – which some commentators think is way too short a time frame.

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed that it recorded 15 murders in February, while in the same month the New York Police Department (NYPD) recorded 11 killings.

In March London also had more murders, albeit by a very slim margin: 22 to New York’s 21.

But as soon as you start to look beyond the relatively narrow confines of those two months, the statistics start to come out in London’s favour.

The Met says there were 8 murders in London in January, which compares with 18 killings in New York during the first month of the year.

Taking into account two murders that have occurred in London in April, so far in London there have been 47 murders in London, compared to the higher running total of 50 in New York.

So were February and March 2018 just blips?
Possibly. While those two months may have been the first times in recent history that London had a higher homicide rate than New York, the year-on-year statistics are still firmly suggestive of the UK capital being the less murderous city.

There were 116 murders in London in 2017, fewer than half New York’s annual total of 290.

The disparity seems even more marked if you look slightly further back, albeit with the caveat that the way the Met presented its data for these years does not allow comparison of exactly the same 12-month time periods.

In the calendar year of 2016 there were 334 murders in New York. In the financial year 2016-17 (1 April 2016 to 31 March 2017) there were 102 murders in London, suggesting – but not proving - that at that point the UK’s capital’s murder rate for any given 12-month period was less than a third of New York’s.

Similarly, New York had 352 murders in the calendar year 2015, while London’s Metropolitan Police recorded 109 homicides between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2016.

So what is going on with these murder rates?
One way of looking at this is to see it not so much as London getting massively more violent, but rather New York achieving an astonishing drop in its murder rate.

The tally of 290 New York murders in 2017 – while still much higher than London’s corresponding total – has been hailed in America as a hugely encouraging breakthrough. It is definitely the lowest annual murder total since comparable New York records began in 1994 and it is being reported as the city’s lowest number of homicides since the end of the Second World War.

It is also indicative of the fact that since recording 2,245 murders in 1990 and 1,905 in 1989, the city has achieved great things in tackling violent crime – albeit that the precise reasons for the success are hotly debated.

London’s recent history, meanwhile, has been mostly one of steady if unspectacular drops in the murder rate, from 181 homicides in 2005 to 155 in 2007 and 101 in 2013.

When the annual London murder total dropped to 93 in 2014, it was hailed as a great success, the first time since the 1960s that there had been fewer than 100 homicides in a year in the capital.

Since then, of course, London’s annual murder totals have increased: from 93 in 2014 to 116 in 2017, a rise of nearly 25 per cent.

It’s worth remembering, though, that if you look over a time frame of a decade, there were 25 per cent fewer murders in the capital in 2017 than in 2007.

So is there nothing for Londoners to worry about?
Sadly it’s not that simple. The 2018 London figures highlighted by The Sunday Times might be an early warning sign that the capital is in for a historically bad year for murder.

There were 45 murders in London in the first three months of 2018. If that rate of killing continues, London will amass a total of 180 homicides in 2018, the kind of death toll not seen since the 181 deaths recorded in 2005.

And there are – admittedly highly tentative - signs that the killing rate is not abating. Since The Sunday Times first published its story there have been two more murders in London – the stabbing of a 20-year-old man in Wandsworth on Sunday and the shooting of 17-year-old Tanesha Melbourne in Tottenham on Monday.

What is also alarming is that the statistics seem to suggest that young people are being killed in increasing numbers, in a trend related to what looks like a spike in knife crime.

There have been 31 fatal stabbings in London so far this year, 30 of them in the first quarter. As The Independent has reported, that equates to a rate of a deadly stabbing in the capital every three days. It also puts London on course to record 120 fatal stabbings in 2018, a 50 per cent increase on the 80 deadly knifings that occurred in 2017.

And nine teenagers have been killed so far this year. In the first quarter of 2018 there were eight teenagers killed, at least six of them by stabbing - (the cause of death has yet to be established in the case of one teenager).

Those figures could be extrapolated to suggest that London is on course to record 32 teenagers killed in 2018, with 24 of them stabbed to death. This would compare with 26 teenagers killed and 20 teenagers stabbed in 2017.

And if it turns out that 24 teenagers have been stabbed to death by the end of 2018, it would be a return to the levels of 2008, when 23 teenagers were killed by a knife in the capital, and newspaper headlines spoke with alarm about a "knife crime epidemic".

It is, however, important to remember that extrapolating from three months of data to suggest what might happen over the next nine months is very far from being a foolproof, scientific method of prediction.