Originally Posted by
KerrAvon
Blimey. IBS would be proud of how far this thread has gone. And I get pulled up by a mod for teasing another poster?
I’ve been involved in crime for the last 31 years with a particular interest in gun and gang crime for the last 3 years or so and will give you my take.
The shape of crime has changed in the last thirty years with that being particularly the case in respect of drug usage.
Cocaine has replaced heroin as the drug of choice for many people who prefer to live in an altered state of reality and I think that has real implications for society. I won’t bore you with my theories of why it should be so, but those involved in trafficking cocaine are often more aggressive and organised in their operations. In addition, even small towns are now seeing the growth of gangs or, worse still are seeing dealers from the larger cities moving in with what are called ‘county line’ operations. Ironically, if the police are successful in taking down a local dealer network it can serve to leave a vacuum into which the bigger and more dangerous operators will move.
There will often be inter-gang conflict in which the guns come out. Someone above suggested that you were relatively safe if you stayed out of the drug trade. That is true to a point, but people can literally get caught in the cross fire or the ‘wrong’ person can be targeted through mistaken identity.
Probably because of the large penalties for gun possession (a five year minimum sentence for many types of gun), the latest development is the growth in the use of acid or ammonia as weapons, which are often used far less discriminatively than guns.
On the question of race and crime, I have seen nothing that persuades me of a clear link. The poorer sections of society are involved in crime far more than the better off. As recent immigrants will often be over represented in the poorer sections of society then, logically, they will necessarily be over represented in the crime statistics.
Thirty years ago, people of Asian ethnicity would rarely be seen in court. In recent years offenders of that ethnicity are appearing much more regularly. I have a British-Pakistani friend who is far more eloquent than I upon why that might be the case. Again, I won't bore you with her theories save to say that she would point to both flaws within the immigrant communities and wider British society.
In the two gang cases in which I have been involved in the last year, it was very striking how multi-cultural they were.
The number of females involved in violent crime seems to have soared in the last thirty years. I don’t know why.
As to why people from the poorer sectors of society are overrepresented as criminals, I think the answer may be far more complicated and nuanced than it might seem at the first glance. Not having very much can certainly make people feel resentful and alienated and, through that render them vulnerable to being drawn into acquisitive crime. At the same time, however, perhaps some people are in the poorer sectors of society because of lower levels of educational attainment, which in turn could be driven by growing up within a poor and dysfunctional home life? Who can say?
As for the argument about the legalisation of drugs, I would simply say that the war on drugs has been fought and largely lost; cannabis use is pretty much endemic and cocaine is seen as being far less damaging and socially acceptable than heroin. One drug gang of which I am aware specialised in dealing to students and I often wondered what those nice educated customers would think if they knew about the violence that underpinned the organisation that was providing for their Friday night pick-me-up. Perhaps they wouldn’t care.
The consequnces of Prohibition in 1920s America demonstrates how criminalising the use of a popular drug (in that case alcohol) serves to drive crime.
On the question of punishment it is suggested above that British Courts are soft. I have not looked up the figures for a while, but it certainly used to be the case that we send more of our population to prison than any other European country except Belarus.
I’m struggling to care about people eating fish caught in the River Don.
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