Deprived areas a bad influence

In reply to my earlier letter about knife crime invariably taking place in deprived areas CT, Gateshead thinks this is too simplistic and appears to blame young people from fatherless households.

I would point out that fathers certainly aren’t always the good role models that CT seems to imply, in fact some are totally the opposite.

I would suggest that young fatherless people from deprived areas are more liable to immerse themselves in gang culture than those from a more affluent area. Generation after generation of people brought up with little hope of a decent chance in life is bound to have an effect. A young person from a ‘good address’ will nearly always have a better chance in life than one from a deprived area, even if by some miracle they are equally qualified.

Stop and search may well be a deterrent to the carrying of knives but we must remember the majority of people from ethnic minorities are decent law-abiding British citizens. If the same criteria was applied to everything, the police would stop and search more people in showbusiness as the appearance is always given, rightly or wrongly, that they are more liable to use drugs than others in society.

Of course all policing takes manpower, not easy with constant cuts to funding an expanding population and big events to police.

Maybe if we had better policing of our borders there would be fewer guns and drugs available to the criminal community. It’s a pity that instead of getting rid of so many of our armed forces they hadn’t been retrained and re-deployed to check and secure our borders.