allyharp wrote:In terms of murder rates and crimes, the thing about Glasgow is that these things just seem to happen randomly - without any real reason behind an attack.
In the rest of Europe you might get done in, but it'll be because they want your wallet or your ipod.
Does that seem accurate?
It does. The Violence Reduction Unit at Strathclyde Police has some really interesting things to say about violence in the West of Scotland, including the point you make, that it is peculiarly (in terms of the rest of the world) unrelated to property theft.
It's more like some honour-based vendetta system, with territorial violence. I.e. if you come from place A, and dare to go to place B, it is acceptable for you to be stabbed. If A gets off with B's burd, then it's acceptable for B to stab A, etc. etc.
It's also recreational - young men (and increasingly women) go and have a fight for something to do. And the answer is not 'more youth centres'. (I don't think anyway.). The fight is part of the culture.
The Violence Reduction Unit also point out that there is something macabre about it. It's far easier to shoot someone from a distance than it is to get up close and personal and stab or slash them. Yet in Glasgow our violent young men and women prefer to stab and slash.
Of course, the murder rate would be far higher still if it wasn't for mobile phones and quicker ambulance response times. Many people who die as a result of knife crime die from bleeding out. The quicker the response gets to the victim, the less chance there is of him dying. If we had had this same level of violence back in the 1970s or 1980s our murder rate would be, what, double? Triple? Who knows.
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