What would STW if the hive mind were home secretary?

What would STW if the hive mind were home secretary

appoint a minister for cryptic online posts.

Que?

Lock ‘em all up and throw away the key…..the politicians that is and get people in who understand the research and how apply it and what ever they do evaluate it properly for next time this happens.

Increase the budget for the police and education for starters.

Get the experts into a room and ask how much they needed.

But if you want the off the top of my head answers

More Community policing
More funding for education and training
Pathways from prison to work with training and help
Drug treatment programs

That would be a start

If I were Home Secretary worried about knife crime?

I’d copy Scotland…

I’m not convinced that it was anything other than us getting kinda lucky up here. The gang culture died away organically, thankfully.

I’d legalise da urb and bring back the stocks and make cats illegal

https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2017/dec/03/how-scotland-reduced-knife-deaths-among-young-people
An interesting perspective on the Scottish example, seems a lot more than the problem just going away.

Pathways from prison to work with training and help
Drug treatment programs

Like what’s been happening for years anyway & never been particularly successful?

There’s going to be no magic wave of the hand to stop knife crime now, that’s for sure. Kids need to learn right & wrong from an early age & sadly that doesn’t happen as much as it should.

Like what’s been happening for years anyway & never been particularly successful?

Was it ever fully or properly funded?
Did we ever do enough, of course kids should learn right from wrong but also must have a way back if things go wrong.
No single thing will fix this but there is a lot that can be done

We’re not going to get anywhere until we look at the bigger picture and acknowledge that the drugs laws as they stand are totally ineffective and are just fuelling the violence on the streets.

Was it ever fully or properly funded?

Judging by the amount of drug workers & offender management staff employed in our prisons (or at least the 3 I worked in) I’d say yes.
You simply cannot rehabilitate someone who doesn’t want to be rehabilitated & a massive majority of current prisoners are in that bracket. It’s simply a lifestyle that needs to be broken well before prison looms.

I’d copy Scotland…

Batter them ?

^ no, just make it really cold outside ….

I think STW’s favourite clinical psychologist nails it here

Slightly OT – Question time has some seriously intense introductory music.

Non of the govt (past and present) has the guts to deal with the problem without being accused of heavy handed or fear losing votes.

Stop pretending it’s all about gangs. And just to get it said, stop pretending that “black on black” is different from anything else- there’s a reason it’s getting talked about more today and that’s shit. Take it out of politics, if possible- we don’t need people playing games with kids’ lives or posturing on how hard they can be on crime (while ignoring calls from police for more resources) or profiting from public fear, we need people to do what works- which it turns out, has been tried tested and proved in Glasgow and ignored everywhere else. And once you accept that what we’re doing doesn’t work, and what does work, do that and spend whatever it needs spending on it.

The hardest part inevitably is the politics not the policing or anything else. But hey, brexity brexit, red white and blue wanton criminality, tough on youth tough on the causes of youth.

Maybe more controversial but I’d drop the widespread use of stop and search- it soaks resources on a massive scale, it’s usually mistargeted, it undermines the police/policed bond, and it doesn’t really work. if you took 90% of the officer time spent on this and put it into actual intelligence led policing, I bet 10p you’d see results.

A decade of austerity means we’ve never recovered from the 2008 crash, the teenagers being caught up in this are the first generation of children since the 70s who’ve seen school funding decrease rather than increase https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/IMSF01/IMSF01.pdf
crushing the opportunities of many before theyve had a chance.

Likewise youth services has seen £500m cut since 2010 , withh 1000s of youth clubs & centres closed.
https://www.unison.org.uk/content/uploads/2016/08/23996.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/10/teenagers-isolated-idle-youth-clubs-services-closed

surely no one can think that this wont have had an impact

on top of that huge cuts to policing, ignored once again by the Home Secretary & now PM that oversaw most of them….

As a father of young children I fear it will get only much worse

@Northwind, I know JP is marmite, but that is exactly what he said. The ‘why’ is the most important part, who is largely irrelevant until we know why. Stop and search is poor and creates division, gathering intelligence and using it for targetted strikes on those carrying out these crimes is what need to happen.

@kimbers, it’s a multi-faceted issue, as you’ve noted there, add in lack of resources and funding for the police and it’s a shit sandwich that young kids are taking a bite out of. No support to try and tempt these kids away from this life while a poorly resourced police force cannot scoop up the shithead ‘role-models’.

@greenskin a stopped clock can be right twice a day 😉

But also +1 Northwind and Kimbers it’s a tragic state of affairs that show no real sign of a turnaround.

and as above I agree that by the time some people make it to prison it could be too late, but the cost of not trying must be too high, writing people off is not a good option. How those people have been treated up to the point it goes really wrong is important. The methods outlined in the Guardian article from Scotland do make some sense – it was a collective and organised effort, properly joined up and integrated which is not something that can be said for even public services at the moment.

@mikewsmith When he sticks to matters of psychology he’s usually on point, it’s when he drifts off down his current avenues he gets “confusing”. If I’m honest I much prefer Dr. Phil.

Anyhoo, agree with you, but as @esselgruntfuttock stated, some of these individuals give no **** about other people, they need putting in holes for a long time, those that want to rehabilitate should be given every opportunity as well as programs of intervention for the more impressionable caught up in this madness.

I hate to say it, really hate to say it but I agree with JP on that point. These kids are labeled as criminal before they’ve even started school because of their social status and post code. We need to tackle poverty and provide opportunity, but the policies which support social mobility aren’t there because they require collective social economical investment in services such as transport, housing, social insurance and health care

I genuinely don’t understand the Animus aimed at JP. He works at a University which you have to be really good to get a job at. He has something like 3000 hours of videos of his lectures up on various sites and clearly really, really knows his stuff. I am not a fan of self-help books in general but if we have to have them I think I’d rather he wrote them than Anthony Robbins or Gwyneth Paltrow.
And he clearly is the only one in that video that is actually more interested in solving the problem than solving it in the politically appropriate way.

Free helicopter rides courtesy of Duterte?

Ah an issue that seperates the idea the the UK Government(s) is shite whilst being in the EU.

About time.

As per lots of people above. Get the money spent. 20,000 coppers would take 2 years to implement according to police chap on LBC.

May’s interview on this is despicable – like the fox hunting mob they would be better off admitting they don’t actually care.

We can justify the money through MMT.

No excuses other than political choice.

As others have said here tackling the causes of crime would be required to make a difference. Poverty is the real problem.

A long term approach like Glasgow’s VRU. Allied with education and methods to alleviate poverty. Policing spending needs to increase.

A nice counter to May’s shite was “if there was no correlation between crime and policing numbers why do we need police?”

Maybe more controversial but I’d drop the widespread use of stop and search- it soaks resources on a massive scale

The universally respected Scottish model started with massively increased amounts of stop and search, and increased mandatory prison sentences for carrying a knife.

Just caught the end of some idiot politician on the news saying that the police should remember they can always deploy the army if they’re short of resources- moronic soundbite kind of completely missing the issue in question

We live in a society that has completely abandoned the remotest pretence at social mobility.

Born on some shithole estate? Then you’ll go to a failing school and you’ll have zero life chances and stay on that sink estate for the rest of your life. All while we starve the public sector of resources to remove anything that made this existance even slightly tolerable.

The best bit is that due to the massive, totally unchallenged social inequality, the middle classes kids will continue to do well, get a decent education and move into well-paid fulfilling careers through the same accident of birth that condemned you to a life in poverty.

And we wonder why these kids are acting desperate? Seriously?

I note that the demands that something must be done have only really been ratcheted up once a couple of nice, middle class white kids have been caught in the crossfire

Nick’s Scottish solution is all well and good, but we should also be tackling the problem: ‘If I don’t feel part of society, why abide by society’s rules’? Make these disaffected and marginalised youngsters feel part of society.
We were talking about this yesterday and the thing that worries me is that, I believe, the two murders at the weekend weren’t gang or organised crime related*. Someone just thought, after a bit of deliberation, I’m going to stab that person to death, for the hell of it. That surely is a step closer to anarchy and something that needs to be addressed urgently regardless of who’s getting stabbed*?
*EDIT: Cynical Binners, cynical.

*EDIT: Cynical Binners, cynical.

But pretty accurate

We seem to be living in a society were we concentrate on our own little boxes of victimhood (ok there are probably better words (like ones that exist)) and fight among ourselves, rather than noticing the lack of social mobility and opportunities for a significant portion of the population

Bonners may be cynical but I admit to having the same thought.

Interesting mix of views here.

Btw, who here lives in an area of high knife crime? Is there any where that isn’t! Living in SE19, a nice quiet residential bit, I still cycle work in Victoria past the site of 2 separate stabbings in Camberwell/kennington, I pass a load of flowers left for another going to the corner shop for milk, and can think of at least one other recent and very close death which I just past on the bus (tulse hill). I tend to think a few more police would help, although do they work efficiently? Cycling home last night I passed the scene of what looked like the police having caught a score on a scooter… Or perhaps it was just a scooter accident. 4 or 5 police vehicles and loads of officers seemed like they weren’t all needed.

Btw, who here lives in an area of high knife crime?

Depends what you call high knife crime. I live in Hereford. A quiet small city on the Welsh border. In the last five years I think there have been about 4 fatal stabbings, not sure how many non fatal.

To me that seems high for a town where before that there might have been 1 in the previous 15 years.

The Glasgow model was not just increased stop ‘n’ search. There was a lot of community work. There was a documentary on it recently.

I think this is it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01m7c1x/p01m72x1

Latest government proposals to tackle knife crime announced

The Glasgow model was not just increased stop ‘n’ search.

No it wasn’t, but it was a part of the programme at the start. You essentially still have to find the knives and confiscate them to get them off the street. What the Polis did find was that stop and search had limited effect as they soon found out a large percentage of knife carriers were in fact middle class lads that wouldn’t have been targeted anyway. But they also did have a programme of showing the effect of knife injuries on victims and families, point out to known drug gang members that they had intelligence on them and came down hard on them. It wasn’t all social work and education, there was strict and tough policing alongside it. Plus the Scottish model was done at a point when the cops had much better funding and numbers of officers,