My Three Step Plan

I might be being cynical, but does anyone else think a knife amnesty is the shittest idea ever. If the police were doctors and you got cancer, they’d come over to you and say “OK, we’ve come up with an idea. We’re going to leave a pot by your lung, and we’re hoping the cancerous cells will just…you know…leave on their own”.

A knife amnesty is like waving your hands in the air and shouting “We’re out of ideas!!”. It can’t possibly work, and it’s stupid to think it would. I’m fairly certain this is a reasonable representation of the thought process behind the decision to hold a knife amnesty…

Kids are getting stabbed by each other all across the country, and the response is to just say “Errrr…can we have those knives please”. At the end of the amnesty, they say “We’ve had over 100 knives handed in, and that’s 100 knives that are no longer on the streets”. Well yippee, I feel safer already. But then they show footage of this crime bucket which is full of shitty old kitchen knives, and I realise that it was pretty unlikely any self respecting stabbist would have been stabbing me with one of them anyway.

So they’re a shit idea, we know that. But just for fun, let’s assume they are a good idea, and it isn’t a complete waste of time. There’s still a problem. Knife amnesty’s only last about a month. If they’re a good idea, why are they only a good idea sometimes? It’s either a good thing to have kids hand in knives, or it’s not. Why is it that it’s only a good idea for a month or so. The reason is simple, when there’s a media outcry after a kid gets stabbed and killed, the police need a response, so they come out and say “Knife Amnesty – HAZAAR” and think that should do the trick. If there was always an amnesty, they couldn’t do this. Surely if they believed letting people give knives in without fear of prosecution was a good idea, it would always be a good idea, and that would always be the case. It doesn’t make any sense to say that sometimes people should be able to hand knives in, and sometimes they shouldn’t. It’s either a good idea or it isn’t.

And of course it isn’t. To simplify this, let me run through the reasons I had for not stabbing anyone today:

Reason Number One - Self control.

Reason Number Two – Fear of being locked up

Reason Number Three – Nobody particularly annoyed me.

Reason Number One Billion and Five – Couldn’t find a knife

It’s not exactly hard to find a knife is it, what’s the point of rounding a few hundred up, there are knives in every house in the world. Knives are all over the fucking place, amnesty or not. In every single kitchen in the country there is a knife that someone could use as a weapon. It’s not the knives that are the problem, it’s the stupid delinquent juveniles who’ve been dragged rather than brought up who go around stabbing people that need addressing. They shouldn’t have a knife amnesty, they should have a cunt amnesty, where you can bring in a local scumbag and have him disposed of safely.

So I‘ve given this situation some thought, and I’ve come up with a three step plan to drastically reduce the number of knife related crimes in the UK.

Observe.

If you are caught with a knife, the police simply apply my three step plan. Criminal goes in sack, brick goes in sack, sack goes in river. Hey presto, problem solved. Crime is easy to solve, you just need to take the gloves off. The way to deal with crime is to deal with criminals, and my three step plan addresses the problem brilliantly.

If you don’t believe me, let me tell you a little story about a place called New York.

You may or may not be aware that there was a huge drop in crime in New York during the nineties, the credit for which mostly went to Mayor Giuliani. He, along with his police commissioner William Bratton, implemented a system of Zero Tolerance across the city. Their belief was that by cracking down on the small crimes, they would send a message out that they were serious about tackling crime, and restore peoples sense of community. They believed this would lead to more serious crimes falling naturally, without them ever having to directly tackle it.

Nice idea right? Seems to make sense. I like it, I think small crimes should be punished heavily as they affect the largest number of people. I’d be much happier with the bastard that keyed my car going to prison than I would some random guy who kills his wife after catching her cheating. The way I see it, only one of those people is likely to fuck up my day, and he’s the one I want locked up the most. So yeah, Zero Tolerance is a nice idea, but I’m afraid it’s not the reason crime dropped so quickly. The real reason was something completely different.

The more informed among you will no doubt be aware that leading up to the nineties, just about every single crime expert was predicting horrific increases in violent crime across the entire United States, not just New York. At the turn of the decade, violent crime in America had risen an incredible 80% over the previous 15 years. You would have struggled to find a single expert that would predict anything other than huge increases in crime over the following decade, and they weren’t stupid for thinking that, because nothing anyone was doing to prevent crime seemed to have any affect. Even the the most positive outlook was for a 15% increase over the nineties, the more negative suggesting it would more than double. Bill Clinton acknowledged that the country was going to be plunged in to chaos if they didn’t get control soon, and everyone was terrified of what was to come. Nobody predicted crime would fall.

And then crime fell.

And it didn’t just fall, it dropped to its knees like a cock hungry sailor, and nobody understood why. The teenage murder rate, instead of doubling like so many experts predicted, dropped 50% in less than 5 years.

In New York, people were praising Zero Tolerance, and it was being hailed as the turning point in the battle against crime. But the thing people overlooked amid this praise was that crime didn’t just go down in New York, crime went down all across the country, even in places where they were using the exact same policing methods as they had been previously. Zero Tolerance, whilst being a nice idea, was obviously not the cause of the drop in crime.

The actual reason is mind blowingly simple. People will argue against it because it’s an uncomfortable truth, but it’s no less of a truth because of that. The true cause for the crime falling so dramatically in the 1990’s was a decision made on January 22, 1973.

Abortion was legalised across the United States.

Before 1973, the only people who could have abortions were the wealthy people who could afford to pay for expensive illegal operations. Abortion being illegal meant that poor women with no means to take care of the child, who also didn’t even want the child, were being forced to have babies that they then did a shit job of raising. Children from this type of background are statistically proven to be far more likely to become violent criminals. 17 years after each of these children were born, they reached their peak criminal years, and a large percentage of them became criminals.

In 1973 abortion was legalised, and 17 years after that, when an entire generation of children were reaching their criminal prime, the pool of potential criminals was significantly lower than it had been in the previous generation. That was just the first year. The prime years of a criminal are his late teens and early 20’s. You can assume that by the time a kid hits about 23, he’s either sorted himself out, got himself killed, or ended up in prison. I’m not saying that happens every time, but it’s certainly the most likely. Muggers in their forties are a pretty rare breed.

So the following year, not just the 17 year olds, but also the 18 year olds were all born post 1973. Each year shrank the pool of prospective criminals in their peak crime years, and with that, each year crime fell further.

So what makes what I’m saying more likely than the other reasons. Simple really, numbers. Numbers don’t lie, they don’t have opinions, and they don’t care about political correctness. Numbers tell the story, and as long as you look at all of the relevant ones, you can find the truth.

We know that abortion was the cause of the drop in crime, because all the numbers back that up. One of the most enlightening figures comes when you compare the crime rates in New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii to the crime rates in the rest of the country. These five states had slightly different time frames on the abortion law. In these states, a woman would have been able to get an abortion at least two years before the rest of the country. So if abortion was the reason for the drop, these five states would experience the drop sooner.

And sure enough, the five states who legalised abortion earlier experienced the drop in crime earlier as well. Between 1988 and 1994, crime in those five states fell around 13% more than the other states. Between 1994 and 1997, as the full affects of the abortion ruling would come into effect for them, they fell 23% more. If that isn’t enough proof, there is also a direct correlation between a states abortion rate and it’s crime rate. The states with higher abortion rates in the 70s had higher crime drops in crime in the 90s, and the states with lower abortion rates experienced lower drops.

New York City had a high abortion rate, and was also part of a state which legalised abortion early. Therefore the affect of the decision was most dramatic there. The reason crime dropped was that there were less criminals around to commit it. The number of guns didn’t drop, the number of knives didn’t drop. But crime still dropped. It doesn’t take a genius to work it out (although that is what I am).

Crime is caused by shitty people doing shitty things, if there are less shitty people, there will be less crime. You can put a decent human being in a room with a hundred knives and he wont stab anyone. It’s not the knives that are the problem, it’s the people that are holding them.

And so we go back to my three step plan. Sack. Brick. River. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it’d probably be a lot of fun.