London while always having a crime problem in general has been good in parts. Some areas for example the areas of Hackney and Clapton have for most of my lifetime been a bit iffy. I don’t think that I’ve ever known these areas to not be without the presence of tuppenny gangsters or violent mentally ill fraggles who could turn at a moments notice or others who you’d cross the road to avoid. Even when I was exploring London as a teenager many decades ago using a Red Bus Rover ticket, I knew that Hackney and the surrounding areas were not places that I should be getting off the bus in order to mooch around.
Even when I was a teenager in the late 70’s I knew that Hackney was no longer an area that contained a majority of those people that I would call the decent but struggling. It was getting filled with those whose idle hands the Devil was finding an awful lot of work for.
But under the current Police and Crime Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, which is the Greater London Mayor Sadiq Khan, the situation in this area, according to what I’ve been told and what I’ve garnered from press reports, has gone from bad to worse. It’s now a place where you can expect violent and random thuggery, sometimes lethal thuggery.
The latest instalment in the story of the fall of the Hackney area is truly appalling. A man in his 30’s who was in a powered wheelchair following a motorbike accident in which he lost his leg, was killed by a man allegedly waving around and using a machete. The dead man used to live in the Hackney area but had moved with his family to Stratford in Newham and was visiting the Hackney area where he was well known and allegedly well respected.
The Daily Mail said:
A man on a mobility scooter has been stabbed to death with a machete in a suspected London street fight – with family and friends now paying tribute to him.
Met Police officers were called at 3.38pm today to reports of a fight in Rushmore Road, Clapton, with suggestions that a machete was used in the gruesome attack.
Emergency services, including ambulance service and air ambulance workers, found a man in his 30s with stab wound injuries in the residential area but despite their best efforts, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
He has now been named as Jade Anthony Barnett, 38, whose sister has described him as a ‘cheerful and caring man’.
A crime scene was put in place and police confirmed two men aged 28 and 21 have been arrested, with enquiries ongoing.
The victim’s Simone Barnett, 45, from Hackney, told the PA news agency that her brother was ‘jolly, cheerful, caring’ – adding: ‘He never took nothing too seriously, he laughed everything off’.
He used to live in Clapton with his mother but his friends said he had moved to the Stratford area and also that he lost his leg in a motorcycle accident in 2007.
Ms Barnett added: ‘He comes around here (Clapton) all the time, everyone knew my brother – young, old, mothers, fathers, everybody knew my brother.
‘Everybody is family, he’s just that character.’
Video posted on social media – claiming the man was stabbed with a ‘machete’ – shows the road blocked off with police tape and an air ambulance flying over the residential area.
A local butcher described the victim as a ‘good guy’ who has lived in the area for about nine years.
A woman who was among those gathering at a police cordon after the death and who did not want to be named, said: ‘He was always funny, making jokes, friendly with everybody, always had a smile on his face, and always pleasant.
If the press stories are to believed then what we have here is a relatively decent man, visiting an area that he knew well and where he was well known who was killed by one of the many random murderous thugs that London is now known for. London is now the city of random violent death.
It wasn’t always like this. There were always bad areas and bad estates and bad individuals but society and police kept the worst of them under control. Now there’s no social control of society’s wrong’uns and the police seem to have become to all intents and purposes inert and only react post incident to crimes like the one above and do little to actually prevent such crimes. Two men aged 21 and 28 have been arrested in connection with this offence but these arrests are merely the clean up after the disaster rather than arrests made in order to prevent a disaster, something which sadly sums up the way the Met work these days.
This situation is not entirely the fault of Mayor Khan and the Metropolitan Police senior management, demographic change and the importation into the more economically challenged parts of London of people from violent cultures has played a very big part in London’s decline. But neither the Mayor nor the Metropolitan Police have had the correct policies that might be effective in tackling London’s growing crime and violence problem. The Met is alleged to be under-resourced to the tune of 1400 officers but it is also not spending money effectively. A few years back it found £1 million for a ‘hate crime and hate speech unit’, a vanity project if ever there was one, at a time when it was clear that London needed more front line police officers to deal with a rise in real crime. The Mayor’s race baiting rantings on various issues have not helped the police. On the contrary it has helped to feed a politicisation of the Met that sees it pander to what are now being termed ‘elite opinions’ such as the kid gloves way that pro-Hamas marches are policed, hurty words ‘offences’ and racial hiring targets, lots and lots of racial hiring targets. None of this rubbish does one bit to make the streets safer for ordinary Londoners.
Under Khan and the woefully bad senior management of the Metropolitan Police, the Met have become a shadow of their former selves. Those decent front line and mostly honest thief takers who the Met were once known and respected for are now no more and those that remain are just quietly biding their time before their retirement. What’s replacing these officers is much much worse. It’s a cadre of officers who don’t see their role as to keep their particular area clear of the sort of crime that bothers people, but instead as members of a reactive ‘service’ that merely turns up and cleans up after yet another awful and probably preventable murder. London is a mess, the Met Police are in a mess and nobody in authority seems to want to either acknowledge that fact nor make any attempt to turn that situation around.
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