Back in October, I was able to report on Police Scotland officers demonstrating how to defuse dangerous situations with a knife-holding person. I was impressed. It was clear the NYPD officers would have shot the offender in every case. I felt relieved and proud of these Scottish officers. See this for more:
Our mainstream media missed the story with only Sky TV news reporting it.
Now, I read that the London Metropolitan chief is to visit Scotland in the wake of a series of stabbings and murders in the city over the last year or so in the hope of learning how we have managed to reduce knife crime and knife possession dramatically in the last ten years.
Only the Guardian seemed to report the story. I could find no mention in Herald, Scotsman, or Record, nothing on the BBC Scotland and STV websites. I can’t bear to watch the TV news so perhaps readers will let me know if it was reported there. Here’s what the Guardian had to say:
‘Met chief, Cressida Dick, will visit Glasgow on Friday to learn more about Police Scotland’s pioneering work on tackling knife crime in the city once known as the stabbing capital of Europe. Dick told the London assembly at the beginning of January that it was time to treat knife crime as a public health crisis, an approach credited with dramatically reducing deaths in Scotland, which little more than a decade ago had the second highest murder rate in western Europe. Of the 39 children and young people killed with knives in the UK last year, not one was in Scotland. The Violence Reduction Unit was set up in 2005 to tackle Glasgow’s deeply rooted blade culture that had barely moved on since the Gorbals gangland was immortalised in the 1935 novel No Mean City. Since then all knife crime rates have been incrementally reduced. Assaults involving knives had fallen by a third by 2012 and there was a 69% drop in recorded incidents of people carrying knives by 2016, according to Police Scotland figures.’
The Herald and the BBC website did have a Police Scotland story but preferred to focus on the alleged unlawful action by the Counter Corruption Unit (CCU) which they could blow-up into a scandal with tabloid comments like
‘Leader comment: Police Scotland in the dock again’
‘Police Scotland seems to stumble from one fiasco to another.’
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/leader-comment-police-scotland-in-the-dock-again-1-4694931
‘Durham chief slams Police Scotland ‘ineptitude’ over probe’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-43160133
The CCU story is of course worth covering but isn’t balance something that our media like to claim they practice?
You can read more from John Robertson at https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/