Sceptical of knife epidemic
After my post on Friday looking at the hospital admission figures for stab and gunshot victims in England, a story was widely reported that knife violence accounts for 14,000 people in Britain being admitted into hospital last year.
You may have seen it in the Independent on Sunday which claimed an exclusive and then almost everywhere else, including the BBC.
Well, I have checked out the story and discovered that the figure includes not only attacks but also accidental injuries from knives and other sharp implements. If one looks only at assaults with sharp objects (stabbings to you and me) the figure for the UK halves to about 7,000.
I have now been able to lay my hands on the Scottish data for the same category which shows approximately 1,300 stab victims north of the border for 2006/7, which is actually a fall from 2002/3.
The figures for Northern Ireland are small, but again the numbers of hospital admissions has fallen over the same period.
The inflation of the figures seems unnecessary to make the point: injuries from stabbings have gone up in England - particularly in London.
However, knives have become political weapons. No politician wants to be accused of complacency, so rhetoric trumps analysis. It wouldn't matter if exaggerating the scale of the problem didn't make it more likely youngsters will seek to protect themselves with knives and the wider population will needlessly worry about what is a tiny risk for all but a few.
I was puzzled, having studied this data, why the Home Office should be suggesting that doctors need to report stab wounds in the same way they report gunshot wounds to the police since we have the figures already
The reason, I understand, is that the hospital figures only apply to those admitted to hospital rather than treated and sent home. Ministers want police to have better information for their community crime mapping.
What I suspect such an exercise would reveal is that knife crime is rising in some inner-city areas, fuelled by gang culture, drugs and alcohol. However, it may actually be falling in much of the UK and I remain sceptical that there is good evidence of a national "epidemic".
PS: I have done a bit more number-crunching for a piece on tonight's BBC News at Ten and I think it is quite informative. By my calculations, knife crime has risen three times faster in London over the past five years than the rest of England. This, I think, demonstrates how the situation in the capital has driven the claims of an epidemic.
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Good sensible reporting again Mark, but why do we have to get this info in BBC blogs. Any chance you could start sharing your wisdom with the Six 'OClock news team?
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When I was a Scout in the fifties there was a fashion for knife crimes and we had to stop wearing sheaf knives. Which was a sensible measure.
Eventually, as fashions do, this nasty one faded. That turnover doesn't lessen the problem and illustrates how difficult it is to anticipate these changes.
We have a continuing problem amongst some boys of their low self-esteem and lack of confidence. And the use of threatening images. I wonder whether those have, once again, spilt over into carrying knives? In the mistaken view that knives somehow 'protect' the carrier from the threatening appearances of others.
Whatever the causes we do need to take firm action to deter knife carrying - but also seek to mitigate underlying motivations.
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Keep at it, Mark, a voice of reason for once - i think i'll actually watch the 10 o clock news tonight just to see a decent report on knife crime
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Good spot, Mark. Although it might be worth having a word with your colleagues who are still reporting "An Independent on Sunday suggests almost 14,000 people a year have become victims of knife attacks in Britain..."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7492758.stm
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Yes, excellent, considered, and absolutely no hype. The complete opposite of the reporting we seem to get from the media these days. I am convinced that a lot of the problems in Britain today are due to the sensationalist reports that we see daily on the tv and in the newspapers. Peoples perceptions are being effected by the daily bombardment of doom and gloom and irresponsible reporting.
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So far your attempts at 'number crunching' have been laughably innumerate. Both in your original piece and your effort on poverty in the UK where you managed to interpret the evidence in precisely the opposite way to that to which the evidence pointed. You use euphemisms like 'urban' and 'gang' to disguise the fact that these murders are overwhelmingly black both in terms of victims and offenders, something you must be purposely disregarding and therefore distorting the whole context of this problem. You might be a bit less sanguine if like me you had a 17 year old son going to school in south London. As for the Guardianista 'moral panic' , aren't you giving your politics away here? How about a piece on the 'moral panic' about AIDS among heterosexual Britons in the UK or racism in the public services
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A brilliant and incisive piece of reporting. Once again, we are being manipulated by the politicians and the press into believing that the situation is worse than it really is. Well, it gains votes and sells newspapers, doesn't it? One thing I disagree with - Mark states that his opinion is that knife crime is "fuelled by gang culture, drugs and alcohol". He omits to mention that alcohol consumption in these instances was entirely illegal. Underage alcohol consumption is a major factor, but this is very strictly controlled within the licensed trade by way of personal licenses and premises licenses. It's not alcohol consumption that is the problem, but young people participating in the consumption of alcohol in deregulated circumstances, on the street. If supermarkets and off-licences were prohibited from selling alcohol and the responsibility for monitoring alcohol consumption was entirely the responsibility of a licensed premises, alcohol would play no part of this tragic scenario. Put drinking into pubs and bars and not out on the street, where it cannot be controlled./
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the man corrected his typo with the stats. give him a rest. so often with these things stats and numbers can be altered or spun as to make things sound better, or to sex them up to give channel 4 a reason have cherry blair parading around on tv of an evening. i do agree with the blog though, it does make you wonder why it is that so many incidents of violence happen in inner cities. poor areas? there are plenty of poor areas around the smaller towns away from the big cities. broken homes? im from a broken home, iv turned out fine, as has my brother. what is it that inner city areas have, or havnt got that make knife attacks so common(if you belive all you read) i agree whole heartedly with post 5 robby67. about sensationalist media reports, headlines all look more exciting when it reads, teens run riot. or knife crime on the rise. i think that fuels the fire far too much. just report the facts, not pointless rhetoric that gets all the weak minded scared to leave their homes. its like global warming, or ecstacy in the 90's, the reality is far less dramatic that the headlines. but if we want to make a difference then we need to stop this scare mongering.
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I think your overall analysis is correct - this is not evenly distributed, it is a phenomenon concentrated in specific areas. (It is also concentrated in specific demographics of people, but that can not be discussed)
I live in rural leicestershire and I haven't encountered any crowds of knife brandishing youfs locally.
But I don't think the government should evade their responsibility on this just because it isn't happening to me. I think people (all people) in certain areas of London have just the same right to live in safety.
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Well in feels like an epidemic in London...
Bye the bye - I thought that map on falling 2 car households in London was a perfect example of how to lie with statistics.
Mark London
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ignore that first bit post #8 about the correction of the stats typo. that was meant to be for another blog written by the same guy. the rest of the post applies to this article
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OldSouthLondoner suggests that the knife crime offenders are predominantly black. The news reporting certainly gives this impression, but I recognise that this may not give a statistically correct picture. I have tried to track down statistics on the ethnicity of knife crime offenders to get a better picture (being a statistics junkie myself), and failed to find what I would regard as reliable data. Perhaps Mark you might have better luck. If it is at odds with the picture given by the BBC reporting then the BBC editorial board might want to take this into account.
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so contributors 5 and 8 believe the current concern about knife crime is down to media hype? That's ok then, we can now sleep safely in our beds and the problem will go away. In the same vein, the article suggests knife crime is only on teh increase in London - phew that's a relief.
There are fundamental reasons for what is happening which will take much longer than one parliament to overcome and therefore solutions are probably unpalatable to polticians of any hue. Solutions such as supporting families, instilling proper discipline, educating children properly not through pointless testing and effective punishments for offenders. More prisons in short term then so be it until new generations emerge where those inclined to wrongdoing are less violent than the present miscreants.
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Tell the families who have lost children to these knife carrying cowards that statistically knife crime is not increasing or serious or going down. I am sure they will be pleased to hear that and make their lose of a child easier to bare. I am greatly concerned that we accept small up turns because of statistical increase in population and hail down turns as triumphs when we should be addressing the problem of serious knife crime in the UK. Statistics can be made to say anything you like. We cannot start stating statistics when a young life or any life is involved. The very nature of these knife attacks should be cause for concern. One life lost should be more than a statistics but until it is your loved one left dying in a filthy street we are happy to hide behind statistics.
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Do you know what I like about your post Mark? It's your commitment to getting to the true facts. I don't read newspapers because of their constant use of headlines designed to attract sales, rather than to dispense the truth.
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Tell you what Mark, why don't we just abolish the NHS altogether! That way there won't be any statistics to massage, and as everyone knows, statistics never lie!
Keep that head in the sand...
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@13, I never said there wasn't a problem. I do believe there is a problem with behaviour generally in our society not just young people.
My point was that the media over hypes everything which does not lead to sensible debate and meaningful actions, but does lead to a distorted perception, panic and knee-jerk reactions.
For your information I actually agree with the second part of your post.
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Why should this come as any surprise, since it appears that London is the centre of the universe?
The same thinking applies to all the 'stranger danger' hysteria in relation to child abduction/sexual abuse, when world wide it is known, should people chose to know it, that a child is in much more danger from its' own family and immediate circle of friends than from any 'stranger'.
Media driven overkill appears to be the daily diet.
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You have confused me with reference to England, UK, Britain and then seperate Scottish and Northern Irish figures. I think you were saying the figures were for England and that Scotland and Northern Ireland were different. What happened to Wales and why did you mention the UK and Britain?
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#19. In matter's legal 'England and Wales' are often quoted as one entity as they share a legal system. Crime stats for Scotland are presented as 'Scottish' as we have a total different legal system- for instance we don't have a crime of 'manslaughter' (we have culpible homicide) etc.
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Text messaging marketing hasn’t really taken the “internet marketing” crowd by storm yet - i’d be really irritated to receive a text about every big launch, for example. But Looking outside of the pure marketing potential of this once, what about providing a service to your text message subscribers? Anything that lends itself to frequent updates that rabid fans will want to know as soon as possible lends itself to text messaging marketing.
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johnsmith
Wide Circles
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