The first of those shootings is heroically incompetent: two of them, two guns, dragged the target out of the car and shot him twice... And he's been released from hospital already. Still, they'll get more practice in: I doubt that the police will make much headway with all the effort they've put into alienating the community... If the word 'community' has any meaning among the denizens of Hackney.
As for the territorial warfare, that's been happening a long, long time: teenage gangs on the estates have always had their 'manor', their 'end', their street, and a serious beating awaited any kid who wandered in. The stabbings are new, and represent a clear failure of policing and deterrent sentencing; the firearms mark the transition from being teenage gangs posing, fighting a bit and committing petty crimes to drug-dealing and fencing - adult crimes with the money and the incentives to keep firearms and use them.
The transition from defending territory against other teenagers - rivals in the juvenile posing - to attacking any and all strangers has already happened in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, where parts of Slater Street and the blocks south of Bethnal Green Road are owned by Bangladeshi gangs and white, black or Hindu faces are an invitation to menaces and a warning to leave, if you're lucky. It marks a complete breakdown of policing, the sense that the streets are patrolled and subject to the rule of law; The Met can and still - occasionally - will conduct investigations and send in a team to make an arrest, so they can claim that there's no 'No Go' zone. But the State's monopoly of violence and any claim by the Metropolitan Police that they are act as guardian of the public is a laughable fiction.
no subject
The first of those shootings is heroically incompetent: two of them, two guns, dragged the target out of the car and shot him twice... And he's been released from hospital already. Still, they'll get more practice in: I doubt that the police will make much headway with all the effort they've put into alienating the community... If the word 'community' has any meaning among the denizens of Hackney.
As for the territorial warfare, that's been happening a long, long time: teenage gangs on the estates have always had their 'manor', their 'end', their street, and a serious beating awaited any kid who wandered in. The stabbings are new, and represent a clear failure of policing and deterrent sentencing; the firearms mark the transition from being teenage gangs posing, fighting a bit and committing petty crimes to drug-dealing and fencing - adult crimes with the money and the incentives to keep firearms and use them.
The transition from defending territory against other teenagers - rivals in the juvenile posing - to attacking any and all strangers has already happened in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, where parts of Slater Street and the blocks south of Bethnal Green Road are owned by Bangladeshi gangs and white, black or Hindu faces are an invitation to menaces and a warning to leave, if you're lucky. It marks a complete breakdown of policing, the sense that the streets are patrolled and subject to the rule of law; The Met can and still - occasionally - will conduct investigations and send in a team to make an arrest, so they can claim that there's no 'No Go' zone. But the State's monopoly of violence and any claim by the Metropolitan Police that they are act as guardian of the public is a laughable fiction.