Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

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Well UK is a special version of hell when it comes to surveillance. I don't know where this apathy in general population comes from, but to me it signals there is something rotten in the base fabric of their society. Can't be just government act alone, since I haven't noticed any significant pushback from citizens. And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty.

And 'they' get smarter too - if you watch Skyfall, one of the better recent Bond movies, there is a nice speech about why MI 6 needs more and more surveillance, powers and budget in front of government officials, because of boogeymen and so on. Of course the whole meeting is attacked by the main adversary. Its exactly kind of glorifying speech that CIA (or FBI, army, air force etc.) likes to sneak to Hollywood movies to purport the image of good guys fighting to save democracy and little children (when we know thanx to Snowden how things look like in real life). Hollywood in exchange at least gets access to special places like aircraft carriers or military bases, not sure what they got in UK, maybe just extra budget.

> And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty.

I presume the reference to gun violence means you're comparing the UK to to US. This is nonsense, gun violence hasn't been "replaced" with stabbings - the UK homicide rate (by any means) is a sixth of the US's - 1.2 per 100,000 people for the UK vs 6.3 per 100,000 people for the US. [0]

Not only that but the US has a higher rate of knife murders than the UK. The US had 1739 homicides by knife or other cutting implement in 2020 [1], or 0.52 per 100,000. The UK had 235 knife murders in the year ending in March 2021 [2], or 0.35 per 100,000.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...

[2]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

Just looking at "murder", "homicide" or "manslaughter" crimes with guns and knives doesn't tell you the whole picture; many knife crime victims will not suffer life ending injury, just really really nasty ones. This is obviously also the case with criminal gun usage to some extent too.

If you look at knife crime in the UK, especially in deprived areas, it's been a growing problem for a long time.

For example, there was over 15 thousand knife crimes reported in London alone in 2019/20, many of which are armed muggings etc.

Knife crime statistics include "stop and search" where orinary working people have boxcutters, Leatherman multitools, and Swissarmy knives taken off them. POC and young people are particularly targeted.

Knife crime in the UK is a red herring.

Slightly better knife crime breakdown for London:

Year beginning April 2020 to March 2021:

– Fatal Injury – 223

– Injury with intent to cause serious harm – 21,421

– Threat to kill – 4,984

– Attempted murder – 465

Yes stop and search affects knife crimes, but there is still a lot of violence, and overall rates of violent knife crime have risen notably faster than the population has grown in London over past 10 years.

Are those numbers isolated events or could one attack fall into multiple categories? Eg there was a threat to kill, then an attack and then an attempt to murder?

I think you're overblowing it a little bit there. As someone from London in the UK it's more nuanced.

Firstly the stabbings are fairly infrequent and mostly isolated to territorial disputes between idiots and the odd psycho. You can walk past the perpetrators up to the eyeballs in Apple kit at midnight and say hello and they are fine and they actually help people in the local community. Just don't sell crack on their territory and you won't end up with any extra holes. I feel completely safe here unlike when I travel to the US.

Secondly most of the surveillance is broken or ineffective or unmanned so the possibility of a conviction or an issue from it is fairly low. Really no one is that bothered about it. That is amplified by the constant tales of incompetence in this area and anyone who's had any direct experience with it.

Realistically we do live in a bit of a pit of apathy but that's because it doesn't really have any detrimental effects on our lives on a daily basis. If it does then we tend to flip our shit rather rapidly and deal with it. Case in point a box junction camera was recently added to a very difficult to cross obscured junction. Bad decision by the council just to make money. After about a week someone burned the camera down. They replaced it. It lasted another week before it was burned again and they got the point.

I don't believe that the incompetence of the surveillance or police state is a defense of its existence or growth. Furthermore direct physical attacks against the infrastructure of the control only reinforce the perception that it's needed. Also it costs council resources to build, and repair it, resource that could be used for any number of other far more useful ends.

I don't think it's a defence either. It's just how it is.

The council never reinvests in infra that is destroyed. They don't work like you think they do.

You say this, but the number of folks I know in London who have been mugged for phones, handbags and wallets by blokes on scooters is unreal, in broad daylight too.

That's a rapidly declining issue now the met have started ramming them off the bikes. They know they're not getting away so there is risk.

OK, so if you acknowledge that muggings on scooters were/are/were an issue, what do you think these former/would-be scooter muggers will do? Go back to do doing it on foot, which is in stark contrast to what the post I replied to said.

Personally, I'd never stand with something like a Nintendo Switch out in public in "London", but it honestly depends on the area of London. Some are much worse than others for crime.

I think the point is that whilst stabbings might not be high, the use of knives as a weapon to intimidate and mug people (going beyond just purse snatchers) is very effective, and much more common than you might imagine, nobody wants to get cut, and nobody really wants to stab anybody over a few hundred quid of electronics.

> And its not particularly safe spot either - instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings, on top of all other crime of which there is plenty.

There are not frequent stabbings. They are reported on because they are so rare.

There were 235 homicides with a sharp object in the entire country of 60+ million people in 2021, which is about one third to half of all of them (which makes sense, without a gun, your options are limited). That makes fewer than single cities elsewhere.

If you think the UK is a specific violent crime hotspot, consider what angle whoever is telling you that is trying to push.

Wasn’t the Skyfall speech about the need for human intelligence, and precisely against the officials who want to replace it with mass surveillance?

Your ideas are so bizarre that I thought it might be worth doing a bit of investigation, specifically around this one claim:

> instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings

According to [1], in 2020/21 there were 235 homicides involving a knife or other sharp instrument in England and Wales. Because of the ability of COVID lockdowns to influence those numbers, let's wind back to 2017/18* - incidentally the highest recorded - at 281.

By contrast, per the FBI [2], 72.6% of the 15129 recorded homicides used a firearm - that is approximately 10983.

Per Wolfram Alpha, the population of England and Wales in 2017 was 58.3 million, and the population of the USA in 2017 was 325 million - meaning the UK had approximately 18% of the US population.

Clearly, you are _VASTLY_ more likely to be murdered by gun violence in the US than by knife crime in England or Wales.

Notice this only covers gun violence and not other types of homicide - even the rate of knife crime in the US is higher than the UK, as others have subsequently pointed out.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/978830/knife-homicides-i... [2]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

* The UK records April->March for such figures, the US seems to report calendar year. 2017 was a high water mark for both countries.

I hate it when people compare the US to any other country, except possibly Russia, or the EU as a whole.

Here's the thing first off the US is more multicultural than any other nation on earth, most other countries have had one ethnicity/nationality in it for 100s of year. The US by contrast has always has a mix of different cultures and backgrounds coming into it, from the Irish to the Italians, from the Slavic people's to the current influx of Latin America migration. This may not seem like a big deal but there are differences between cultures and having a heterogeneous cultures results in places where they will come in conflict.

2nd the United States is a group of states that are united. This isn't like simply administrative divisions, there are clear and distinct separations and lines of authority between different levels of administration, so much so that going from Illinois to Florida has such a wide gulf in laws, policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales.

Finally the size, the US is big, huge in fact. It's so big that there are numerous states within the US that could fit multiple European countries in them with room left over.

All in all this comparison on gun deaths or really any other metric between the US and any other country except from Russia or the EU is like comparing an SMBs closet "data center" to an AWS data center, they are totally different discussions.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

OK, I'll humour you for a minute since I'm waiting for CI... (I am from London and live in the US, and do not agree it is more multicultural, but OK, whatever).

Let's take a single state: Texas. Population in 2017 was 28.29 million. Per the CDC [1], there were 3513 gun deaths in Texas that year. I believe this includes suicides, so let's take a conservative rate here and assume that 40% were homicides and 60% were suicide (I believe that this is over-estimating suicide).

So, 1405 gun-related homicides in Texas that year. But, Texas only has around half the population of England and Wales. I'm sure you can do the rest of the math yourself.

But, maybe Texas isn't to your liking because it's so big by land area - so let's also look at Alabama, which is approximately the same size. 1124 gun related deaths there per [1] in 2017, and conservatively assuming 40% of those were homicides, that is approximately 450. However, the population of Alabama was less than _just Greater London_ - only 4.87 million people.

But, maybe Alabama isn't to your liking either because it's conservative. So let's look at New Jersey - only just larger than Wales by land area, and substantially smaller than England, but trending "liberal" by US standards.

In NJ, there were 478 firearm-related deaths in 2017. Again if we conservatively assume 40% homicide, that's around 191 - finally a state where the absolute number is less than knife-related deaths in England and Wales! But, one where the population was only 8.8 million...

None of these include knife crime in the US, either. While you can make all the excuses you like for this, the numbers don't look very good regardless of how you cut (or shoot) it.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

It’s the cultural angle the troubles me more. The US has more cultures so they fight. That doesn’t seem a good argument.

I’m a bit baffled by the way you calculate gun murders. You get a number of gun deaths and guess the number that were murders.

I tried searching and could only find the combined value that you have used. Why is this?

I fundamentally disagree with your analysis - most areas of the US are not remotely diverse in culture compared to London.

The way I estimated gun murders was by taking a guess at around 40%, on the basis that conservatives (likely to be pro-gun) claim that 6 in 10 gun deaths are suicides, and they likely over-count.

By a "combined" value do you mean for England and Wales (which is because that is the reporting authority), or for gun deaths overall (which is because that is what is reported by the CDC - I'm sure this is broken down elsewhere but I only had a few minutes)?

I'm in agreement with you and am arguing against buscoquadnary's analysis (which you make a good argument against). I don't see that diversity can be blamed for the US murder rate. The combined Texan gun death value you cite is readily found, but I have had trouble finding the number of gun homicides per year, which is puzzling but must have a reason.

Ah apologies, I missed that you were a different responder.

I don’t understand really why the gun homicide rate does not appear to be available - it’s certainly surprising to me that it’s not easy to find.

> 2nd the United States is a group of states that are united.

Every state except New Hampshire (0.9) has a rate substantially above the UK (1.2). And NH was 2.4 the year before. Next best is Maine (1.6). So even taken individually, it's not good.

> policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales.

The UK and France are almost exactly the same (both 1.2).

> I hate it when people compare the US to any other country, except possibly Russia, or the EU as a whole.

This is a new angle I haven’t heard. Having multiple cultures doesn’t need to mean they murder each other. But let’s say that there is something special about the US cultural makeup that causes a higher level of violence.

The murder rate has been declining. Why?

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