20 April 2007 Blog Home : April 2007 : Permalink
Merseyside's Chief Constable Bernard Hogan-Howe told the Guardian newspaper that the protective "wall of silence" around those involved had to be broken.
He said Britain should adopt laws similar to those in Australia which make it a duty to report information.
Yes indeed here you are, you've just had some nasty criminal shoot you and the polce want you to tell them whodunnit on pain of going to the chokey if you decide that discretion is likely to involve living longer and better than spilling the beans.In 2004-05, there were 78 fatal shootings in England and Wales: 40 victims were white, 25 black, seven Asian. The figures do not record the ethnicity of the killers but, by and large, murderers tend mostly to target members of their own ethnic group. In 2005-06, there were 50 fatal shootings: 18 victims were white, 19 black and four Asian.
The law this maroon is proposing is about people who are shot but survive. People who are fatally shot do not survive to tell the police anything. An article last year in the Independent tells us there were a lot of gun incidents behind those low numbers of deaths:Gun crime rose slightly in the United Kingdom last year, to 11,110 incidents. There were 3,865 firearms offences in London, up 7 per cent, with Lambeth, Hackney and Haringey seeing 25 per cent rises. One tenth of all firearms offences in the UK are shootings: Trident dealt with 241 non-fatal shootings in the year to March - up by one third - with 15 fatal shootings.
(I assume the "last year" is 2005). So we have about 11,000 gun crimes, 1100 shootings and roughly 60 fatal shootings. Oh and depsite all those draconian gun laws the gun crimes are going up as are just about all other violent crimes. And the way to stop this is to send the victims to prison if they don't cooperate.