SilverFalcon

Unless you are into extortion and collusion what is the point of a police force having any kind of negotiation with the criminal fraternity? The only way to do business with gangsters is to do it their way. How pathetically politically correct do the police intend to get before the gangsters lose their last shreds of anxiety about the establishment's capability to control the streets and start brokering deals with the taxpayer's law enforcement representatives? You don't do deals with crime bosses in order to keep apprentice pistol jockeys in line. Unless you are a rival gang and need space to operate and unless there is booty to share and both sides feel that solidarity in some things beats grassing and snitching and losing out.

kernow

When I saw it on the news I couldn't believe it! It's like a TV comedy farce!
Can you imagine, " Come on now you lads, stop giving us a hard time, we've got our hands full trying to tackle speeding motorists the last thing we want is valuable Police time and resources wasted trying to catch you violent criminals!"

Mountaineer

Ok I think there may need to be some clarification on what’s happening here in London. There have always been criminal gangsters that control extortion, drugs and prostitution etc, but this is not what gang culture is about here. Basically it’s about turf, and moving from one post code number to another, example if you’re from E1 you have to stay on your manor, if you go to E2 you’re taking liberties. Each area is broken into different ethnic groups, for instance you cannot go into an area that is occupied by Somalia’s if you are not from Somalia. There are others that are mixed race but your loyalty has to be to your brothers, posse or crew. The police force belongs to the government and only contacted for an incident number so you can claim on your insurance. This behaviour will inevitably spread throughout the UK, as in most major cities have already. The gangs are not technically criminals only the person that fires the gun, because apart from murdering each other there has been no crime committed.

Watch the film adulthood and that is pretty much how life is here.

SilverFalcon

What I meant was if the police are not into extortion and collusion, how do they think they will solve any "interfacing" with criminal gangs? That is how gangs survive, off agreements that mimic ancient invader tactics. That is what gangs are, no matter what colour or breed. They live inside and under any sustaining system. They have their own rules. Unless you are going to negotiate by their rules you aren't going to get anywhere. It may be portrayed that you are getting somewhere, but the gang is not like the lovely law abiding unit of human community. The gang is a unit of loyalty and service that lives by its own laws and dies by its own rules. How are the police going to penetrate its inner core of independent control by trying to ask for boons and treaties. It's like dealing with pirates. Any agreements that suddenly no longer apply will be torn up and posted to you in a blood-soaked envelope. That is how gangs differ radically from the societies they leach off. They have their own rules and anyone who doesn't play by them is used as an example to others who don't play by them.

Gangs have always been about turf. From the fifties onward especially as these unique entities came to occupy city streets and selected areas of operation. Step off the turfline and you take your punishment. The teenage gang culture is, it's true, based on this way of operating. But little boy gangsters grow up to be big boy gangsters and they have to keep proving themselves. Here in SA, especially among the Coloured communities who are gang pros here, the kids are coerced into gang groups from primary school. They graduate from one level and gang to another and this graduation is based on deeds and actions and street cred, as you know.

Once into a gang, there is little hope of escape. That is why they all start carrying hardware of some kind. Often for self protection as well as overt violence. And the whole sexual manhood thing is tied to achievement too. I have a dead cousin, shot by a gangster who needed a kill to prove his entry into a more powerful gang.

They are a sub-culture and as the ghettoes grow through poverty and overpopulation, so will gangsters make their way out of these humble beginnings into the world of big business and finally into politics. The good hearted soul who just wants to do good, should take note. They won't spare you, sweetie pie, they will kill you. And they will have people in place in the police and prisons and the law courts to get them off anything you can throw at them. If people allow this situation to grow unhalted, the future will be one of rule by gangsters and ex-gangsters.

But the sweetie pies won't believe you. They'll vilify you instead for mentioning it.

Mountaineer

What you have said is spot on, you know what you are saying because it’s from experience not text book theory, and I’m sorry to learn about you your cousin.

Time is running out for a solution, and my conclusion is our intellectual philosophising and intelligence will prevent us from unifying into a mass movement that will put into operation a political system that we all believe in. Looking through the posts and threads here, it’s my belief that the underlining principles of all our beliefs are pretty much the same, but rarely agree.

Summing up but unfortunately true,,

Mountaineer

Definitely not wrong there, that’s exactly the police mentality.

SilverFalcon

If a new, more realistic philosophy could be engendered, Mountaineer, based on the direct help and testimony of the gangs and ex-criminals themselves, there might be a way out of what's coming.

One must always seek to understand by engagement rather than presuming to know the other because we can never know an other. We need that other's story to understand, and he needs ours to co-operate. It is also how we need to learn to live in nature with wild animals. We make them extinct because we haven't yet learned to know them. If we really understood them we'd stop trying to be bears and wolves and big cats and eagles and realise that we are humans and they are "other" and that to live together we need dialogue and understanding so each knows where the other's territory begins and ends and each knows the limitations of the other's tolerance.

Life isn't about loving and giving, it's about understanding and co-operating, and about defending and protecting. This is what is missing from the extant "philosophies" that you mentioned.

Mountaineer

Very true,
My experience is that people don’t know themselves or what they really want, but they know they need something. My Belief is that people need to feel English if they live here. They need to feel that they belong. To acknowledge your ancestors and race with respect, but to know that you are English and that this is your home and have a stake in it. To be treated as an equal with everybody else no matter what your wealth or status, and people look to a strong political leader for inspiration, to achieve this.

SilverFalcon

Absolutely. And your experience and your opinion should be part of the politics that is supposed to be in the public interest. I agree that divisions between strata in a single system cause these to separate and become hostile to one another. A form of social engineering that cuts off its nose to spite its own face. And the results of centuries of this attitude can be witnessed today.

Mountaineer

The English Democrats appear to be the best party to solve these problems in my mind, but appear very hostile towards the Scots, instead of the government that’s causing the rifts between people of all nationalities, and nations. I believe as the saying goes, ‘divided they fall’.