LONDON—I try to tell Britons that it’s possible to attend a doubleheader at a packed U.S. baseball stadium in hot weather and come away without a scratch. Likewise, it is possible to attend a capacity-crowd American football game without witnessing or experiencing violence.
American fans are, for the most part, non-violent. The main reason why, even after many years in the UK, I have never attended a soccer match is because of my fear of hooliganism, a curiously vicious form of fan confrontation that characterizes many sports events.
When I called to reserve a seat for an exhibition American football game at a London stadium, the operator asked me in which section I wanted to sit. I said I had no preference. She explained that fans of rival teams “had to be separated.” I told her I didn’t think American fans would kill each other, but she warned I could be “attacked” if someone near me found out that I was not a supporter of their team. Huh?
My point here is that violence used to be confined to soccer, but now, murder in the street has become part of British life. Several years ago, a friend gave up driving because of terrifying “road rage” from other drivers. She joked, “Carol, if we Brits had guns there would be as much homicide here as in an American city.”
Recent Attacks
On New Year’s Eve, a bouncer, Tudor Simionov, 33, who had only just moved to London from Romania with his fiancée to seek a better life, was mobbed by a group of angry young men who wanted to crash a private party in fashionable Park Lane. He was standing in for a friend who had wanted the night off. His reward for doing this? Stabbed to death. His fiancée is distraught, and the place where he was murdered is strewn with flowers and candles from the general public.In the first week of 2019, there was a further string of gruesome murders that made front pages and topped the network news. A friend in Rome called to ask what was going on, as the UK violence was being covered by Italian media.
On Jan. 4, Lee Pomeroy, 51, got into a low-level disagreement with a young man who had boarded a train heading for Waterloo and was promptly stabbed nine times in front of his teenage son. The station at which his death unfolded is, like the Park Lane murder scene, strewn with flowers. Those who knew Pomeroy, an IT consultant, said he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. The suspect now in custody says he “hears voices.” Should he not have been confined to a psychiatric facility and not out on the street? Am I being Dickensian in that view?
The Answer?
What can be done? London’s police presence is small. Cops are not armed. Then again, it can be argued that Chicago has had its share of violent crime and the substantial police presence does not seem to have helped.London Mayor Sadiq Khan (Labour) and Home Secretary Sajid Javid (Conservative) are accused by critics of all political persuasions of not coming to grips with the crisis. A British member of Parliament, Jo Cox, was murdered outside her office in 2016 by an alleged Brexit supporter, and member of Parliament Stephen Timms was stabbed in 2010 by a constituent angry about UK involvement in Iraq.
Since June 2016, the British government has been distracted by the complicated Brexit negotiations; it occurs to me that criminals feel they can engage in a free-for-all of homicide when those in authority are otherwise engaged. Can we blame rising poverty? Even Conservatives are beginning to acknowledge that their own party in power took fiscal austerity to unnecessary lengths, resulting in the highest-ever use of food banks. There is youth resentment of the proliferation of million-pound apartment blocks and soccer players being paid six figures a week. The film “I, Daniel Blake,” which won the British Academy Award and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, exposed the broken British welfare system.
Then we could ask: Why are Jewish kids not involved in crime? When I visited a high-security prison near Newcastle, England, that holds 1,000 violent men, my group was told there was no need for a rabbi as there were no Jewish inmates. Could other communities learn from the Jewish way of child-rearing an insight into keeping them off the streets? Decades ago, U.S. churches waged a massive campaign to attract urban youth to their activities and it worked—Britain is a seriously secular country and I do wonder if the absence of criminal behavior in Anglo-Jewish children is because of the intense involvement of synagogues in their weekly life cycle.
British MP Enoch Powell was ruined by one speech in 1968 when he warned of “rivers of blood” being the result of unchecked immigration. He was condemned as a racist. In my view, the violence in modern Britain is exacerbated by the fury generated by social media and lack of family life.
Most of all, Britain needs massively more cops on the beat. Can it solve gang warfare? That’s a tough question. But an unprotected citizenry is ridiculous and this must change.
