that sounds good
i think its all to do with money!!!
they think why should i go to work monday to friday 9-5 for minimum wage which prob
works out at £175-250 a week when they can easily go and sell drugs or go out robbing and get that
same amount in a day or two
and lets face it £200 a week aint alot of money now a days
i could go for a night out, spend that and still come home sober!!
cost of living is going up but wages aint!!
same old thing richer get richer and the poor get poorer!!
i partly agree mate just not all of it, but i fully see where you are coming from, good post;)
I work in the council workshops and come across several people that work with youth. One fella drives a bus that teaches sex education he told me he had kids of 16 driving to the bus in bran new mercs and he asked them why they deal drugs and dont go to school the answer is :if you can pay me £2000 a week then i wont deal drugs but i cant earn that so why shouldn’t i deal drugs. How can you tell a 16 year old that he shouldn’t earn £2000 a week!! sort that and you get rid of the problem.
Its the drug takers arming the kids the Amy Winehouse Pete dochertys of this world doing this as well as the useless parenting going on.
It will never stop unfortunatly as the government gloryfi drug taking by not stamping down on it tell me why pete docherty is not in jail for 15 years or why amy Winehouse isn’t doing Bird
America banned amy Winehouse from performing in their country for failing a drug test what do we do let her play at NELSON MANDELA!! concert.
NELSON MANDELA i tell you !! one of the great people of our time humming along to a prolific drug taker that whats wrong with the world
sorry for the rant its your fault Ratty
Couldn’t have put it better myself:)
No answer to the 2k a weekAgreed that Whinehouse and Docherty are not a particularly good example, but what has been done about it??? Nothing. People still go to see them. Look what happened to Kate Moss, as soon as her employers found out abouot her coccaine habbit they canceled all her contracts. That’s what the music industry should do to these people. Refuse them venues, recording studio time, withdrawl of cds from the shops and tracks off the internet. Dont feed a habbit dont buy their music.But it is not these role models that are to blame. Where do you think they got the notion that is was ok to do drugs in the first place?? Why do the kids think it’s ok to carry knives and behave like they do??Because WE accept it! We sit here and moan and whinge and say the police should do more about it and should have more powers, when we stripped them of those powers in the first place, we stripped the schools of their powers and we are slowly taking our own powers as parents away as well. We voted in the coucillors and the MPs that have brought in the legislation and the red tape. Knee jerk reaction to gun crime: Ban guns. Knee jerk reaction to knife crime: Ban knives.Has it worked?? NO, course it hasn’t!!We have stopped telling our children that it is wrong to behave the way they do. Good behaviour should be the norm. Not rewarded. Exceptionally good behaviour should be rewarded. Bad behaviour should be punished. Not ignored, not distraced from. I’m not saying beat the child, you can punish without violence. We are slowly, but assuredly removing the authority figures we had as children, they don’t respect their teachers or the police and who do they get that from???US, sadly but true. We, everyone, as a community and a country need to start standing up for ourselves, to not be afraid to say no and mean no. Get rid of all this political correctness waffle. It has been proven beyond doubt that it causes more harm than good. The rights as an individual. Did that little toerag consider my rights as an individual?? No. If you decide to step outside of the law and you did so knowingly dont expect the law to protect you.Rant over;)
The human rights laws that were implemented to protect people, are wrecking havoc in society now, as they are being used by the criminals to prevent them being deported if they are foreign, helping them claim against the victims if they lash out in self defence, causing trouble for the police who need to have very good reasons for stopping and searching someone who isnt white, and preventing the police from entering places like mosques!
No one should be above the law, but yet we see it everyday when politicians take the ****. There is no figure head for kids to look up to, just crooks everywhere right up into the government, terrorists let out of prison in northern ireland because theyre killing was apparently a ‘just cause’, not to mention the fact its ok for the west to go into the middle east and kill, but not ok for them to do it.
We live in a world that crime, and killing seems to pay off, and the consequences are few and far between
personally, i think troublesome kids should be conscripted to the army, but they cant do this, why?
ITS AGAINST THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS!!!
Amy Whinehouse, Peter Doherty, George Michael, Kate Moss, all people caught with drugs numerous times, but yet theyre always let off with it, another great example of the world we live in, but yet do something wrong whilst riding on the road on your bike, and feel the full blow of the law…
The problem with that was that it was just a knee jerk reaction to look like they were doing something. They all seem to have given her the contracts back now judging by the way she is always on TV adverts and magazine covers.
i fugging hate kate moss, skinny fugging coke head biatch…she should have been pusehd out of modelling…hold on…tho…there alll on teh sniff!!
dont get me started on pete and amy…
its not so much these role models its grime music artists and hip hop artists, soem have a postive attitude soem dont, thats teh problem, has anyone seen kidulthood?? no that film potrays modern day london excatly how it is…,…
:w00t: well until i start seeing yoots walking down the street with ak47’s and the like, i’ll continue living in my own blackheath suburban utopia thank you very much :hehe:
And then you’ve got Lewisham and Peckham just down the road… now that’s suburban heaven if ever I’ve seen it… I’d have thought Blackheath sitting with a load of cash smack in the middle of some pretty rough parts of South London will be one of the first places the scum bags will come knocking! Saying that it doesn’t seem like anywhere in London is immune from this problem.
It’s a catch-22 but I wish someone’d work out a realistic way of solving this then get on with it. All the ideas suggested so far are interesting but they have been thought of (and in some cases tried) before and not worked out- time for something new? Answers on a postcard…
Legalise all recreational drugs, get companies to make them to pharmeceutical standard with controlled purity, tax them, sell them in the pharmacists or off-license. People go down to the offie, buy the poison of their choice, get off their t1ts or merely cheerfully high, everyone happy. End of drug-crime problem.
This is an awesome thread. Some excellent opinions. Me personally, in addition to most of what’s already been said I suspect that the abolition of corporal punishment in schools is a major contributing factor to the rise in anti social/violent/criminal behaviour in youths these days. Before all the PC Human Rights mob start going mental on me think about it, well for those of you over the age of 30 anyway. I was at school when corporal punishment was permitted and whilst it was abolished. We never had anywhere near the amount of trouble with youths as there appears to be nowadays. I don’t think it’s as barbaric as some would have us believe either as if you look at a natural learning process such as someone touching the bar of an electric fire, they feel pain and don’t do it again (unless they are demented). Yes there were still killings/shootings/stabbings/robberies etc but there just didn’t seem to be as many when I grew up in the '70s. When I was younger the rozzers would give you a good slap about if you even gobbed off at them, not nowadays. My parents used to ‘leather’ me with a belt if I ever caused the cops to appear at our door. Needless to say I feared the pain if that I knew was coming my way for stepping out of line so I tended not to, or at least not to get caught half as much anyway;) I also had respect for my elders and parents. Seems today kids do not fear anything and have no self respect let alone respect for others. Just my 2 bobs worth.
shando
“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” So said William Shakespeare. Teenage gangs have been with us for centuries and I expect many of us were up to no good during our teenage years. However, I agree that the increase in youth knife crime / murder needs to be stopped. I also do not think that most teenagers are inherently ‘bad.’
There are social causes - as stated on this thread - family breakdown / poverty / lack of opportunity and the anger that brings / the breakdown of a manufacturing base in this country and subsequent lack of job opportunities / lack of family structure / the wrong role models. There is also peer pressure / the drug culture - cartels etc / the lure of obtaining money quickly / the ‘me me’ culture / loss of respect for others and lack of value of another person’s life.The causes can be debated at length.
But how to stop knife crime? I have told teenagers off on many occasions and have not been violently attacked. I recently told off a group of young teenagers wearing hoods for abusing a woman at a cash point machine. I was very firm and explained that they shouldn’t speak to her in that way. Although they then started calling me a F*****G bitch etc I did not feel that they were going to attack me. Maybe if more adults intervened or took control over situations, from parents to teachers to members of the public, teenagers would not feel out of control and lack boundaries or an understanding of what is right and wrong. They would not feel afraid to speak up and grass others up, if they actually thought that adults / the system could protect them.
I have no answer as to how to stop knife crime. We know teenage violence has been around forever, we know that there are many causes and reasons for it. But how to stop it? Stop and search? That might work, but it is random and may only weed out a few weapons. Deterrents such as longer prison sentences / harsher penalties? Would that work in the long run? National service? Engaging the young people involved in knife crime and at risk from it and asking them for their solutions? I too would be interested to hear other’s views on this.
Brilliant Shakespeare quote Hels! - puts things in perspective ;).
I have a lot of sympathy with wigglemethis, 7wheelwagon etc on the role of drugs in all this - if we legalized drugs we would eliminate the criminal subculture that is turning a lot of these kids into knife/gun toting delinquents.
It’s worthy of serious debate anyway 
agree with shando soem cracking posts i say some, pretty much all!
i thought this topic may start a biit of chat, i just have been getting so wound up about whats been going on, and thought i woud vent my anger and fustration on here.
indeed there have always been gangs, but the scale of the problem at the moment is huge, walk onto any estate in london and i bet you will see large groups of youths anything from 10-50 of them, i kid you not, 50 strong! some of them maybe even more, if you could search them i bet my bike you would find wepaons.
drugs are a part of it… but its not just drugs…
its the culture of ‘you got my back, i got yours’ i think many of the kids dont want to get dragged into it, BUT many resort to it merely to protect themselves or be protected, also many feel like outsiders if they dont join in, and they want to be part of something
it was sort of like this for me when i was into graffiti, i loved being a part of a culture i felt like i belonged to sumthing, no one really understood the culture, unless they was one of us, we had rows with other writers yeah, but we didnt stab each other!
the music i would argue is almost if not a bigger influence on the culture of the gangs, with the music comes the steretyping, wich these kids are living up to, when you have MC’s talking about another MC (a ‘battle’ or ‘clash’ ) they often go to town on each other,verbally of course, ’ im badder than you, im bigger in the scene than you, dont try it with me i’ll bore you up (bore=stab)’ etc this is a big part of the problem, see i can listen to that music, more for the beats than lyrics but i dont model myself on it, thats where the problem lies i think, they model themselves on teh artist, this is why you wont find many grime clubs in london, too much trouble, shootings and stabbings, its supposed to be a dance ffs!! not a fight club!
i’m quite a youngster on here, i have seen first hand what goes on, as im sure have others,i can look after myself, i’ve had to where i’ve grown up.
but i can honestly say i am so glad i dot have to walk about, cos its scary out there.
and a group of 50, that would take at least 100 police officers for it too be done safely and control the situation. and it just causes problems in the community as we are seen to target particular sections . and when did you ever see a 100 spare coppers knocking around. i work in one of the buisiest boroughs in london with a minimum strenght of little more than 20 officers on the streets and you’d be surprised how often we run out of troops before were 1/4 way through the shift.
working hard and flying round risking our lives and the lives of others to deal with stupid calls that dont warrant a reponse but everyone wants us there immediatley to sort out their silly little problems, some caused purley by peoples intolerance of others ( kids playing in a square making a noise at 8pm) or peoples inability to sort their own lives out and we have to go deal with that and while we are people are dying.
i dont know how to stop it i just wish we had the chance to get out there and try .LONDONBIKERS Against Knife Crime - Ride A Blade,Dont Carry One
Yeah your hit the nail on the head there Ratty mate, I said some, I shoulda said all. When I was a kid we had gangs too it was a territorial thing based around which street you lived in coloured with the usual idoitic sectarianism of Scotland. But most disagreements were sorted out with a ‘square go’ and generally both parties shook hands afterwards after they had seemingly resolved their differences via punching and kicking each other. Mass fights were a bit rarer back then. You never thought that by walking into another part of town you would be stabbed or even killed, maybe you expected a chase and a couple of punches etc but nowhere near the levels of violence which appear to be commonplace amongst todays youths.
i didnt mean it like that fella, it was more an example;)
**
i dont know how to stop it i just wish we had the chance to get out there and try**
mate i agree 100%, the sooner this country is less PC the better, we can send troops to afghanistan and iraq but we cant deal with youths in rough areas, its madness, personally i think the old bill should get in there and get stuck in, scare the **** out of em!