Banning carrying of knives in public isn't the same thing as "banning all knives" however, which implies they're coming into houses to take people's cutlery away, which is clearly nonsense.
Also, that's from the mayor of London. And if you're not aware, London is a city, and not the whole of England.
Also, if you look at the context of the crime-spike, it's because of a drug war and turf battles between rival gangs in London. Not only is this not any sort of national ban, it's not a ban at all: it's a crackdown on gang behavior, and common sense would tell you that they have very limited police manpower to carry out the crackdown, so the entire effort will be focused on specific districts where these gang killing are taking place, and looking for groups of people who look like gang members, or are known gang member affiliates. It's going to be nothing like a national ban on having all knives of any description.
For clarification, it is a ban. London isn't just a city, it's 22% the population of the UK, not factoring in the millions who commute to London everyday. It is the single largest concentration of CCTV in the world, and yet it is a crime ridden mess with whole estates falling under the administrative control of 16 year olds. We are a joke tbh, so while I appreciate you trying to give the UK good PR, we do not deserve it at all. We used to have the best policing in the world! Good Lord how we've fallen. We're like a retarded police state with most of the downsides and none of the benefits or stability.
So for starters, you will get done in for carrying a knife on your person, whether or not you're affiliated with any gangs. The times where it's acceptable for you to have them in public you must have an incredibly valid reason for it, and that reason must be in active use - a butcher at their market stall is fine, a butcher just walking around with a knife anywhere is not, even if they use that knife for their trade. A man carrying a knife he uses on his boat is not fine, unless he is carrying that knife on the way to his boat. If the police can't decide whether your reason is valid or not, or if you cannot provide proof of why you're carrying that knife, they'll err on the side of taking your knife and will either give you a warning or arrest you, usually depending on whether you're wearing adidas, cas or smart. To top it all off, buying knives is 18+ only (this includes butter knives), deliveries including knives to residential areas are restricted or forbidden in some cases, and certain knives are just forbidden no matter what. This means that possessing them, importing them is a serious offence - this includes any knife which has a serrated edge or is used for "cutting" or has any marketing labels which suggest its purpose is for causing harm to people or zombies. So if it has an edgy brand name like "ripper, raptor, tearer, dick flenser 9000" and so on it's illegal as fuck, even if it's just a rebranded fish gutter. Swords are absolutely verboten unless the swords are made using traditional techniques or are antiques, or are imported for usage by museums, martial artists or film/theatre companies... Historical re-enactors and cosplayers are in a bit of a limbo, where they're legit as long as it's absolutely clear what they're doing. A CS:GO cosplayer nearly got done in by counter-terror police until he walked next to a Roman centurion and the police realized he was just in costume.
What of enforcement, you might say? Surely the police are all focused on specific districts where gang killings are taking place, or looking for groups of people who look like gang members, or are known gang member affiliates?
Nope lol
Metropolitan police has <130 police on their gang busting department, while the force has lost tens of thousands of people due to a decade of budget cuts and stagnant wage growth slowly crippling the force. They're now phasing in a degree requirement to join the police force too, meaning that young kids who want to become police officers have to spend at least 3 years and £27k in a campus environment which despises the police force - OR - self-fund a practical policing degree, moving the police force in line with the NHS by forcing Nurses and Doctors to pay for their own training in order to stave off fiscal collapse. By contrast gangs aren't picky, pick any borough in northwest, west, central, south, southeast or east London and there'll be thousands of gang members in each at least, with metropolitan London having tens of thousands of gang members in total. Daylight acid attacks, hammer attacks, stabbings, violent muggings, robberies, even brazen robberies on the Thames or attacks on police, coupled with a decline in police force size and quality, the police force is a thin blue line stretched thinner by the day. There's leaky gaps all over the place. We've had shit where police officers were forced to respond to violent crimes taking place on their own that resulted in the police being sexually assaulted, assaulted or humiliated, with the current national average being
6,000 attacks on police a day. The Home Office's response has been pretty much to always underreport crime or underreport the attacks on police and so on. There's no problem if no one is complaining you see.
So policemen are few and far between, with the best usually spent patrolling public areas owing to terrorism, and every time there's a carnival or a demonstration or a big sports events, police are usually too overwhelmed to prosecute criminals even when they're conducting violent crime in front of them, or attacking the police directly. When it comes to targeting gangs, our MPs have made targeting online trolls a greater priority than targeting gangs. In order to avoid accusations of being racist by targeting those who look like gangsters (our police force is still allowing human traffickers to enslave English children so as to not be called racist ffs), where they have enough manpower to conduct searches, they take over traffic bottlenecks like underground stations and set up metal detectors to screen everyone, and I've only ever seen them have enough money and manpower to do that once in my area - not even bothering to touch the estates where the gangs actually lived. That's not even factoring in how much of the violence isn't caused by gangs, just by violent kids who've grown up in the environment where the police cannot protect them, and so they have to protect themselves by being violent too. That's before you consider the urban geography of the city, with many areas of London being self-contained towns whose architects designed the buildings to be anti-bourgeois council flats which are impossible for policemen to safely patrol, and that's assuming police officers could patrol those areas and didn't have their nearby bases shut down due to budget cuts, as happened to my area's one. The police officers are doing their best, but the objectives they've been set by government are politically motivated, while they do not have the budget needed to stop the deterioration of the metropolitan police force.
A record number of police officers have resorted to taking up second jobs just to pay for their bills, while corruption is such a pressing issue
the metropolitan anti-corruption unit is under investigation for corruption.
tl;dr
we're a hive city with 1 spire
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 8568282 times)