London is suddenly beset with a knife crime problem. Londoners know it. They talk about it constantly. But that doesn’t mean that they want to hear it from the president of the United States.
Donald Trump’s observation that one London hospital resembled a war-zone has led to a furious reaction in the British capital, including from the doctor he had paraphrased. London is a left-leaning city, and wouldn’t have taken kindly to any American politician complaining about its crime rate. But when that politician was Donald Trump, and when he was using the statistics to argue for gun ownership, the reaction was bound to be apoplectic.
Still, when the shouting dies down, an awkward fact remains: London’s murder rate has, for the first time since records began, overtaken New York’s. Britain’s restrictive gun laws are plainly not holding down the number of homicides.
London may, of course, be experiencing a blip rather than a new trend. Year on year, New York is still the more lethal metropolis. In 2017, NYC’s homicide rate was more than twice London’s: 290 murders and non-negligent manslaughters to 116, a figure broadly in line with previous years. So far in 2018, though, London has inched ahead. The Metropolitan police investigated 15 homicides in February to the NYPD’s 11. In March, the figures were 22 and 21 respectively. The two cities have a comparable population and, on a proportionate basis, London is presently more dangerous. So is President Trump right? Have Britain’s strict firearms laws simply pushed gangsters to knives?
The UK’s crime rate has always been low by global standards and, in common with other Western countries, it had been dropping since the 1990s. Its per capita homicide rate is only 20 per cent of America’s, and knife crime, like gun crime, is a lot less common in Britain than in the U.S. So how are we to explain London’s sudden uptick? We can, I think, discount the explanations offered by lobbies who see every development as an argument for whatever they happened to already think. The surge would not be reversed by more youth clubs, as anti-austerity campaigners claim, nor by spending more on the police, as the police suggest.
No, we are dealing with something specific, something happening only in certain parts of London, something happening overwhelmingly among immigrant and ethnic minority communities. (Indeed, it was surprising that Trump didn’t latch onto this fact, since he is usually fond of arguing that immigration makes places more violent.)
What has caused the surge in violence? I’m afraid the most depressingly plausible hypothesis is that we’re dealing with fashion — fashion accelerated by social media. London’s stabbings are celebrated in drill videos, grim pieces of rap that glorify gang rivalries. There is, in the violence of teenage boys, something horribly banal, horribly trivial.
London’s homicide rate is spiking despite strict gun controls. New York’s is plummeting despite a slight increase in the availability of weapons there. That figure of 290 murders in 2017, though alarming by London’s standards, was the lowest in NYC since the Second World War. In 1990, the figure stood at 2,245. Again, there are various competing explanations for that drop, from zero tolerance policing to the Steven Pinker thesis that we are simply becoming less violent as a species. Whatever the truth, it is hard to see much correlation with gun ownership, any more than in London.
Perhaps a total ban on guns would reduce America’s homicide rate, in the same way that a total ban on cars would reduce traffic accidents. But, in the real world, it is far from clear that Britain has any lessons to offer either side of the American gun debate. The two countries are starting from very different places. A relaxation of Britain’s gun laws would probably lead to a rise in gun crime. But it doesn’t follow that tighter laws in the U.S. would have the opposite effect, because there are so many firearms already in circulation. It is, in other words, perfectly rational to support strict controls in Britain without wanting to see them copied in the United States.
Both sides of the American debate should stop grabbing at foreign examples and make their case honestly. If you believe that anything that makes school shootings less likely is worth trying, Britain’s knife crime statistics are irrelevant. If you believe that the right to bear arms is non-negotiable, they are also irrelevant. Either way, please don’t press the victims of these stabbings into your argument. They have suffered enough.
