I’ve attended Notting Hill Carnival once or twice, back in the late 1990’s when it was relatively peaceful. Sadly this event is no longer peaceful. It seems to have been getting progressively more violent since the turn of the 21^st century.

The Notting Hill Carnival has now got so big and so out of control and sucks in so many police resources that it is difficult to find any reasonable justification why it should continue or at least continue in its present form. It is a nightmare for local residents who have to board up their properties to stop carnival goers pissing and crapping on their doorsteps and in their gardens and it must cost local businesses millions of pounds in lost revenue if they have to close for security reasons during carnival. Also not for nothing has the Notting Hill Carnival become known to its detractors as ‘stabfest’.

My view that the Notting Hill Carnival should either be banned or reformed is strengthened by a comment, allegedly from a former police officer, on a video by Jack Buckby about the problems that the Notting Hill Carnival is now causing.

The ex-police officer, Andrew Warwick, said:

I worked it twice 2005/2006, it;s a complete disgrace.

It’s a festival for street robbers and drunken thugs to sexually abuse women. It’s rife with theft and overt drug use, with criminals openly goading and taunting police. Police are told not to make arrests unless absolutely necessary to avoid causing a riot. How upholding law and order causes a riot is beyond me, unless you are a thug.

Police use video cameras operated by designated Evidence Gatherers so that arrests might be made in the days after the event, to avoid actually taking any action on the day, again to avoid upsetting the carnival goers. The police are too weak to tell the truth about the event, if the leadership did they would be deemed as racist.

In my view, crime is crime, and the children who get taken by their parents should be protected from it, as should the good people who go naively thinking it safe and fun. It’s chaotic, dirty, loud, and violent. The crowd is a tinderbox waiting for the slightest spark.

The atmosphere is extremely hostile and threatening towards police, it is one of the most dangerous times to be a front line copper because you can’t do anything to protect yourself and you have to let young black thugs get so close to you they could easily stick a knife in. Many officers would prefer to police a high risk football match, at least you can kit up in riot gear and protect yourself, no one worries about causing offense to white football fans.

There is the constant fear of guns, knives, drugs and violence. Everyone is drinking to get drunk. Our female officers are constantly sexually abused and nothing can be done because its just “cultural behavior”. But the thugs know what they are doing. Male officers are fixed with malevolent stares, or expected to put up with fat black women grinding up against them, its disgusting.

POLICE HATE POLICING THIS EVENT, IT IS BEYOND AWFUL!! IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN CANCELED A DECADE AGO! IT IS ONE OF THE REASON I LEFT! And then, as the crowds thin out and families go home at around 7pm, it really turns to shit, and police end up having running battles with young black thugs who think that the carnival gives them some kind of legal exemption. It’s like something off of the movie, “The Purge”.

The only trouble is, we were not armed, and they were…… On one evening I witnessed a stabbing, which was followed by a stampede of more than a thousand people down a narrow street, my colleagues and I, only about 10 of us, had to climb lamp post and jump behind garden walls to avoid getting literally run over there was nothing else we could do. It never made the news. Then as we tried to assist the victim and paramedics arrived, we had to call in back up and put a ring of 50 officers around the victim to protect him. The crowd then starts attacking us and the ambulance staff.

Words fail me…… Just cancel it.

If this former officer is to be believed, and from what I know about how Carnival has disintegrated over the years, I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of his account, then he is correct. It’s time to cancel the Carnival. I’ve no real objection to Britons of West Indian heritage celebrating the best of their culture, but it’s plain to see that the Notting Hill Carnival is no longer the way to do this. Although Carnival has a long history, it can no longer be sustained in its present form and needs to reform, maybe moving to an enclosed off street venue like a park. It’s now time for the Metropolitan Police, the Mayor’s Office and the Home Secretary to bite the bullet and say ‘enough is enough’ and do away with what has become little more than a carnival of crime.