IMO we need to focus on the dramatic increase in knife attacks and deaths in the UK.
I've been wondering about that issue myself. Several things really puzzle me about it.
For one thing, I think it's because I'm getting old, but with these sorts of issues I constantly feel bemused by the time-scales people use when deciding there's a 'trend' or some sort of 'crisis'. The media here is going on relentlessly about the 'knife crime' or 'murder' 'epidemic' and 'crisis', but to me the figures don't seem to justify the sense of novelty or urgency about it.
Every single stabbing in London now gets onto the national news. But when, for example, they breathlessly declare 'this is the 35th fatal stabbing in London this year', that only translates to ten a month, which is exactly the same rate as 2018 and 2017, and indeed, not
massively higher than most years for the last few decades. And in those previous years the media didn't report every single incident the way they are currently doing.
I agree the murder rate is too damn high, in absolute terms, and knife-killings in particular. But what I don't get, and this has got to be to do with being old and how one's perception of time changes with age, is the sense that this is some new 'crisis'. It's bad, but it's been bad for most of my life. I've always thought it was too high - we should do better (I blame neo-liberalism, aka 'Thatcher').
The second thing I find really puzzling is that while
knife-homicide in particular has increased (and most UK knife-crime is in London), the overall
murder rate in London is
not particularly high. It's significantly lower than it was in the 80s and 90s, in fact. It seems as if knife murders are displacing other forms of murder. It's almost as if people are stabbing people to death instead of bashing them over the head or something. It's odd. I don't understand what is going on there, and the media hasn't even acknowledged that point yet alone explained it. Unless other forms of murder are declining due to improved emergency medical care meaning people are less likely to die from things other than stabbings?
I'm confused how to reconcile this data (and bear in mind London's population has grown by maybe 25% since 1990, so the actual murder _rate_ is even lower for the later years, a graph of the actual
rate rather than absolute numbers would have a significant downward trend super-imposed on it)
With the knife-specific figures (in non-embeddable charts!) in this link (that seem to show a slightly different pattern, with a much more dramatic rise in the last couple of years)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42749089
It's quite confusing, and it irritates the heck out of me how useless the media is at properly analysing such issues.
Edit - yeah, the media is just _rubbish_ at thinking or talking about things properly. There are a few tiny islands of thoughtfullness in the BBC, but even the Beeb is largely moronic.