Among other things are these points:
"'These are kids who, if left to their own devices, will end up with a gun in their hands or a bullet in their heads,' says Detective Inspector Mark Powell of the Greater Manchester Police."
"To illustrate the point Powell produces a newspaper headline from 12 years ago which announces the police are to wage war on gun crime and contrasts it with another from last year showing that gun crime has risen 35 per cent in the past decade. 'The police cannot win this war on their own. It has to involve the community. That is why the Mags project was started.' "
"...Powell recognises that it is hard to convince youngsters to go straight when they can earn £200 a day or more working in the drug industry"
Pay close attention to this:
"Giving the gangs names makes them seem more organised that they actually are. We're not talking about slick criminal organisations - we're talking about kids with guns.'
Others disagree. Many of the gangs are said to be highly sophisticated and some have access to private doctors who will treat gunshot wounds without informing the police. There have also been incidents where the wounded have been given basic assistance by fellow gang members and then taken abroad for professional treatment. This, say those on the fringes of the gangs, is the reason that while the number of incidents involving gunfire has remained fairly constant over the past year, the number turning up with gunshot wounds in hospital has declined."
And finally, the numbers:
"Despite recent slight falls in the levels of gun crime, inner south Manchester remains one of the most dangerous parts of the country. In 2002 the firearms murder rate for England and Wales was 0.09 per 100,000 head of population, compared with 5.4 per 100,000 for the US.
In Greater Manchester the rate was to 10 per 100,000, while in Longsight, Moss Side and Hulme it was 140 per 100,000."
Several things about this. The police are basically admitting that the gangs have no problem getting guns.
Referring to drug dealers as the 'drug industry' is a telling point to me, instead of calling them dealers, as to the attitude toward it. And they're basically saying that they've failed to teach these kids that there's something wrong about selling crap to other kids and fighting each other over territory. Sounds rather like the inner-city gang problem here, doesn't it?
Whether it's denial or CYA public relations noise, they're not admitting just how big and serious an enterprise the gang activity is. Note apparent first-aid training and sneaking wounded people out of the country for treatment; that speaks of serious organization and money, and also why some statistics are being skewed to make things seem better.
And look at those final numbers. If I'm not mistaken 2002 was the year that some paper found out and demonstrated that the government was messing with the numbers to make crime look like it was less of a problem, including- maybe especially- crimes involving firearms. The 2004 numbers? X2 and X30 higher than in the U.S. in those areas! Someone once pointed out that in the U.S. if you took out the gang- and drug-related crimes in inner city areas, our homicide rate was actually very close to that of Britain. It appears that the same type crimes in the U.K. are overall shooting their gun homicide rates up. And as Kevin at Smallest Minority has pointed out before, this does not count all other homicides; knife and gun and beating, etc. You add all those in? It has really gotten bad in Britain. Last official numbers I saw said that assault, burglary and robbery were 2.5 times higher in Britain than here; I can't remember the overall homicide numbers, but they were, I think, just a bit below ours. And where ours have held steady or gone down, theirs have gone up.
Yeah, I really, really want to be more like Britain and Europe.
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