While the Home Secretary defers judgment to the results of yet another inquiry, the Right’s political narrative, convincingly supported by the released footage, is that the racialized obsessions of progressivism have claimed another innocent life: falsely accused of racism, the victim was treated as the suspect, and died for it. For all the shocked protestations made against Reform by those culpable for this state of affairs, this is not an argument limited to Farage. The Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, condemned in Parliament “the dangerous ideology of so-called anti-racism”, which “enshrined” in the Police’s own strategic guidance differential treatment of suspects according to their race. As Philp states, in what is an expression of mainstream conservative opinion rather than dangerous rabble-rousing, “extreme activists have hijacked the policymaking process, and this is where it has led”.

Philp is correct, as is Farage. This is the true state religion that governs our society, with its own Test Acts, ritual phrases, taboos and zealous enforcers. For its hold on public life to endure, for the faith of its adherents to not be shaken, it has turned the British people into its unwilling victims. To cleave to the privileging of racial difference over competence, fairness or the basic functioning of a society is now the marker of career advancement in every limb of the British state. Nowak was murdered not just by the dagger the state allowed his killer to carry in the street, but by the chaotic jumble of powerpoint presentations, HR decisions and fears of offending the wrong people which informed the officers attending his miserable death.

Nowak’s murder was not, in itself, an event of historic national importance, in a country where the consequences of sudden, violent ends have become a regular feature of political turmoil. What made it historic is Nigel Farage’s unexpectedly strong response, unimaginable only a few months ago. In his address this morning, backdropped by green Kentish downland and the chirp of morning birdsong, the Reform leader sought to capture a national mood, using this “moment to take a long hard at ourselves as a country, and what we’ve become”. Nowak’s callous treatment by the police was “proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country”, Farage claimed, “where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”. In managing the unnecessary tensions caused by unwanted mass migration, he observed, “to stop any criticism of this, we’ve brought in hate speech laws, we’ve brought in a DEI agenda, we’ve brought in what is called ‘positive discrimination’ in favor of ethnic minorities, over those of white people whose families have lived in Britain, in many cases, for centuries. That is the mess we’ve got into.”

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It must be noted that both the victim and the perpetrator of this crime, one of Polish descent and one of Punjabi, were the result of migration to this country. Yet for those who might query Farage’s invocation of Nowak’s race, it was the British state itself that made race the operative factor in his death. Once the magic charm of racism had been uttered by the murderer and his family members covering for him, Nowak became a white perpetrator, automatically suspect to the officers presiding over his final moments, reading his rights to him as he bled out, the British state’s perversion of the Last Rites. Praising the dignity of Nowak’s family, which like Calocane’s victim Grace O’Malley-Kumar’s family has chosen to confront the state’s failings rather than accept the loss of a child for a greater social good, Farage suggested that instead “the rest of us respond to this with pure, cold rage”.

This is a tone we have not heard in British politics before, though its arrival has been long expected. It was not hard, even during the hysteria surrounding the death of the man who Farage pointedly called “the career criminal George Floyd”, to divine the beginnings of a popular reaction; a time coming when the politics of racial self-interest and group grievance would be turned against a political and cultural establishment wielding such a dangerous weapon with such recklessness. Farage declared that, for the police, “the fear of being called racist was greater than dealing with Henry Nowak’s murder”: but it is also apparent that the fear of being called racist is now less of a concern for Farage himself than channeling public anger towards Reform’s capture and overhaul of the state. Perhaps it is Restore’s threat, to his Right, that has brought about this startling language; more likely, it is the shift in public attitudes both Restore and Reform compete to represent.

Yet if Farage’s striking language, declaring “Enough of anti-white prejudice” and “a promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black lives” marks a new waypoint in Britain’s political settlement, what is perhaps most remarkable is that the ends to which it is being put are objectively liberal ones, of “a country that treats everybody equally and fairly before the law”, rhetoric language echoed, indeed, by Shabana Mahmood. Who could argue, in good faith, against such an obviously desirable outcome? Only those who, for their own private advantage, or their witless attempts to do good or merely to be seen to do good have brought us to where we are today. The Britain of recent decades is a failing, actually-existing post-liberal regime, governed by racial hierarchies and unequal laws, overseen by an increasingly oppressive and authoritarian state unable to govern the society it has created.

The ends of a Reform government, at least judging by today’s rhetoric, and the hopes of its voters, are a return to Britain’s governance of the Nineties, by contrast with today a stable, prosperous, well-governed and fundamentally happy country. While Reform forthrightly condemns “antiwhite racism”, addressing itself directly to the dwindling majority in what was hitherto only tacit signaling, the Conservatives invert the rhetoric, focusing on the excessive emphasis on race over fair policing. Yet for all that Kemi Badenoch condemns Farage’s language, her chosen policy outcomes, of a return to equal policing under the law, are the same. There is little distance to be found between the two conservative parties: each of them, rhetoric aside, can be viewed as the last defenders of a race-blind, liberal conservative settlement already shown to be superior, in managing a diverse country, to everything that has followed.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the competence of a future Reform government, or its ability to bend Britain’s state towards a belated reflection of the electorate’s will. But what can no longer be argued against is the necessity of trying to do so, before the state loses the last vestiges of its legitimacy. The progressive obsessions of our masters have dramatically worsened Britain’s cultural and racial politics, to the extent that it is reasonable to fear where it will end; to fear that unreformed, the state will lose what little popular acceptance it still possesses, and that the reaction will sweep us into a dangerous new world, unwanted by all but the most committed extremists.

Farage’s apocalyptic language, presenting Reform as the only political choice “if our society is not to be ripped apart, where communities start to distrust each other and deeply distrust the police and all the other institutions of this country”, where “I fear for where our society will be in a few short years if we don’t grip this and do it very, very quickly”, is now no longer beyond the bounds of political speech. Indeed, many of the comments underneath his address, shared on social media, are from voters declaring he does not go far enough.

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That Reform has positioned itself as the only party both willing and capable of saving the British state from itself is precisely why it is the likely next party of government. That neither the Conservative nor Labour architects of our racialized regime can be trusted to salvage what they have wrought is their epitaph. While Westminster awaits the results of the Makerfield by-election, and its probable elevation of the next interim prime minister, uncharacteristically silent on the news of the moment, it is both the Southampton murder and Farage’s unapologetic response that now crystallize the national mood. It is not in the interests of Britain’s ethnic minorities for those claiming to represent them to have brought us so close to the precipice. Conversely, it may only be through Reform being seen to defend the interests of Britain’s majority population, in rhetoric delivered through its multiracial shadow cabinet, that much of the liberal settlement of previous decades can be preserved.

Like Lampedusa’s Tancredi, a natural conservative forced by events to adopt revolutionary airs in order to preserve what was good about the society crumbling around him, it seems that for Farage, for things to stay as they were, everything must change. It is not hard to foresee, once Reform’s likely victory becomes a certainty, the functionaries of the state who so eagerly bent their knees to the enforced religion declaring their earnest allegiance to the new settlement. Britain is, after all, a country of few natural zealots, but many amoral and shallow-witted careerists.

Indeed, a key element in Reform’s victory, now, will be encouraging elite defection towards the new regime, among civil servants and others who will be encouraged to weigh the benefits of cooperation against the looming costs of defiance. Just as Hungary’s election has brought about a total clearing-out of the old order and its political appointees, so will Reform’s success or failure be determined by the party’s ability to reshape the state according to its vision of the common good. The alternative is no longer a return to the failed nostrums of the past, as our antiquated Blarite media class still believes, but the British state as we once knew it becoming its own final victim.

Yet allowing all this anger, all this hatred, to shape the logic of the prison system is a mistake. However satisfying it may feel to some observers, Huntley’s bloody death, and the rising chaos in cellblocks right across the country, erodes the very authority that keeps these institutions working. And if that’s bad news for prison discipline, to say nothing of inmates themselves, Huntley’s fate, and that of people like him, ultimately makes life less safe for everyone — both in jail and out.

HMP Frankland, the County Durham prison where Huntley was attacked with a spiked metal pole last month, is one of the most secure in the country. It holds Category A prisoners, men assessed as posing the highest risk to the public and national security. But that underplays the system’s sophistication, for Frankland actually operates under several distinct “regimes”.

The main population houses many of the country’s most dangerous offenders, alongside a unit for prisoners with dangerous personality disorders. There is also a so-called “separation center”: a closed unit used for the most ideologically challenging inmates in the system, including Islamist extremists. It was here that Hashem Abedi, the brother of the Manchester Arena bomber Salman, attacked three prison officers with hot oil and improvised weapons. Separate from all these is the “protection estate”, where prisoners at risk from the general population are segregated for their own safety. It was here that Huntley was serving his sentence, and where he was attacked.

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Unsurprisingly — and as I learned firsthand over the years I spent at Frankland serving a life sentence — these varied units can only function by tightly controlling the movements of prisoners. When inmates move between areas, from a wing to the gym or the clinic, they pass through multiple checkpoints designed to prevent the transfer of weapons, drugs or other contraband. Wands, sniffer dogs and airport-style body scanners are common. I myself remember standing in a queue waiting to pass through security, not unlike the slow shuffle through customs after a flight. If someone was ever stopped with contraband, the entire line was held up as staff investigated.

Prisoners only mix with others on their own regime, and even then interactions are monitored by staff and security cameras. Workshops are supervised, with tools like hammers and screwdrivers issued individually and tracked through meticulous tagging systems. Even visits and healthcare are held separately, effectively creating parallel systems within the same prison.

Regimes and movements are structured precisely to reduce opportunities for escape, the passing of contraband — or violence. Yet even in such controlled environments, human instincts endure. Where the social restraints of ordinary life fall away, prisoners organize themselves into informal hierarchies that soon shape the culture of prison life. A prisoner’s perceived morality, and the nature of their offense, inform where they sit within a jail’s unwritten order.

Within this hierarchy, crimes against women and children are the most despised. Other prisoners frequently regard their perpetrators as legitimate targets, something that remains true even within protection units. Child killers remain at the very bottom, while other murderers — like men who kill their wives — enjoy a marginally higher status.

It is not yet possible to know the precise motivations behind the attack on Huntley. Within prison culture, however, acts of violence are often shaped by these same reputational dynamics. A prisoner who attacks someone occupying the lowest rung of the moral hierarchy may be seen as enforcing a twisted kind of justice.

Anthony Russell, the man suspected of killing Huntley, is himself serving life for the rape and murder of one woman and the murder of another. On paper, then, Russell is near the bottom of the moral hierarchy too; by allegedly murdering Huntley, he may have hoped to alter his position. I often witnessed this dynamic during my own years in custody. Attackers received no rewards, no privileges, no tangible benefits. What changed was their reputations. A prisoner seen as willing to inflict extreme violence on a fellow inmate — especially one at the bottom of the moral food chain — is likely to enjoy boosted respect from some inmates: and simply be feared by others. And for someone like Russell, unlikely to ever be released, that shift in reputation may serve him for the rest of his life.

As for Huntley himself, he mostly seems to have avoided provoking other inmates, though there are some suggestions that he wore a red top in jail, apparently mocking the Manchester United jerseys of his victims. Either way, prisoners like him normally keep their heads down. Before this last and fatal assault, after all, he had already survived two earlier attacks, including one in which another inmate slit his throat.

Yet if all this savagery is obviously a problem in itself, especially when prisoner-on-prisoner assaults jumped by 11% in 2024, the real challenge is again hierarchical. Once violence becomes entwined with the informal dynamics of the prison population, it becomes the mechanism through which status is asserted and reputations built.

At that point, anyway, the authority of the institution starts to weaken, as control shifts from formal rules to the unwritten codes of the wing. And if prisoners are permanently pushed to the margins — denied any possibility of engagement — they rarely move beyond that position. Isolation hardens identity. Resentment grows. The space to confront one’s demons narrows, and the willingness to engage with psychologists or teachers lessens.

This matters because most prisoners will eventually return to society. The only question is: what will they be like when they do?

As comments under stories of Huntley’s death vividly show, many people imagine that brutality behind bars is a deterrent: make prisons frightening enough and crime will stop. In truth, though, deterrence rarely works so directly. Most offenders don’t commit crimes expecting to be caught. Many crimes, particularly sexual offenses, emerge from deep-seated psychological patterns, distorted thinking and long-term behavioral problems that can’t be corrected simply by the threat of punishment.

Addressing those patterns requires long-term psychological treatment. It also requires structured programs, professional engagement and sustained effort over many years. For all this to happen, the prison environment must be stable, something fatally undermined by vicious acts of violence.

When assaults are rife, after all, prisoners are focused not on rehabilitation, but instead on mere survival. Even worse, safety often means getting protection from organized criminals: whether drug gangs or Islamists. I again witnessed this dynamic first-hand during my time in custody, with Islamist networks deploying a particularly strong reputation for collective retaliation. For vulnerable prisoners, aligning with such groups meant safety from bullying or worse. But protection always came at a price. Loyalty was expected, and ideological pressure soon followed.

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None of this is easily solved. The only way to eliminate violence in prison altogether would be to keep everyone permanently locked away. But a prison run on that basis ceases to function. Education classes stop. Workshops close. Healthcare, gym sessions and social interaction disappear. The very activities meant to stabilize behavior and prepare prisoners for release are the ones that require movement, contact and trust. Shut those down and you don’t create safety. You create stagnation, resentment — and men who leave prison more dangerous than when they arrived.

Better, then, to tighten security. Stronger intelligence gathering among staff; closer supervision within workshops and protection units; stricter control over tools and materials — all this would reduce opportunities for violence. Some prisoners, those with particular reputations or vulnerabilities, may also need tighter movement restrictions within protection units. To reiterate, none of these measures will remove the risk entirely. But well-staffed wings, experienced officers who understand prisoner dynamics, and tighter control of potential weapons, will make attacks far less likely. In prisons, as in any complex system, safety does not come from eliminating human interaction. It comes from managing it carefully.

In short, it’s clear that Huntley’s death isn’t merely the story of one notorious inmate, or even of a single prison in crisis. Rather, it goes right to the heart of what kind of penal system our society wants: one that quietly tolerates violence, or one that maintains disciplined authority over even the most hated of prisoners. The first might satisfy our anger — but it’s the second that’ll keep us safe.

The presumption is that the kind of people who carry out hits are a bit like Eddie Redmayne’s assassin in The Day of the Jackal reboot: mysterious, smooth, deadly professionals, whose employers are criminal masterminds who know how to organize a clean liquidation. But in Britain at least, nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is an exchange of real-life text messages intercepted by police as part of an investigation into a planned triple homicide in 2019. The boss of an influential Turkish organized crime group in North London is hiring a criminal broker to arrange the killing of three men. “I’ll pay 150 bro then give u like 5 bricks new year January or something”, he writes. (That means £150,000 up front, plus five kilos of cocaine or heroin on completion.)

The man taking on the contract, formerly a senior member of a local street gang, feels the need to reassure his Turkish paymaster of his credentials, despite their longstanding criminal relationship: “U know I’ve killed about 9 people and made about 4 die bro its fucked up init,” he replies. Then: “First person was in 1st year in school bro kmt bro, after I do the ones on the list I think I’m gonna go into retirement.” Kmt is urban slang for “kiss my teeth”, an expression of contempt or nonchalance.

In this case, the planned murders were prevented before any shots were fired — thanks to the police monitoring these communications as part of a surveillance operation. But in May last year, an assassination attempt linked to the same long-running feud — which is linked to at least 20 murders in two decades — did play out on the streets of North London. A gunman hired by the Tottenham Turks pulled up on a stolen Ducati Monster motorbike outside a busy restaurant in Dalston and fired six shots, injuring three members of the Hackney Turks, who were sitting outside. He also accidentally shot a nine-year-old girl who was eating ice cream, leaving her with severe injuries. The bullet remains lodged in her brain.

Last month, a North London criminal named Javon Riley was jailed for life for his role as a spotter and getaway driver in the hit. But Riley refused to name the individual who paid him £40,000 to help the gunman, telling the court he feared for his life. Meanwhile, the hitman himself remains on the run.

“We’re a million miles away from [the high death count] portrayed on TV shows like Mobland and Gangs of London, but these executions do happen,” says Ian Broughton, a former Met detective who advises on court cases involving drugs and firearms. “If it can’t be solved by diplomacy, when all else has failed, murder is the last course of action.”

Still, in the real world, gangsters are actually pretty bad at murder, and organizing an execution can hit the same problems as organizing a legitimate business project: service delivery can be unreliable; outsourcing means no one takes responsibility when something goes wrong; and too often efforts are more performative than results-based. High-level gang hits on Britain’s streets are, mercifully, less frequent than you might think, but when they do happen, they are often brutal, shambolic, and orchestrated from thousands of miles away.

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We know this thanks, in part, to a fascinating study into subcontracted violence among London drug gangs recently carried out by Jack Warburton, a researcher at Oxford University who specializes in organized crime. Warburton analyzed 17 contract hit cases, gaining access to closed-case police files relating to a large and detailed surveillance operation into the activities of a North London crime network as it planned three assassinations in 2019. The intercepted phone chats, beginning with the text exchange detailed above, show how the job was offered around the London criminal underworld like a gig on the chore-outsourcing app, TaskRabbit — with one of the three killings ultimately taken on by a low-level drug user who was seemingly incapable of finding his target, let alone killing him.

The job begins with the Turkish gang boss ordering the triple hit. A big figure in London’s drug trade, the Gang Boss is now living in Turkey, where he moved to evade the attention of the police. One of the three men he wanted dead was a member of a rival Turkish crime group, whom he held responsible for the murder of his cousin. Surprisingly, however, the other two were members of his own organization. He targeted one for going to the police, and the other for acting without the approval of senior group members.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the case, however, is that despite his organization’s nationwide reputation for violence, the Gang Boss opts to subcontract out the killings — using a senior member of a local street gang as a criminal broker. The pair trust each other, because the Turkish Gang Boss has been supplying the Broker with wholesale amounts of Class A drugs to sell on London’s streets for several years. Like last year’s attempted murders at the Dalston cafe, the use of predominantly black street gangs to carry out hits has been a regular feature of ethnically Turkish and Kurdish crime groups, enriched by decades operating as the chief gatekeepers of London’s heroin supply. Police have recovered numerous pistols and machine guns that have been passed from Turkish crime groups to black street gangs — who rely on their supply of drugs to make their own money.

The text exchanges reveal the Gang Boss and the Broker identifying the targets and agreeing the fee. However, even though he boasts about his own credentials as a killer, the Broker himself opts to subcontract the hits, asking an Accomplice to help him. The Accomplice is similarly reluctant to become directly involved himself, and so he in turn tries to find someone else to do the actual killing. And as the job moves down the chain, the plot starts to get a bit haphazard.

The Accomplice picks out a Journeyman — low-level drug user and dealer with little experience in carrying out contracted violence — to kill the rival gang member. However, he has no luck finding anyone to kill the other two victims. Frustrated, the Broker casts the net wider, bringing in a trusted relative with underworld connections. It is this Relative (now the fifth person involved in the conspiracy) who recruits the other two hitmen (the sixth and seventh people) from a prominent violent gang from another city.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman sources a gun, and alongside the Accomplice, steals an Audi 4×4 and fixes it with a number plate pinched from a similar car. They hide the weapon inside the Audi before parking it near the home of one of the targets. Little do they know that all of this time, the police have been intercepting their phone messages. The police are aware that one of the targets is in imminent danger — but they also want to continue monitoring the criminal conspiracy. So they decide to steal the Audi containing the gun, making it look like a regular car theft.

The criminals fall for it. Assuming the theft to be an unfortunate coincidence, they resolve to start again. But they find it challenging to source a new gun for the right price, and the plot descends into the kind of cluelessness familiar from Guy Ritchie films.

The Broker is meanwhile telling the Accomplice that one of the other three victims is an easy target. He’s recently been released from prison so must wear an electronic tag, meaning he’ll be at a certain address after a certain time every day. “…we should be cashing in tomorrow, this really is light work,” says the Broker.

But it doesn’t turn out to be light work. The Accomplice struggles to find the target or the property he’s tagged to. So the Broker pays £10,000 to a member of a local street gang from the target’s neighborhood — now the eighth conspirator in the plot — to carry out surveillance. When the two assassins recruited from outside London finally arrive to carry out the hit, they find the property is teeming with armed men providing protection. They abort the mission agreeing that they need more guns.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman is back to surveilling his target, who lives in a remote area on the outskirts of London. He carries out four separate surveillance sessions, each lasting between 10 minutes and a couple of hours — and the police know this as his mobile phone connected to the local cell tower. Bringing your mobile with you to a hit counts as a schoolboy error, and shows just how far out of his depth the Journeyman is. And so, with the plot nearing its violent conclusion, police swoop on the gang, arresting and convicting several of the UK-based conspirators.

It’s a case worth dwelling on, because it encompasses several traits that have become common in modern gangland assassination attempts. You would think violence and murder would be an essential in-house capability for an organized crime gang. But subcontracting out murder “makes strategic sense,” notes Warburton. It distances the criminal act from the person ordering it, and allows bosses to get on with the important business of making money. Note how the Gang Boss remained safely in Turkey, where he is less likely to be found by police or by rivals seeking revenge.

The safe haven du jour for European gangsters, however, is Dubai. For years, criminals have flocked to the Emirate to take advantage of its luxurious living, lack of gang violence, and crucially, its lax rules on money laundering and extraditing criminals. In June, British cocaine baron James Harding was jailed for 32 years after plotting to pay a hitman £100,000 to put a rival “permanently out of business” while lounging by a pool in a five-star hotel in Dubai.

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Nevertheless, by operating remotely and subcontracting out hits, British gangsters have surrendered some control over the actual operations — which often come with a distinct air of amateurism. Part of this is down to Britain’s tight gun laws, which mean there are simply not many people around who are proficient in wielding a gun. When gangs are able to source firearms, their lack of expertise means they tend to “spray and pray”. In the space of 24 hours, innocent bystanders Ashley Dale, 28, and Olivia Pratt-Korbel, 9, were killed in totally separate incidents in Liverpool in 2022, with both killed by gunmen hired to murder rival gangsters.

But even hiring trained gunmen is no guarantee of success. In 2021, a serving British soldier was jailed after he was paid to kill a man in Cheshire by a regional crime boss living in Spain. The soldier turned up at the man’s home with a Glock hidden in a pizza delivery box. Despite having a photo of his target, he managed to shoot the wrong man, blasting the intended victim’s stepfather in the legs.

Then there was the case of Anis Hemissi, the killer hired to execute the Swedish-Albanian drug trafficker Flamur Beqiri in 2019. Bequiri was shot dead in front of his wife and children on the doorstep of their £1.7 million home in Battersea. It’s a story that made national news, in part because Bequiri’s sister Misse starred in The Real Housewives of Cheshire. But despite being able to carry out the killing, Hemissi’s methods had a distinct flavor of Inspector Clouseau.

“The media presented [Hemissi] as this kickboxer, this professional killer, but he was the complete opposite,” Warburton tells me. Hemissi, who had flown in from Sweden under his own name to carry out the hit, was identified as the culprit within days because his attempts at subterfuge were so useless. “When he did the surveillance he rode a distinctive women’s bike and was litter-picking wearing a latex mask and a Swedish bin-collector’s uniform, so a local resident, thinking he was crazy, asked him what he was doing, and reported it to the police.” Hemissi was jailed for life in 2022.

Still, criminals are capable of learning from their mistakes. One of the main concerns crime experts now have is their increasingly sophisticated use of technology, with tracking devices increasingly preferred to human spotters to monitor targets’ movements. In 2022, Koray Alpergin, a Turkish radio DJ, was tortured to death in a disused bar in Tottenham while his girlfriend Gozde Dalbudak was forced to listen to his screams. The Tottenham Turks wanted him dead over a drugs-related feud — and the thugs they hired captured him after attaching a tracking device to his car.

Nevertheless, such killings remain extremely rare. There are no detailed statistics on how many attempted and successful hits are carried out in Britain each year, but a College of Policing study estimated that 5% of annual homicides in England and Wales are linked to organized crime groups. That would equate to 28 of 570 killings last year. More general gang-related killings, including teenagers attacking each other with knives and machetes over petty beefs, were roughly twice as frequent.

But that stands to reason. Killing is bad for business in the criminal world, as it attracts reprisals, extra heat from the police, and impacts revenue. And despite their fearsome reputation, British organized crime groups are much more money-making machines than killing machines.

The underworld is, after all, a distorted mirror of the world we live in. As in the legitimate business world, crime organizations are now run by remote and unaccountable leadership, often based offshore, hoovering up the proceeds; there is a chain of harassed middle management giving everyone plausible deniability; and then there are the undertrained, underpaid workers actually doing the jobs. On the rare occasions they succeed, it’s almost always these hapless individuals who get caught — and almost never the person who bankrolled them. As in the business world, the reputation of the people at the top must be preserved at all costs.

The bizarre details of the crime — Kercher was raped, stabbed multiple times, then covered tenderly with a duvet — and the Italian prosecution’s proposal, on no physical evidence, of a Satanic sex ritual orchestrated by Knox, created an international media firestorm that has flared up again with each new legal development. Knox was freed on appeal in 2011 and has been exonerated by Italy’s highest court. But the legal wrangling continues (she has sued to have additional minor convictions overturned), and she remains an object of bizarrely intense public fascination. Her new memoir (she also wrote one shortly after her release) is well-written, persuasive, and genuinely insightful.

It’s also occasionally tone-deaf in a way that seems to expose the reasons the story gripped us so in the first place.

Knox, who was 20 in 2007, has steadfastly maintained her innocence ever since her brief, obscure time in Italian police custody directly after the murder, when she made a series of damaging and incoherent statements that were used against her as a confession. She has always maintained the plausible and evidence-supported theory that Rudy Guede acted alone, and that the Italian police took advantage of her youth and naivety to juice up a salacious case.

Today, she is 37, married, and a mother of two, and lives once again in her hometown of Seattle. She has become a writer, hosts a successful podcast with her husband, the author Christopher Robinson, and is an activist for criminal-justice reform and media ethics. If she was once dangerously naive about her predicament, she is no longer. She explains that her first book, written shortly after her release, was “the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did.” Free is a corrective whose dual mission is to tell her personal story and to defend her right to tell it.

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White, female, American college students from solidly middle-class families haven’t contributed much to prison literature to date. But the combination of Knox’s intelligence and unique situation is a genuine addition to the genre. As she tells it, she arrived in prison so innocent that “it took me a while to realize that the room I was kept in was in fact a cell, my cell…” As the days and months passed and the gears of justice turned (very slowly, provincial-Italian-style), she had the experiences we would expect: she was scared, alone, isolated, and mistreated by the guards and other inmates (who disliked her as the privileged and famous one).

But she also had experiences we don’t expect: when she was allowed out to exercise in a small courtyard, she jogged, did jumping jacks, skipped, and sang at the top of her lungs, anything to feel free. When she was scared and lonely, she would call up a vision of herself as the happy, innocent, tough little girl she once was, and then she would talk to her younger self about their current troubles. Her raw youth pours off the page.

She was aware, even at the time, that much “invisible luxury” set her apart from her fellow prisoners. She had family to support her and visitors at every visiting hour. She didn’t suffer from the combination of trauma, mental health, and addiction that is common among female prisoners. Nonetheless, she was a prisoner, and accepting the situation as it was, especially after her conviction and sentencing to 26 years, helped her survive. The story of a young girl’s slow, painful grasp of the human essentials is powerful: we always have agency; there are things we possess that can’t be taken away; we must accept the life we actually have, and not pine for the one we wish for.

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After four years of incarceration, Knox was freed on appeal and returned to America, only to discover herself in a different kind of prison. She was traumatized from her ordeal, had panic attacks, and found it difficult to reconnect with family and friends. She was — and is — notorious, a public figure and media sensation, a frequent target of hatred and death threats. For defending her innocence, asserting the value of her own story, or even just being OK, she is perceived as denying the awfulness of what happened to Meredith Kercher. The tabloids, especially in England and Italy, continue to distort her every action into something sinister. “Amanda Knox Wears Bizarre Yellow Outfit as She Marries Poet Boyfriend”, ran a Daily Mail headline from 2020. Once again, she faces the challenge of accepting the life she has, trying to make sense of her experience and to make something good out of something terrible.

The middle section of the book explores the social and cultural factors at play in her case, skillfully woven into the events of her life post-release. She was, she theorizes, the first cancellation of the social-media era and the first person to be subject to the kind of prolonged public shaming that has now become commonplace. She was also a victim of prurience, and the virgin-slut narrative, and the time-honored tradition of pitting women against each other. Cultural factors came into play: the Italian investigators couldn’t comprehend her behavior in the days following the murder, and created a narrative of her guilt as a result. The case became not about the facts, but about her character.

I was moved by the book, and went to see Knox in discussion with British journalist Jon Ronson at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on Wednesday night without lingering doubts about her innocence. I understood why the people who still believe she is guilty, not least the Kercher family’s lawyer, find her ongoing notoriety to be ghoulish.

If you think she did it, Free is very provocative name for a book. And that “extraordinary” from the opening anecdote has a third valence: Knox has had a more extraordinary life than most people because she has benefited, and not just spiritually, from her hardship. She writes books about it; she befriends other famous people (Monica Lewinsky became a pal); she just executive-produced Blue Moon, a Hulu series about the ordeal set in Perugia, expected to debut this year. But I’d been convinced that these perceptions were not her fault, and that she had no moral obligation to cater to them.

And yet a strange thing happened: the longer she talked, the more it seemed possible that this small, cute, physically unimposing, nerdy-chic Seattle mom in platform boots could have done it. To be clear, I don’t believe she really did it. More important, there has never been any evidence that she did. But there is something about her affect and demeanor that gives off the eerie vibe that if any totally unlikely young woman could secretly be a crazed killer, it’s this one. The more she laughed and said how absurd it was, the more I could see why the police were suspicious.

She mentioned some photographs in a particular situation made her look like “a flippant psycho”, cackling at the ridiculousness to a crowd of fans, but that was exactly what she looked like in that moment. She argued that such perceptions are the awful legacy of suspicion, media-distortion, and our dirty minds. Perhaps greater self-knowledge would come in realizing that it is a mysterious quality of hers, unfortunate to be sure, that was visible to Italian investigators, and has been visible in photography since the early days of the case. I suspect it’s the real cause of our unstoppable slippery fascination with her.

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And there are reasons for it. Knox doesn’t quite know how to treat other people. Her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, for example, has only a minor role in Free, mainly as a person whose life was, unlike hers, permanently derailed by the wrongful accusations. He’s still single, Knox writes. He’s a pariah in Italy, and he’s never been able to get steady work. Someone brought him up at the event, and she retold an anecdote from the book about how sad he was during their meeting in Italy in 2022, when a passer-by mistook her baby for his.

I thought Sollecito would have been unlikely to feel good about himself if he were sitting in the audience. Knox’s right to tell her story suddenly seemed more complicated than it had in the memoir. If you’ve come through an awful catastrophe, with multiple victims including yourself, and your ultimate success highlights your fellow survivor’s failure, do you really have every right in the world to promote it far and wide? There are some situations — many, actually — where we can’t say whatever we want, and this in order to protect the feelings of other people. Or we can, but we’ve chosen ourselves over them, and it’s going to look bad.

There’s also Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor of Knox’s case, with whom she strikes up an unlikely relationship in the book’s third section. The narrative slows down a bit here, as Knox enters into an endless wrangle with what she wants from the man — which somewhat contradicts her claim to have found peace. Mignini is willing to engage with her and offer her his friendship, but he won’t say he was wrong about her case. Her final epiphany comes from accepting that there is greater value in just forgiving him. It’s true, and it sounds good (and makes her sound good), but she also mocks him in the book and did so again during the event for being more invested in the relationship than she is. At the event, she tacitly agreed with Ronson, her interviewer, that Mignini is a narcissist. Again, I wondered how he would have felt if he were sitting there, and again I doubted Knox for promoting her own virtue at someone else’s expense.

One of the many themes of the case has been Knox’s ordinariness. She fascinates us, supposedly, because what happened to her could happen to anyone. But Free proves in many ways — both its insight and intelligence, and also its odd failures and lack of self-awareness — that she’s never been ordinary.

As a reporter, I am supposed to bear witness: to expose the truth relentlessly and seek justice. I thought I could cope with seeing such horrific things; I would reassure friends that I was fine and point out that I was not the victim in these scenarios. Over the years, I have avoided examining how being immersed in a world of rape, child abuse and femicide has affected me. I would always support those feminist activists who threw in the towel to retire to Spain, but I would feel a bit bemused by their actions. Why would you want to take up gardening, instead of being an agent of change?

Then something shifted. Investigating yet another atrocity, over the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, unable to sleep. I now understand why some activists retire.

It began with the murder of a seven-year-old girl. Nikki Allan lived with her mum and three sisters in a run-down block of flats in Sunderland. One day, in 1992, a man took her to the wasteland outside a derelict warehouse and sexually assaulted her. When Nikki screamed, he pushed her through a window into the building, chased her into a far corner, and shattered her little skull with a brick. He then stabbed her 37 times, before dragging her into the basement. There he left her, propped up against the wall like a rag doll.

Police focused their investigation on a man named George Heron, seen as the local oddball. They effectively coerced a confession out of him. The following year, he was acquitted of murder at trial, after the judge ruled the confession out, but was forced to go into hiding because people in the local community were convinced of his guilt. Nikki’s mum, Sharon Henderson, believed Heron had got away with her daughter’s murder, because the police repeatedly told her that there were no other suspects. The media reinforced this narrative.

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I picked up the story in 2006. Visiting my parents in Darlington, not far from where Nikki was murdered, I saw a photograph in the local paper of a woman standing by the grave of a child. The headline read: “Mum’s bid to dig up daughter”. Sharon was asking police to exhume Nikki’s body, in order to test it for DNA evidence, following a change in the law on double jeopardy, which prevents someone being tried again on charges of which they’ve been previously acquitted. More than a decade after her daughter’s murder, Sharon was still fighting for justice.

“I always said I would never, ever give up campaigning for Nikki until her murderer was locked up,” Sharon told me. “Not until the police answer for that first so-called investigation.”

I first interviewed Sharon shortly after reading that newspaper story. A single mum from a rough part of town, she felt that the police weren’t taking her seriously. Over the years, I’ve kept in contact with Sharon, admiring her tenacity, and her refusal to accept that the police had done right by her daughter.

And then, in May 2022, the unexpected happened. A man named David Boyd was charged, 30 years after Nikki was murdered. A child sex offender, with convictions dating back to 1986, Boyd lived three doors down from where Nikki disappeared, and had moved away from the estate shortly after the murder. When questioned, Boyd had lied, presenting a made-up alibi. So focused were the police on Heron, they didn’t even bother to check it.

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By this point, I had started working on a podcast series about Nikki’s murder, originally with the intention of marking the 30th anniversary, and to give Sharon’s campaign a boost. It felt like we were close to getting justice. I attended every day of the trial, renting an apartment close to Newcastle Crown Court. Sharon and her family would come there between sittings, for respite. I saw, as I had over the previous 17 years, how much pain Sharon was enduring. But here she was, struggling on. The evidence at trial was harrowing. Sharon did her best to listen. But most of the time she would leave the public gallery after only a few minutes, sobbing. “Imagine listening to what that bastard did to your bairn,” says Sharon. “The details of how he murdered her will never leave my mind.”

Day in, day out, the particulars of the murder were played out: the forensic pathologist who examined Nikki’s body in situ back in 1992 came to repeat her evidence, 31 years later. A blood splatter expert, she painted a vivid picture of what had happened to Nikki in life and in death. We saw video footage of the crime scene. Nikki’s body was pixelated out, but the brick that had killed was in plain sight.

“Vicarious trauma” is a term used by psychologists to describe the effect of witnessing or hearing horror stories. It is increasingly recognised as a potential consequence of working directly with seriously hurt and injured individuals — an occupational hazard among Accident and Emergency personnel, for instance, or social workers who witness child cruelty. With wider recognition of the condition, it is becoming more commonplace for employers to offer counselling to staff who encounter atrocity in their working lives.

I feel uncomfortable claiming to be experiencing “vicarious trauma”. I’m not the victim here. I have always felt it important to be resilient, when focusing on the women and girls directly affected by a crime. But something snapped in me, with this story.

During the trial, I would find myself crying at home for no apparent reason. I would be too tired to blank out the stories I’d heard, but then have trouble sleeping. I’d stay awake watching Netflix as a way of escaping my intrusive thoughts, my hypersensitivity, and a feeling of deep, deep despair. I suffered extreme neck and shoulder pain, attributed partly to five weeks of scribbling in a notebook every day in court, but also to the tension of hearing the evidence, and trying not to cry on the press bench. I started getting headaches. I would imagine all kinds of horrific things happening to my loved ones, anything from car crashes to brutal murder.

What was it about the Nikki Allan case that kept me awake night after night, driving me into a depression? It was not the first time I had reported on the case of a murdered child, or seen such terrible evidence in court. But in time, I have come to realise that so many aspects of the case resonated with my own childhood experience, and what I escaped. Growing up in the North East, I witnessed how the police dismiss working-class women, in particular single mothers; I saw how child sexual abuse was minimised. Boyd was free for 30 years to abuse girls a short drive from the rough housing estate I grew up on, where men targeted me and my friends.

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I was first flashed at when I was nine years old. Aged 12, a man violently grabbed my breast as he walked past me in the middle of the town centre. At 16, I was raped by an older man I considered a friend. My job cleaning in a pub ended abruptly when a campaign of horrific sexual harassment culminated in an attempted rape. By this time, I was 17, and had recently joined the ranks of feminists fighting against sexual and domestic violence.

I was drawn to the cause partly because of my own experiences, but also inspired by the widespread protests about the police investigation into the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. The misogyny and class prejudice that underpinned this investigation — the idea that the victims were “common prostitutes” and were therefore somehow complicit in their fate — felt familiar to me. Many of the women I was raised among would be seen as the kind who would be “asking for it” simply for going to the pub alone, when they should have stayed safely at home.

Returning to the North East, spending time so close to where I was raised, amid Nikki’s grieving, traumatised family, I sometimes caught myself wondering how my life would have turned out had I stayed put in Darlington. Had I never found feminism. Sharon’s life could have been mine.

But anyone doing this work, immersed in the harsh reality of it, is bound to struggle with the toll it takes on our mental health. I see rape and domestic abuse routinely dismissed and minimised. Victims are dismissed, disbelieved, or blamed for their own predicaments. I also see men excused. They are reassured that what they have done is “not so bad”. Meanwhile, women such as Sharon Henderson are fighting against a system that views them as irritants.

And if the crimes themselves aren’t taken seriously enough in the mainstream, why would those of us reporting on them be given any consideration? Instead, we see the trivialisation of both sexual violence and of the hellish side effects of campaigning for change. I will never understand how Sharon must feel, having lost her seven-year-old daughter to murder; I do know what it is like to be silenced and misrepresented when speaking out against atrocities committed by men, and police inaction.

So, I will always be inspired by women like Sharon (in May, Boyd was found guilty of Nikki’s murder and jailed for life, with a minimum term of 29 years). One positive I cling to, in this bleak state of affairs, is the sense of solidarity that often flourishes between women. Sharon may never have considered herself a feminist campaigner until the unimaginable happened. But the rest of us have so much to learn from her tenacity.

‘Three doors down‘, Julie Bindel’s podcast series on the case of Nikki Allan, is out now

This terrible crime electrified Lincolnshire, and gave rise to horrified headlines across the country. Floral tributes festooned Fountain Lane, and locals filed into St Botolph’s church below its magnificent early 16th century landmark tower to light candles and cry. While parishioners uttered heartfelt, inadequate platitudes, shopkeepers closed for the day, passers-by shook their heads, and a local man started a fundraiser for the family which has already attracted nearly £6,000. As a Lincolnshire Police Chief Superintendent said, people in Boston were “struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible”.

This is an awful new low in the town’s criminal annals, but it is not the first time, nor even the second, that Bostonians have struggled with the incomprehensible.

In December 2020, the body of 12-year-old Roberts Buncis was found in the woodland of nearby Fishtoft, a village previously noted only for being the attempted departure point of future Pilgrim Fathers. Roberts had suffered more than 70 knife wounds, in an attack so frenzied that the tip of a knife was embedded in his skull. An attempt had been made to remove his head and hand. His killer, Marcel Grzeszcz, then 14, had enticed Roberts to the wood under the pretext of giving him drugs to sell. It was, said another investigator, “one of the worst and saddest cases” his force had ever handled.

Four years earlier, in 2016, Boston had been called “murder capital of England” by the national press, reflecting statistics on murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to murder that outdid London or Manchester — there were 10 such cases, in a borough with a population of around 65,000, the equivalent to 15 per 100,000 people. Knife crime, imaginatively linked with inner cities, has become inexorably associated with an intimate red-brick fishing port in one of England’s least assuming areas.

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Lilia’s killing resulted in a swift arrest — of Lithuanian national Deividas Skebas, 22, who has now been charged with her murder. He is a fruit picker, despite being from what a former girlfriend described as an “upper-class” background.

Not the backwater it is often assumed to be, Boston has experience of Europe. Between 1279 and 1289, it was the biggest port in England, exporting three million sheep fleeces annually, and accounting for nearly half of all the nation’s customs revenue. The town had strong links to the Rhineland — the three crowns of Boston’s crest may be an allusion to Cologne, traditional burial place of the Three Wise Men — and older brick houses have Flemish detailing. The town’s history with Eastern Europe is however more combative. The future Henry IV led a crusade out of Boston in 1390 against the stubbornly pagan “Livonians” — the ancestors of Lithuanians — with Lincolnshire archers instrumental in the capture of Vilnius. But thereafter Boston fell largely out of exciting history. During the Civil Wars, Boston was so reliably parliamentarian it was never in the front line, and its Puritan sects could, in peace, enjoy their perennial pastime of accusing each other of backsliding.

Today, though the town is unwillingly drawn into equally ugly culture wars. Violent crime has increased markedly since 2004, coinciding with the arrival of disproportionately large numbers of Polish and Baltic field-workers who descended on Boston after their countries joined the EU in 2004 (and Romanians, after 2007). The rapid changes felt deeply disconcerting to many in Boston, a town with already poor healthcare and housing, and low educational attainment and wages. The population increased by nearly 16% between 2001 and 2011, creating an EU-born minority of around 13%. Vigorous workers, often with young children, piled into the tiny, tight-knit town with cash to spend after back-breaking days picking cabbages. A godsend to agriculturists, and responsible for rejuvenating ageing districts, they were also blamed for depressing wages, over-filling houses, burdening medical practices and schools, leading parallel lives in different languages, and filling late-night streets with alcohol-fuelled altercations. Sometimes old country feuds were imported, sometimes new ones invented, as criminals of different nationalities expanded across these fertile new territories.

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Most arrivals were inoffensive, even beneficial — like unlucky Lilia’s family (her mother runs an embroidery and screen-printing shop). But a few got out of hand, and their escapades sensationalised. As misunderstandings and ultimately serious crimes mounted up, there started to grow a deep, if often surreptitiously-expressed, sentiment in Boston — an inchoate feeling of being ignored, or even despised by Labour, by “London”, by all elites, including Brussels. There were also powerful economic factors at play. Farmers who relied on European labour also disliked the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, and the trawlermen who creep with the tide down the Witham to the Wash bitterly resented fishing quotas. All too soon, as a Borough Council officer acknowledged last year, there was “significant negativity between our residents”. In one especially intemperate 2016 TV debate, a woman incensed by political reluctance to discuss immigration even claimed “all we get is murders”.

Local politics, somnolent for centuries, sparked into life. In 2007, the Borough Council was taken in a landslide by a group called the Boston Bypass Independents, campaigning mostly on transport but channelling all kinds of discontents. In 2008, a BNP councillor was elected, and in 2009 Labour lost its three remaining seats. Ukip waxed strongly in the town, with crammed public meetings; in 2012, it held its spring conference in Skegness, just up the road. In 2016, Boston delivered a 75% pro-Brexit vote, earning it opprobrium as ”Britain’s most Eurosceptic town”.

That vote may have been cathartic for the 75%, but for the 100% the consequences are unclear. The exodus of Europeans has caused short-term “critical” labour shortages, in farms and haulage firms, care homes and caravan parks, with crops sometimes left to rot and lorry-loads of goods left undelivered. Eastern Europeans are being replaced by workers from even further east and south, which may result in even less tractable problems. The United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust has already been found guilty of racism, and the county as a whole accused by one ex-resident of “intolerance of colour”, and called “the most racist county in the country”. Historic England has also started singling out Lincolnshire locations for links to slavery, one of many pressures “woking” up the long-bypassed town to the news that it too is in history’s firing line.

But in this proud county, angst-filled preaching may merely exacerbate existing resentments towards out-of-touch elites, and London liberal opinion. And in any case, such abstract thinking seems coldly otiose, in this torrid season, with its terribly real and now timeless symbol of a little girl playing hide and seek, in streets where the future of Britain is being forged.

A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to the Marengo trial, where 17 men stand accused of involvement in six murders, four attempted murders and preparing for six others between 2015 and 2017.

Fear hangs in the air around this court case, telling a tale of a country where the hydra of organised crime has so many heads that it is threatening the very rule of law. When the trial resumed this month, journalists were asked to sign agreements not to name judges or prosecutors, for fear of them being targeted. After reports that co-chief suspect Ridouan Taghi was planning a jailbreak, the streets around the fortified courtroom known as the Bunker are ringed with police cars and trained teams made up of police and soldiers.

The Marengo is only the latest in a series of organised crime trials to shake the Netherlands. This year, Dutch courts are also trying alleged criminal druglord Roger P., accused of turning shipping containers into an underworld prison, with its own gruesome “torture chamber”. Meanwhile, a Marengo side-trial involves motorbike club Caloh Wagoh members charged with shooting dead five people, preparing three other murders and “putting another seven people on the waiting list to be killed”.

“I call The Netherlands a ‘narco-state 2.0’,” says Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union. “We aren’t Mexico, with 14,000 dead bodies, but in our parallel economy, there is an attack on public order and unprecedented numbers of people with personal security — politicians, judges, prosecutors, police staff, journalists — because there is still a serious risk from organised crime. It is a huge problem, being tackled on every front, but we have a long way to go.”

Struijs first raised concerns that this small, well-connected trading nation has “characteristics of a narco-state” four years ago. At the time, there was a muted political response. But then the brother of the Marengo crown witness Nabil B was shot dead and the crown witness’s original lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, was gunned down outside his house. Finally, last July, celebrated crime reporter Peter R de Vries, who had unconventionally agreed to act as Nabil B’s representative, was shot in the head on a busy central Amsterdam street and died of his wounds.

Today, few would argue that increasingly violent crime has clawed its fingers deep into civil society. But as Lieselot Bisschop, criminologist at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, points out, before you can combat the crime, it is important to understand who is involved and how. She and a team of researchers have been looking at the key drug runners’ entry and exit point of Rotterdam port, where last year a Hit and Run Cargo team (HARC) confiscated a record 72,808 kilos of cocaine plus another record of 1,500 kilos of heroin. “Whether it’s a good thing that they are catching more, I don’t know — is more going through anyway?” says Prof Bisschop. “The quantity aspect is always very challenging. It’s a dark number, guesstimates.”

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Meanwhile, the Netherlands is apparently a centre of synthetic drug manufacture, with regular busts of “professional” crystal meth and MDMA labs, especially in Noord Brabant. When international police decrypted millions of messages on devices criminals thought were secure — such as Sky and EncroChat, and the Dutch decoded Pretty Good Privacy software for Blackberry’s in the Marengo case — they lit up a web of crime.

Experts agree the Netherlands’s infrastructure is key for both legal and illegal trade. In their 2020 book, Nederland Drugsland, Dutch police academy professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp explored how criminals exploit its efficient ports, good roads, and strong financial and digital infrastructure. “The Netherlands has long been a trading country — not just the harbours but also our high-quality internet environment. We have huge numbers of bankers and our country is central in Europe in terms of all kinds of transport and transit,” says Struijs. “We have huge numbers of imports, which means a lot of drugs are mixed with legal trade, coming in containers of fruit or liquor. Organised crime takes advantage of the legal infrastructure.”

Corruption is another factor. As a nation, the Dutch are keen to make a deal — and regular businesses haven’t always been too fussy about carrying out background checks, as various banking money laundering cases and high tax haven rankings show. The NVB Dutch banking association says an estimated €16 billion in illegally-earned cash washes around each year.

Personal corruption is also a problem in a port 40km long and with 180,000 employees, says Bisschop. “Within Europe, it is definitely the gateway for any kind of trade and probably for cocaine. Over the years, the port has become more physically and digitally secure. We think this has contributed to more pressure on the people in the port. Basically, you need corruption to pull it off — both public and private, not just police and customs but also planners in container terminals. You need someone on the inside.”

So in court, says veteran crime reporter Saskia Belleman, there has been a spate of cases against allegedly corrupt customs staff, shipping and port employees, partly as a consequence of a Dutch gedoogcultuur of looking the other way. There are also concerns about so-called “collectors”, often young men who trespass into the harbour and collect drugs.

Nobody knows if the Netherlands is worse than other European port countries in terms of international organised crime, but its soft drug culture is undoubtedly a weak spot. Although smoking cannabis and coffee shops selling the drug are tolerated, it is illegal to grow commercially. This means that cafes offer a legally tolerated channel for criminal activity, and a training ground for young criminals.

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In the Netherlands, it’s become increasingly common to read about the ethnic aspect of organised crime — the so-called “Mocro Maffia” Moroccan-origin mafia which inspired a true crime book and spin-off television series. But Peter Schouten, one of the new lawyers for the crown witness in the Marengo trial, says: “It’s not true that it’s only people with another ‘heritage’. Certain gangs have a kind of micro-organism, a gangland where there’s a lot of the same culture, but there are other gangs arrested, and you read stories saying that the new kingpin is ‘Bolle’ Jos from Brabant.”

It’s hard to measure organised crime, partly because victims don’t always make reports, but ethnic minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects. Statistics Netherlands researcher Maarten Bloem says, though, that “if you correct for age, education level, socio-economic category, there is not much difference between different ethnic origins”. He concludes: “It’s not so much about someone’s colour but the situation in which they find themselves.”

It is unclear whether the segregated, Dutch grammar school system helps contribute to excluding certain groups, too: critics say it selects too young, hammers in socio-economic difference, and makes no account for innately-talented children who speak Dutch as an additional language.

Crime, after all, can be seen as a way out of poverty and an equal opportunities recruiter. So there’s a widespread recognition that long-term crime prevention needs to offer other options, especially to young men in problem districts. There’s a new drive targeting “vulnerable” areas in Utrecht, and projects such as working with the “top 600″ criminals and their families in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, international efforts have been led by the mayors of Rotterdam and Belgian Antwerp — where a record 90 tonnes of smuggled cocaine was found last year. They have visited South American counterparts and lobbied governments to ramp up international efforts against organised crime, increase barriers in harbours, and confiscate criminal assets.

In Rotterdam, there are promising signs of public-private cooperation, with busts by the multi-agency HARC, a new Information Sharing Centre, a business integrity initiative, and a “training container” to coach harbour staff in combatting corruption. A long-awaited law banning civilians from the container area is in place to help apprehend those vital ‘collectors’ picking up drugs from containers, while Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is also enforcing a €2,250 anti-nuisance penalty. The new Dutch coalition hopes to add to these initiatives. It will start investing specifically in combating crime that “undermines” public order from 2023, ratcheting up to a €100m yearly investment by 2025. In the meantime, the last budget put aside an extra €434m to increase annual budgets for police, judicial organisation and subversive crime prevention, though experts warn that money must not be used to add to the layers of bureaucracy.

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Instead, some want a shift in public attitudes on drug taking: as the prosecutor said in the torture container trial, show users the “abhorrent” consequence of their habits rather than perpetuating the permissive, hippy culture of the Seventies. “It’s not done in the Netherlands to point in the direction of drug users,” says Belleman. “If you don’t use drugs, there’s no market. But people who use cocaine at the weekends don’t make the connection between organised crime and their drug use — and if you tell them, they are really offended.”

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in how to prosecute those alleged criminals who are caught. In the mega-Marengo trial, hearings are currently mired in details such as whether the co-chief suspect Saïd Razzouki left his reading glasses behind when he was extradited from Colombia in December, and whether due process was followed in his subpoena.

The accused in the trial deny the charges, and Schouten doesn’t expect a verdict until 2023. “This trial is under an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “This is about the rule of law, the dyke against injustice, and we must continue to protect this. But there is a lot of fear.” Even when the trial verdict is reached, until words turn to action, that fear is unlikely to go away.

Last week, Breivik appeared before a parole hearing, asking to be released from prison. If you’re unfamiliar with the procedural mechanics of Norway’s criminal justice system, you might think that “Breivik” and “parole” have no business belonging to the same sentence. But in Norway offenders are legally entitled to apply for parole at the halfway point of a maximum prison term.

Breivik, who in 2016 ludicrously filed a complaint that he was being subject to degrading and inhumane treatment in prison and who has now served 10 years of his 21-year sentence, was never going to renounce the opportunity to further ridicule the largesse of his liberal jailors: when he walked in to the courtroom, ponced-up in a black slim-fit suit that was plastered all over him like cheap spray tan, he flashed a Nazi salute. He then gave an hour-long speech, in which he said: “Today, I strongly dissociate myself from violence and terror… I hereby give you my word of honour that this is behind me forever,” straining credulity not least by his invocation of the word “honour”. For some reason, the court allowed this travesty to be filmed and broadcast. It did not, however, allow the travesty of freeing him: Breivik’s parole was denied.

As a criminologist, I am not supposed to say that Breivik is a monster, much less express any vengeful emotions toward him. Rather, I am supposed to place him within a broader context and resist the seductive temptation to “Other” him.

I am supposed to say that he’s a product of society, whose homicidal actions speak to the deep alienation that some young men experience in a spiritually depleted world at the End of History. Or I am supposed to highlight how Breivik had internalised the trauma of a painful childhood — his mother tried to orphan him and his sister when he was a child — and then sought to cancel out that trauma by violently imposing it on the people who inhabited that same desolate society. I am supposed to take all the monstrousness that Breivik unleashed against his multiple victims, most of them teenagers, and causally tie it not to Breivik the person but to other sources of social dysfunction that produced him. I am supposed to say that Breivik is, to annex the title of Åsne Seierstad’s account of his massacre, One of Us.

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By Asne Seierstad

As a criminologist who studies terrorism, I’m all too familiar with Hannah Arendt’s thesis that while human cruelty can be monstrous, its perpetrators are often pathetic men (and sometimes women) who are neither demonic nor sadistic, but ordinary people with grubby little motives, like career advancement, pleasing superiors or not wanting to stick one’s neck out for fear of censure.

When I first read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a book about how ordinary Germans, from all walks of life, willingly participated in the open-air slaughter of tens of thousands of Jewish civilians in occupied Poland between 1941 and 1942, I was impressed by its overall Arendtian argument; it seemed profound and radical. According to Browning, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed not because they were fanatics motivated by the ideology of murderous anti-Semitism, but because they were psychologically weak.

As Browning puts it: “To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot…” A broader argument soon materialises: that there is a line of good and evil that runs through every human being; that we are all, when the circumstances permit it, capable of terrible acts of inhumanity.

I have now come to think of this account of human evil as banal and partial. And I have come to dislike the glibness with which the account is expressed by its defenders, as though they are imparting some deep and unsettling truth about the human condition that is lost on the plebs with all their talk of evil and mythical monsters.

Well, we are not all capable of inhumanity, and while some people fearfully succumb to the weight of group dynamics and kill, others can’t wait to get started with the business of slaughter and need only the flimsiest of pretexts to enter a berserk state. And still others not only refuse to follow orders, but bravely intervene to stop their fellows from killing civilians.

The problem with the Arendtian thesis about ordinary killers, and the broader consensus that has hardened around it, is that it can’t explain ideologically fervent men who revel in the idea of murdering and humiliating scores of their perceived enemies. Men like Breivik.

Granted, Breivik was a pudgy-faced, piggy-eyed loser with blond sweaty hair — all now shaven off. As Seierstad recounts in her book, Breivik’s life was an elaborate catalogue of miserable failures. The problem was his tremendous narcissism and resentful anger, which sabotaged him at every turn.

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As a teenager, he reinvented himself as a graffiti artist called “Morg”, claiming to be the top “tagger” in Oslo. But he was shit and annoying and was soon excluded from the “tagger” community. In another reinvention, he tried his hand at selling fake university diplomas on the internet, until he nearly got caught. He then joined the anti-immigration Progress party, intent on becoming a politician. That, too, went nowhere. Women, in particular, seemed to find him radioactive: he ordered a Belarusian mail-order bride who left as swiftly as she came. He would brag to his friends that he was a brothel man; this self-righteous and disgust-prone creep was probably terrified of women.

But for all these squalid and all-too human details, Breivik was a singular individual with a troglodytic interior world that made him stand out. Around 2006, he moved back in with his mother and retreated from the world, living almost entirely in his imagination. He became obsessed with the idea that white European culture was under existential threat from marauding hordes of Muslim migrants, abetted by white cultural Marxists and multiculturalists. And he began nurturing the fantasy that he would lead a secret order of knights to stop this cultural “genocide”.

Yes, Breivik was a chump and a radical loser, but he was no ordinary killer following orders, still less some colourless bureaucrat orchestrating mass-murder from behind the scenes, as was the case with Adolf Eichmann, the apotheosis of Arendt’s banal evil. Far from being banal, Breivik’s motives were related to his sense of worthlessness and lack of virility. Only by violently crushing all those who had made him feel weak and pathetic could he restore his sense of manly “honour”. In short, Breivik was an enthusiastic killer who wanted to kill.

One of the dark ironies exhibited in Breivik’s parole hearing was his appropriation of liberal explanatory motifs to excuse his monstrous behaviour. “I was brainwashed,” Breivik told the court on the first day of the proceedings. He had been radicalised online, he elaborated, embracing the language of victimhood that he so despises in others and that so many progressives employ to rationalise or explain away the crimes of “the oppressed”.

Breivik once had a grudging admiration for al Qaeda, and the courage with which its foot-soldiers embraced death in defence of their beliefs. There was no culture of violent martyrdom among neo-Nazis, and he bitterly lamented that. Now, it seems, Breivik has taken a leaf out of the jihadi apologia playbook, claiming that he was radicalised by dangerous material on the internet. While he hasn’t gone the full Shamima Begum, who has explicitly renounced Isis and its ideology, his displacement of responsibility onto the internet closely resembles hers and many others like her.

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It is hard to know if Breivik’s claim that he was radicalised online is sincere. Given that he continues to hold firm to his to neo-Nazi beliefs, it seems doubtful. In fact, I am inclined to believe that it was some private joke aimed at other neo-Nazis to mock liberals who use the self-same explanatory trope to excuse the radicalisation of jihadists.

I also don’t blame Breivik for flagrantly ridiculing his liberal oppressors, as he sees them. In Breivik’s eyes, they are his enemies, and he is a political prisoner. Perhaps the Norwegian authorities should in turn take him seriously and recognise him as such, which would mean refusing him any public stage on which to propagandise his vile beliefs.

Even in liberal Norway tolerance should have it limits — as should the virtue that professes that even the most fanatical and dangerous of murderers should be given a chance to present a case for their release.

As the mother of a son who identifies as part of the transgender community,[1. My son uses the pronouns associated with his sex. I have chosen to remain anonymous to protect his identity.] the prospect of there being an epidemic of trans murders holds an added weight: is my son’s life in danger? Should I be beside myself with worry when he travels to work, let alone when goes out to a gig at a weekend? Suffice it to say that this is not an issue that I can afford to take lightly.

Facts always matter — but they take on a particular importance when they’re being used to claim that your child could be murdered. So I decided to delve into the research used to inform these claims. For me, it was personal.

The Government doesn’t publish data on the number of transgender people in the UK, though in 2018 it “tentatively” estimated that the figure stood between “approximately 200,000-500,000”. What proportion of that number must have been killed to warrant today’s warnings of trans murder epidemic? 10? 100? 1,000?

To find out, I analysed data collected by the trans-led organisation Transgender Europe, which has received more than a million dollars from the Arcus Foundation, who are based in the US and take a keen interest in transgender issues. As well as donating almost $150,000 to Stonewall, in 2015 the Arcus Foundation handed $312,000 to Transgender Europe specifically to supply reliable global data on transgender murders. The website it created provides an interactive map and links to documents naming the transgender victims.

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Looking at Transgender Europe’s list of cases, it became clear — to my relief — that  the total murders reported for the United Kingdom since 2008 amounted to 11. This translates as a murder rate of around 0.165%.

Now, that is still significantly higher than the murder rate for the UK as a whole: the ONS reports that the homicide rate in the UK for the year ending March 2020 was 11.7 per million people, rising to 17 per million among men. But look a bit closer at the list of trans murder victims, and that figure of 11 becomes increasingly suspect.

For instance, two of the listed victims, Vikki Thompson and Jacqueline Cowdry, appear to have been erroneously included. Thompson died by suicide while incarcerated in HMP Leeds, while Cowdry’s death was ultimately ruled as non-suspicious. This reduces the total to nine unlawful deaths, all of whom were born male. (By contrast, the number of homicides committed by transgender people between 2008 and 2017 was 12.) For context, the number of women killed by men during the same period was 1800. So much for our alleged “cis-privilege”.

Searching for more information led me to the work of Karen Ingala-Smith, who founded the Counting Dead Women project in 2012 after she realised that there was no central record of the extent of femicide here in the UK; thanks to her, a list of murdered women is read out in the House of Commons each year to imprint the rate of femicide on the minds our political class. Ingala-Smith’s tireless work focusses on female victims of, predominantly, male violence, though she made an exception to highlight the discrepancy between the mass hysteria about transgender victims of homicide compared to the treatment of woman-killing as mere background noise. (There is still no equivalent to the Trans Day of Remembrance for the much greater number of women killed by male violence.)

Crucially, her research sheds a vital spotlight on the nine remaining victims identified by the Trans Murder Monitoring report. Reading it, two things become clear. The first is that it is not entirely certain that all the victims themselves identified with the label “transgender”. The second is that the motives behind these crimes are more complex than straightforward “transphobia”.

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Three of the nine victims were murdered by a violent punter while working as prostitutes; another was killed by their husband, who lived on her earnings from prostitution. Another of the victims died at the hands of someone who was also trans-identifying. Another was a gay man who cross-dressed occasionally, and the motive for the murder has been ascribed to both transphobia and homophobia. Two of the murders were linked to drug use.

In other words, despite the way their deaths are often framed in the media and by activists, the large majority of these trans victims were not killed simply for being trans. Almost half appear to involve prostitution — a fact that has been quietly brushed under the carpet.

Nor is this wilful misunderstanding confined to the UK: according to global statistics, 58% of transgender murder victims were born male and work in prostitution. It seems remarkable, then, that “Trans women are women” and “Sex work is work” remain two of the most heavily promoted mantras in trans-activist circles. Indeed, a number of role models in the trans community go as far to claim that it was only because of prostitution that they were able to afford their treatment and surgeries.

Take, for example, trans activist Janet Mock, who has described how the “sex trade becomes a road well-travelled, helping trans women alleviate financial woes while also making many of us feel desired as women”. To be fair to Mock, she has also spoken publicly about the dangers of engaging in prostitution, emphasising the impacts of economic coercion, sexual abuse and trafficking on the trans community. She has also highlighted how prostitution is heavily racialised, with black and Latino communities making up a disproportionate number of transgender “sex workers”.

For reasons of sexual politics, I do not use the phrase “sex work” on the basis that the inside of our bodies, be they male or female, is not a legitimate place of work. That isn’t to say that I believe we should reprimand former prostitutes, or those still engaged in prostitution, for using this phrase. I know of former prostituted women who say this description was a survival strategy and allowed them to distance themselves from their experience.

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But that doesn’t make the phrase helpful — especially when used to describe transgender people. In recent years, the fetishisation of the transgender body has come increasingly into focus: PornHub’s annual report for 2021 — yes, they do an annual report! — showed there had been a 126% increase for porn searches using “trans”. There is clearly a “market” for trans-identified sex acts; and paired with the vulnerability of trans people to violence and murder while engaged in prostitution, the association of trans activism with “sex work” becomes even more dangerous.

Presented in this light, it seems obvious to me that we need to rethink the accepted narrative around transgender murder rates, regurgitated with monotonous regularity by both politicians and the media. For example, rather than holding vigils, those concerned with the tragic deaths of transgender people would do better to watch The Sex Map of Britain, a BBC documentary that follows two young men who were both homosexual and rejected by their family. In one of the most heart-breaking scenes, Mia, now a transgender escort, is brought to tears when talking about maternal rejection for the crime of being gay. Later Mia seeks reassurance from a client that they enjoy each other’s company. The punter answers that he does not want to cause offence, but he is only there because of the sex on offer. In another scene, Mia talks about hoping to find love in sex filmed for pornography.

It pains me to say it, but I see my son in Mia, and of one thing I am certain: looking for love, validation and self-worth in porn and prostitution won’t help him. Likewise, pretending that there’s a trans murder epidemic, when incidents are isolated and largely confined to prostitution, is equally unhelpful and even dangerous — not just to people like my son, but to the women whose murders are quietly forgotten in favour of performative headlines about an ‘epidemic’ that doesn’t exist.

But taking the lethal option was almost as undesired by the perpetrator as the victim. Murder has a way of redoubling the authorities’ efforts; and besides, dead men can’t pay kickbacks.

Today’s bad guy, however, leaves nothing to chance. The tripartite of gangsterism, terrorism and militarism has become a crowded market, and the art of intimidation has given way to the credo of shoot-first-don’t-even-bother-asking-questions-later.

I’ve seen this callous disregard for human life, and the blurred lines between crime, politics, warfare and “legitimate targets” in countries ranging from war-torn Sierra Leone to South Africa. But nowhere is it more abundant than in Mexico: the narco-capital of the world, a place where ingenious methods of drug trafficking and murder go hand in bloody hand.

To gauge what a typical Mexican crime reporter’s beat reads like, here’s the introduction to a recent report from Albinson Linares of current affairs show, Noticias Telemundo:

“The corpses of three people, dismembered and burned, were found in bags in Abasolo, in the state of Guanajuato, on Sept. 2. Three days later, a trans woman was murdered in the same state, and the body of a man, burned and tortured, was found hanging from a tree in Coacalco state. On Sept. 7, more than 300 migrants who had been kidnapped were rescued in Aguascalientes, and on Sept. 19, an entire family in Chihuahua was killed and an explosive package in Guanajuato caused the deaths of two men.”

And that’s a tiny sample of the 438 “acts of extreme violence” registered in Mexico that month. In this sense, then, daily life in Mexico is not a million miles away from the corrupt, ultra-violent, narco-state image of the country that Netflix has successfully cultivated via multiple documentaries, movies, series and “dope operas”.  The latest, and greatest, incarnation in the streaming service’s drug dramas is season three of Narcos: Mexico — a show notorious for its “brutal” executions and murder.

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But the truth is that, if anything, these shows actually downplay the violence of cartels. In Narcos, when someone gets whacked they’re dispatched like a third-rate nobody. A bit of blood splatter; a groan; next. In the real world, people who fall foul of the cartels get taken out in the most macabre of fashions: in one execution video allegedly released by the La Familia Michoacán drug cartel, a pit bull rips the man’s testicles off in full view of the camera. It’s horrific, gruesome, and in keeping with the cartels’ sadistic rule of law.

“These videos emerged in Mexico way back in late 2005, with the first one supposedly coming out of Acapulco,” says British journalist, Ioan Grillo, who left Britain for Mexico 20 years ago and is the bestselling author of El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. “It showed the interrogation of a gang member who was strapped to a chair. At the end of the video someone puts a gun to his head and blows his brains out. Literally. That video wasn’t posted on the internet in the same way that videos are today, because at that time it wasn’t as easy to post videos online. It actually turned up on a VHS tape and was given to a regional newspaper in the United States before making its way to the Dallas Morning News newspaper and then onto Mexican TV. They didn’t show the video in its entirety, but that was arguably the start of it all.”

According to Grillo, the cartels got the bright idea of shooting VHS videos of their murderous activities, and disseminating them via American and Mexican mainstream media, from watching al-Qaeda’s beheading videos of Westerners in the early 2000s. After one Mexican news programme ran the unexpurgated version of an American contractor’s beheading by the terrorist group in 2003, the cartels registered the hype it generated, and a new narco-propaganda tool was born.

Ever since, an endless stream of filmed ‘media-friendly’ atrocities and ultra-violent stunts have been employed by various warring cartels, including the rolling of five decapitated heads onto a crowded dance floor in Michoacán in 2006 by masked gunmen and the discovery of a box containing a football with a man’s face sewn onto it in a Sinaloa street in 2010 as a threat to the Juarez drug cartel. Inside the box was the message: “Happy New Year, because this will be your last.” The victim, Hugo Hernandez, was found chopped up into seven pieces.

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Yet decapitations have become so routine that, as Grillo says, they’re barely newsworthy anymore. So to up the propaganda and aesthetic stakes, the likes of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel records videos to spread on Facebook and Instragram. They usually show a phalanx of military vehicles and cartel members posing in tactical gear with assault weapons and, as Grillo notes, “sometimes torturing and executing enemy cartel members”.

While YouTube had been an unwitting early adopter of cartel snuff videos, and the jihadist executions that had inspired them, its $1.6 billion acquisition in 2006 by Google soon put paid to all that. The drug lords’ propaganda activities retreated into the shadowy recesses of the Internet and onto ‘dark social’ platforms and encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp, which contain no digital referral information about source material and thus make it nigh on impossible for law enforcement to track a video’s origins.

With decapitation fatigue setting in among Mexico’s informational gatekeepers, and the Western mainstream media having little or no interest in Latin American current affairs, dark social has given the cartels, with the help of a new breed of ‘citizen journalists’ and the pervasive use of mobile technology, the opportunity to spread its propaganda. Websites such as Blog del Narco have become aggregators and repositories for the worst of Mexico’s violent drug war, disseminating information the mainstream media and political establishment choose to ignore due to cynicism or boredom.

From these blogs — and increasingly their associated Twitter and Instagram accounts — a sort of narco-chic has evolved, spanning everything from music to fashion to ‘slanguage’. Like the criminal milieu of West Coast gangs and their symbiotic relationship with gangsta rap in the Nineties, or the petty New Jersey mafiosi who got their dress codes from The Sopranos in the early noughties, the narcotariat is seeping into mainstream culture thanks the nexus between Narcos and traditional-cum-trendy drug culture.

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And so at one end of the spectrum we have narcocorridos, or drug ballads, about the exploits of drug traffickers, sicarios (cartel hitmen), their lovers or even mass murders. And at the other we have buchonas: the cosmetically enhanced, Kardashian-esque girlfriends of flashy cartel players whose style has become something of a social media phenomenon. Just look at Jenny69, one of the more visible ambassadors of buchona culture despite being from California, who has racked up more than two million followers on Instagram.

No doubt we’ll learn about these developments in Netflix’s next outing in Mexico. But just as journalists have to wrestle with cartels exploiting us as useful idiots in a trade-off between proper news and propaganda, so documentary and film producers must contend with the costs of glamorising one of the most dangerous criminal underworlds on the planet.

In 2017, Narcos producer Carlos Muñoz Porta was shot dead while location-scouting in Temascalapa, north of Mexico City. To date, no one has been brought to justice for the murder. We will probably never know whether it was cartel-inspired or just another random act of violence. Either way, it seems guaranteed that the blurry line in Mexico between art and reality will continue to be crossed for many more seasons to come.

He went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August to protect property during a Black Lives Matter protest after widespread arson and vandalism the night before. He ended up shooting three men that night, killing two, in what he claimed were acts of self-defence. All of the shootings were captured on video, some from multiple angles. He tried to retreat from everyone he shot that night, resorting to deadly force only when he was cornered, physically attacked, or threatened with a gun. At no point did he continue shooting after ending the immediate threat.

Although prosecutors attempted to argue that, merely by being present with a gun, Rittenhouse, now 18, had “provoked” the protesters, they were unable to provide any convincing evidence that Rittenhouse had done anything to threaten anyone or initiate conflict in any way. The defence, by contrast, was able to show that Rittenhouse, far from picking fights, attempted throughout the night to avoid or defuse conflicts with protesters.

The trial confirmed that the real villain of the night was the first man Rittenhouse shot, 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum. This was the most important shooting, because it set in motion the events that led a crowd to assault a fleeing Rittenhouse, allegedly in the belief that he was an “active shooter”, and which led to Rittenhouse shooting and killing Anthony Huber, who was attacking him with a skateboard, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, who advanced on Rittenhouse with a drawn pistol.

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Rosenbaum, a convicted child-rapist and domestic abuser, had no connection to the protesters. He was a disturbed man who had been released from a psychiatric ward earlier in the day and who, according to video evidence and multiple eyewitness testimony, had been belligerent and threatening all night.

According to both Rittenhouse and one of his companions, the Army veteran Ryan Balch, Rosenbaum told members of their group: “If I catch any of you guys alone tonight, I’m going to fucking kill you.” Later in the evening, he found Rittenhouse alone and began chasing him across a parking lot. After first attempting to run away, Rittenhouse wheeled around and shot the advancing Rosenbaum. The closest eyewitness to the shooting testified that as Rosenbaum approached the defendant, he yelled “fuck you!” and lunged for the barrel of Rittenhouse’s gun. The other main clarification at trial came from Grosskreutz, who admitted that Rittenhouse only shot him after he pointed his own gun at the teenager.

Many of the initial media reports that painted Rittenhouse in a sinister light turned out to be false — for instance, Grosskreutz’s claim, which he repeated in multiple interviews, that he had been shot with his hands up in a position of surrender. Rittenhouse did, as was reported early on, “cross state lines” to get to the protest, but only from Antioch, Illinois, a border town that is a suburb of Kenosha, which is where Rittenhouse worked and where many of his family live. He did not transport the gun across the border, and although it is legally murky whether he was allowed to be carrying it — he was 17 at the time — the judge threw out the charge because of ambiguities in the law.

Yes, he was a supporter of Trump and Blue Lives Matter, but there is no evidence that he was a “white supremacist,” as alleged by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, or a “domestic terrorist,” as alleged by Pressley and Ilhan Omar. He was not a member of any militia group, despite the misguided representations of his initial defence team. He was not out “hunting” anyone.

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The most damning evidence against him, which was not admitted at trial, was a video from a few weeks prior in which he joked about shooting looters. But again, there was no credible evidence that he initiated or escalated conflict with anyone that night. He lied about being an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), when in fact he had only received CPR training, but this was hardly relevant to the shootings. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been there, but the same was true of nearly everyone there that night. They were all defying a curfew. Many of the protesters were also from out of town. Some, like Grosskreutz, were also carrying illegal guns.

From the beginning, the case against Rittenhouse relied on obfuscating the actual events of the night in favour of mythmaking: easily debunked misinformation, moral and emotional appeals to the justice of the protester’s cause, the racial identity and political sympathies of Rittenhouse, the far-Right politics of some of his most vocal supporters, rhetorical flights against “white male tears” or “fascism”, and arguments about the United States’s gun laws or the biases of its criminal justice system. One index of the confusion surrounding the case is the number of Twitter users who appear to have only recently learned that Rittenhouse’s assailants were white.

Indeed, even on the Left, those reporting on the case or following it closely have tended to conclude that Rittenhouse was not the monster he was initially painted as. Long pieces in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, while drawing attention to the extremism of some of the militia members who showed up to protests, to the general atmosphere of chaos, violence, and racial tension that summer, and to the role of Right-wing media in stoking outrage over rioting and property destruction, concluded that Rittenhouse himself was more or less a foolish kid with conventional politics who got in over his head. Last week, Ryan Grim of The Intercept tweeted: “People should be prepared for Rittenhouse to be acquitted on all the major charges”.

Emotional reactions, not to say irresponsible tantrums, are to be expected after a divisive trial such as this one. Commentators on both sides will say stupid things, and there will be no shortage of people on Twitter making triumphant racist memes about Rittenhouse or declaring that the verdict gives licence to MAGA wingnuts to hunt down liberals and shoot them for sport. Today, nearly every national issue in the United States is what the blogger Scott Alexander has called a “scissor” issue — one that is not merely divisive but in which the opposing sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality. The Rittenhouse verdict is no different, even if in this case, unlike in the Brett Kavanaugh or Covington Catholic controversies, we can know with reasonable certainty what actually happened.

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What happens next will be a litmus test for the country. Despite the uncertainties inherent in jury trials, the two main trials to come out of last summer’s unrest, this one and the murder trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, reached the correct verdict, though this is cold comfort in a country where the two main factions are defined by their mutual mistrust and loathing. Already, Republicans have begun pouring salt into the wound, and it looks as if the verdict will cement Rittenhouse’s reputation as a conservative folk hero — an innocent man smeared by corrupt politicians, a partisan media, and biased Big Tech companies.

Democrats, meanwhile, are convinced against all evidence that a cold-blooded murderer has been set free due to the colour of his skin, with leading politicians declaring the verdict a “miscarriage of justice” and asking the Justice Department to pursue what could only be described as a political prosecution of the Wisconsin teen. These are signs that the scars opened over the past few years will not be quick to heal.

Yet some on the Left have already begun to signal that things got out of hand last summer. They are admitting, for instance, that “defund the police” was a stupid and politically toxic idea, that riots and arson lead predictably to violent chaos and should therefore be discouraged rather than cheered, and that some of the police shootings that initially sparked outrage — including the one that set off the riots in Kenosha — were based on initial reporting that, had it come from Fox News or the Right-wing Twittersphere, would have been clearly labelled as disinformation.

Many of these things were obvious at the time, and it can be frustrating now to observe those who only found the courage to say the obvious after Joe Biden won the presidency. But it is better than the alternative, which is to continue denying the reality in front of their faces. In this case, the reality is that Rittenhouse was found innocent of murder, and correctly so. Biden, to his credit, has already stated that “the jury system works and we have to abide by it”. One hopes that his allies will listen. To refuse to do so is only to court more tragedies.

And nowhere does this sort of reconfiguration stand a better chance of success than in Atlanta, where an organised and well-funded group of residents is pushing for Buckhead, the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood, to break away from the de facto capital of the South and form a municipality of its own. But while ‘Buckxit’ may be a local campaign to create a city of just 80,000 residents, it also goes to the heart of the challenges facing cities — and the Democrats who run them — across America.

In Buckhead, as in so many places across the country, calls for secession are being driven by one factor: crime. “We feel like we’re living in a war zone,” says Bill White, who is running the campaign. White says the problem has driven many Buckhead residents out of town. “They’re not leaving because of the potholes,” he tells me. “It’s crime, crime, crime.”

Atlanta is one of the many major American cities that has seen violent crime spike in recent years. Between 2019 and 2020, the city’s murder rate rose by 62%. The problem has worsened further this year; as of June, the city’s homicide rate was up by another 58%, while in the first half of 2021, shootings rose by 40%. Meanwhile, the number of arrests has nearly halved. The city’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, once a rising star in the Democratic Party who was even talked about as a possible Vice-Presidential pick for Joe Biden, has been chastened by the crime explosion on her watch and is not seeking re-election.

Were Buckhead to go its own way, it would take with it a fifth of Atlanta’s current population and threaten to do real damage to the city’s finances. According to one estimate, Atlanta would lose 38% of its tax revenue were it to gain city status. David Sjoquist, Professor of Economics at Georgia State University and an expert of public finances, predicts grave fiscal consequences from Buckxit, as well as a tangle of lawsuits over a move that is without precedent; no neighbourhood in Georgia has ever broken off to form its own city. “Atlanta would be much worse off,” he tells me.

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Buckxit, then, has the potential to be fiscally ruinous for a major American city. And Atlanta’s political and business elite are firmly opposed. Bottoms argues that Buckxit would not solve the city’s problems: “Even if an impermeable wall were built around this proposed new city, it would not address the Covid crime wave that Atlanta, the state and the rest of the nation are experiencing,” read one recent statement. “That is why the measure is opposed by many residents and the business community. A better use of this energy would be to work together to address the challenges facing our city, not divide Atlanta.” Every candidate in the crowded field to replace Bottoms agrees.

White, unsurprisingly, paints a rosier picture of a world after Buckxit — both for Buckhead residents and the rest of Atlanta. Much like a Brexiteer shrugging off “Project Fear”, he is dismissive of a political system that he says has become a “cesspool of corruption”. Under a plan put forward by Buckxit campaigners, an independent Buckhead would more than triple police numbers in the area, from 80 to 250, and ensure Buckhead City police were better paid than any other cops in the state. (Atlanta’s police force saw 200 officers retire last year.)

As for the rest of the city, White argues that a safer more prosperous Buckhead is in the interests of the metro area more generally, and would bring more jobs to the city. “If we get this right, we can be a wonderful example,” he says.

But White’s cheery win-win predictions are hard to square with the fiscal reality of a city losing such a huge part of its tax base. And, ultimately, White is open about the fact that he is first and foremost interested in the fate of his community, not the rest of the city. “You know,” White adds, “we’re not doing this to be an example for anybody. We’re doing it because we’re fighting for our lives.”

There are signs that White’s message is resonating. The campaign has so far raised a million dollars and an Atlanta Constitution-Journal/University of Georgia poll recently found that 54% of Buckhead voters support cityhood. Surveys commissioned by the campaign for cityhood also find a stronger majority in favour.

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By Oliver Wiseman

The man driving the Buckxit train is a colourful newcomer to the Atlanta scene with an unusual political story and a talent for fundraising. Until recently, White, 53, was a fixture on the New York Democratic scene. In 2016, he and his husband Brian Eure were devoted Hillary Clinton supporters, raising money for the Democratic candidate and hosting a $39,500-a-head fundraising dinner in their Chelsea townhouse with Barack Obama as the guest of honour. But since then, White, who relocated from New York to Atlanta three years ago, has been on a journey from Manhattan liberal to MAGA enthusiast.

He admits his flip-flopping has led to accusations of him being “a political whore”. He and his husband have been some of Donald Trump’s most vocal gay supporters and are close to the Trump family. They were reportedly at the White House on election night, and White spent the ensuing weeks lending his voice to the outgoing President’s efforts to overturn the result. (White has subsequently denounced the January 6 Capitol Riot and seems focused on the Buckhead campaign, but his political leanings hardly help his claim that the cityhood effort transcends party politics.)

Notwithstanding White’s politics, “Buckxit” maps awkwardly onto conventional political divides. The upmarket enclave may be the most Republican part of Atlanta, but that’s not saying much. In fact, swings in white affluent Atlanta suburbs such as Buckhead were crucial to Biden’s narrow win in Georgia last year; according to Atlanta Constituion-Journal analysis of the election results, 60% of Buckhead voters opted for Biden in 2020, and 51% backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. “We have people from the Left, from the middle, from the Right,” says White. “We have Biden people, Trump people, people who hate Trump, people who hate Biden. We have environmentalists, we have everyone.”

Buckxit’s critics also point to Atlanta’s racial politics — though this time as a cause for concern. Atlanta as a whole is 51% black, while 82% of Buckhead residents are white. Jim Durnett, CEO of the Buckhead Coalition, a group opposed to cityhood, argues that while he “[doesn’t] believe race is motivating the movement to create a new Buckhead City”, the “racial implications” of Buckxit will be obvious. “Drawing on Atlanta’s rich history of the civil rights movement, we are clearly best when we come together during times of challenge, not when we separate.”

White, however, has little interest in engaging with the possibility that his campaign drives a wedge between Atlanta’s white and black neighbourhoods. Race, he says, is the “go-to narrative” to cancel your idea. “What are your solutions as opposed to saying, ‘This is racist’?” he asks of his campaign’s critics.

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By Batya Ungar-Sargon

The mechanics of securing popular support for Buckxit are reasonably straightforward. A bill needs to be passed in Georgia’s general assembly and state senate. Both are Republican-held and legislators will presumably be eager to stick it to the opposing party’s city stronghold. Votes on those bills will take place early next year and, if they pass, Buckhead residents will get a say on cityhood in November 2023. White claims that by spring 2023, a mayor and city council could be up and running, spending taxpayers’ money. A slew of complicated rows about settling debts with Atlanta and securing contracts to secure utilities from the city would follow.

But regardless of whether Buckxit becomes a reality, the campaign for cityhood should at the very least be a warning shot across the bows of Atlanta and other American cities, where comparable neighbourhoods might be tempted to try something similar. The success of a modern metropolis depends on persistent vigilance against the threat of crime, public disorder and economic decline. In a year of plague, shutdowns, protests, riots and a violent crime spike, too often political posturing has been prioritised over making sure cities work for all their residents.

For White, though, Buckxit is more than a warning. “The divorce should be something that both sides strive to make smooth, because it’s definitely happening,” he says. “At the moment, barring a lightning bolt or the second coming of Jesus Christ, the writing’s on the wall.”

What’s even more appalling is that Couzens had apparently committed indecent exposure twice: once in 2015 and once three days before Everard’s murder.

Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said in an unfortunate phrase a few months ago that there is the occasional “bad ‘un” in the service. She did go on to say that they are “intolerant” of violence and that they “​​work to identify and tackle and prevent any such behaviours”. But the impression was given that the occasional bad ‘un is an inevitable part of the institution.

It appears to be rather more than one, for the record. Apparently, 27 serving Metropolitan Police officers have been convicted of sex crimes since 2016. At least one is still on the force as an unpaid special constable, having joined the Met after his conviction for indecent exposure. (A simple criminal conviction does not automatically bar you from joining the police.) Another Met officer, who worked in the same unit as Couzens, is facing rape charges this week.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Metropolitan Police has been accused of institutional misogyny — and of needing drastic reform. In the wake of an awful story, there is an understandable, human need to want to make sure it never happens again. Specifically, we feel the police should, of all professions, be the one without a single “bad ‘un”.

But it’s also worth remembering that, in the coming years or decades, no matter how well we vet police officers, you’ll read some horrible story like this again. Hopefully we can reduce the likelihood; perhaps even reduce it a lot. But the numbers involved are just too large for it to be realistic that we can bring it to zero. So we need to have some idea – with this, and with every movement campaigning for some social good, from public health to racial justice – of what success looks like. And if we want to aim for zero, then we have to be honest about what the costs of that aim are.

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Here’s why I think it will be difficult to reach zero: the numbers. About 120,000 sexual offences were recorded in England and Wales in 2017, of which 40,000 were rapes. That’s a huge undercount of the actual figure committed (the Crime Survey of England and Wales estimates the true figure at four million), but let’s use it.

Presumably some of those 120,000 were committed by the same people — there probably weren’t 120,000 recorded perpetrators — but even if we half that number, we still end up at about 0.1% of the entire population of England and Wales recorded as committing a sex crime each year.

Let’s take that 0.1%, and pretend that the whole population is equally likely to commit sex crimes. There are about 160,000 police officers in the UK. That means that if police officers commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population, you would expect about 160 sex offences committed by police officers every year.

I sincerely hope that police officers don’t commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population. But even if they only do it 1% as often, you would still expect one or two every year; easily enough to fill newspapers with appalling stories. At those rates, you’d expect even rarer crimes such as rape and murder once every few years.

So let’s return to the question: what does success look like?

This is a difficult conversation for any reforming movement.Because there are costs that come with demanding too perfect a victory.

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By Sarah Ditum

Take a topical example: Zero Covid. You can say what you like about the movement’s aims, but at least it was explicit about them: it called for the “elimination of the virus from the UK”. If there’s still a single case of Covid in your country, you have not achieved Zero Covid, and you keep trying until you have.

New Zealand was always the Zero Covid paragon, along with Australia and Hong Kong and a few other places. As recently as August, a single Auckland case that couldn’t be traced to a point of origin led to a several-week lockdown. But this week, the Wellington government formally abandoned its policy of eliminating Covid, and moved to a plan to live with the virus (albeit, no doubt, at a much lower level of the virus than we have to live with). The costs of maintaining Zero Covid in the face of the Delta variant — and the reduced threat of the virus itself, given the vaccines — led them to decide that going for absolute zero wasn’t the best policy anymore.

In the UK, we have decided that a certain mortality rate is acceptable. Professor Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said recently that “living with the virus” will probably mean about 100 deaths a day, or more than 30,000 a year. It’s a grim thought, but we have to be clear-eyed and say that the elimination of risk is probably impossible, so we have to tolerate some level of it.

But when it comes to violence against women and girls, what is an acceptable number of murders every year? It’s an appalling question, but it’s one we have to ask, just as we had to with Covid. And it’s worth stopping at this point and asking whether you know how many women are murdered each year right now. Give a figure, in numbers per 100,000 per year. And then say how many you think is acceptable, again in numbers per 100,000 per year: 10 per 100,000, one in 100,000, 0.1 per 100,000?

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Here’s the real figure: according to the ONS, there has been an average of about 200 women and girls murdered each year in England and Wales for the last 10 years. Out of a population of about 31 million, that is a little under 0.7 women per 100,000 per year.

To be clear: I’m not saying that’s acceptable. But if you’d just said that you thought about one woman in every 100,000 was killed every year, and you wouldn’t rest until the murder rate was below one in 100,000, then we’re already below that.

If you said one in a million, then we’ve still got some way to go. But soon you’re going to start hitting up against some really hard limits. According to the World Bank, only two countries in the world recorded 0.1 murders per 100,000 female population (that is, one in a million) in their most recent data, and those two countries were Oman and the Palestinian territories, which makes me think that the data might not be entirely reliable.

Other countries manage 0.3 per 100,000: Singapore, Japan, Macao, Norway, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But most of the countries we tend to think of as our peers — France, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Canada — have roughly similar numbers. Getting the numbers much below that seems to be very difficult.

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You could argue that it does no harm to aim for zero, even if you know you won’t get there. But it’s not as simple as that. Reducing some societal harm costs money and time, and at some point, you’re going to hit diminishing returns. You’ll have to spend ever more resources for smaller and smaller improvements.

Maybe you’d say that you can’t put a price on a human life, and that’s understandable. But the reality in which we all live puts a price on human lives for you, via opportunity costs. If you spend the money on street lighting, you can’t spend it on dialysis machines, or early years education, or renewable energy subsidies. At some stage, because of diminishing returns, you’ll reach a point where spending more money on reducing murder rates means that more people die (or more people are harmed) elsewhere.

Whatever social problem you’re talking about fixing — obesity, police brutality, inactivity, racist abuse — we need to be explicit about whether we’re aiming for zero, and facing up to all the costs that will come with, or admit that you’re really aiming for some more achievable (but more painful to accept) figure.

When it comes to police reforms, there are all sorts of trade-offs to consider. One obvious reform, for instance, might be to impose stricter rules on recruitment — such as that no one with any criminal record at all can be a police officer. But I imagine that would hinder the efforts to increase the number of non-white police recruits, since young men of colour are the most likely to have criminal records. How much it would hinder them I don’t know, and perhaps the trade-off would be worth it, but you need to start by acknowledging the trade-off.

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Who would kill children to save the planet?

By Tom Chivers

I’m really, really not saying there’s nothing that can be done. Couzens turned up to a police work party with a sex worker, and his colleagues “jokingly” called him “the Rapist”. There is something wrong with a culture that allows that, and there are clear failures on the part of the police in investigating his earlier offences.

Most importantly, we need better data on how many police officers do commit crimes, so that we can get a sense of whether they’re more or less than we would expect. Profoundly affecting though they are, policymakers can’t make these decisions on the back of high-profile anecdotes and shocking individual stories.

Any group made up of thousands of people, such as the police force, will include some number of dreadful individuals, however hard you try to keep them out. And every so often, a dreadful person will do something dreadful.

Sophie loved going to the gym — “boot camp” classes were her favourite — and working with horses. But most of all, she loved her two sons, who were just five and six-years-old when she was killed by Sam Pybus, her occasional sexual partner, in February this year.

Last week, Pybus was sentenced to just four years and eight months in prison after admitting manslaughter. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was ultimately convinced by his claim that Sophie had enjoyed rough sex and regularly asked him to choke her, and chose not to test the evidence in front of a jury at a murder trial.

At Teesside Crown Court, Judge Paul Watson QC accepted that Sophie was extremely physically and emotionally vulnerable. According to Parkington, she developed postnatal depression and sank into mental illness and alcohol abuse. By 2018, the couple had split; the boys continued living with their father, while Sophie moved to her own flat a short distance away. Parkington remained one of her few sources of support and would regularly visit, taking her food and checking on her.

Sophie, who was 33 when she was killed, lived in my hometown of Darlington. Over the past week, I have spoken to several people who knew her — many of whom admitted that she was frequently sexually exploited by men for alcohol.

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There is no suggestion that one of them was Pybus, who was married but had been having occasional sex with Sophie over a three-year period. What we do know, though, is that one night in February, he waited until his wife was asleep and then made his way to Sophie’s house, having drunk 24 bottles of lager over the previous ten hours.

Pybus told police that when he woke to find Sophie unconscious, he left the flat and sat in his car for fifteen minutes while “deciding what to do”. He did not attempt to resuscitate her or call an ambulance. The hospital was a short distance away — nearer to the flat than the police station that Pybus eventually drove to in order to hand himself in. The CPS stated that evidence was then gathered from a former boyfriend of Sophie who confirmed that she enjoyed being choked during sex. This witness has not been named, and the evidence was not tested in court.

But that was just one in a series of disturbing developments in this tragic case. Last year, following a campaign from the feminist group We Can’t Consent To This, the 2020 Domestic Abuse Bill outlined how the “rough sex gone wrong” defence would no longer be permissible as a mitigation to murder. After all, the “50 Shades of Grey” defence, as it is known, quite literally blames the victim for her own death. It is also unclear how a court can determine whether violence during sex is actually consensual.

So how did Pybus evade a trial on the basis that Sophie Moss consented to being choked?

In court, Pybus said the sex was “consensual”, but admitted he had little recollection of how Sophie died. Pybus eventually conceded he must have strangled her during sex because his hands were hurting.

Why his account of events was not put before a jury is perplexing. Since setting up Justice for Women (JfW) in 1990 to advocate on behalf of women who killed violent men, I cannot recall a single case in which the CPS decided to accept a plea of manslaughter and bypass a murder trial, despite there being overwhelming evidence of abuse perpetrated by the deceased towards the defendant.

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By Kat Rosenfield

The case of Emma-Jayne Magson is just one example of the legal double standards when it comes to such cases. In 2016, Magson stabbed her partner James Knight after he attacked her and attempted to strangle her. There was a known history of domestic violence perpetrated by Knight towards Magson; on the night he died, Knight was captured on CCTV pushing Magson into the road.

She had also grown up witnessing horrific domestic violence which led to mental health problems in later life. But during the murder trial, there was no mention of any of this. Despite an appeal, Magson was sentenced to life with a minimum term of seventeen years.

Then there is the case of Farieissia Martin, who was 22 when she was sentenced to a minimum of 13 years in prison for the murder of Kyle Farrell in 2015. Martin, who had two small children with Farrell, had grabbed a knife when he tried to strangle her. Farrell’s history of violence had left Martin in fear for her life, but she was too frightened to call the police in case social services intervened and took away her children. During the trial, Farrell’s violent behaviour was inadequately explored — and Martin was convicted.

All of which raises an uncomfortable question: Why do men who kill women have it easier than women who kill men? Why is misogyny allowed to rule the criminal justice system?

In April this year, strangulation was made a specific offence in recognition of the potential for serious injuries and death. But despite this — and the abolition of the “rough sex” defence — the CPS gave Pybus the benefit of the doubt and accepted his plea to manslaughter.

“What this man did is abhorrent,” says Fiona McKenzie of We Can’t Consent To This. “There is no justice in the court’s apparent acceptance that it was violence Sophie consented to, so not really serious violence at all.” She thinks it is “absolutely right” that the Attorney General is considering whether the conviction should be referred to the appeal court as an unduly lenient sentence. “Pybus’s defence recasts sustained violence on a vulnerable woman as violence that she had asked for, that she knew the risks of and as a fatal situation she really had herself to blame for,” McKenzie tells me.

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As someone who has spent years campaigning against male violence, I am shocked but not surprised at the sympathy given to some men by the judicial system while women who should be treated leniently have the book thrown at them. The horrendous irony is that had Pybus knocked Moss over when he drove to her home, he could have been given a longer sentence: the average jail time for careless driving is 4 years, 8.5 months. (And no doubt the sentence would have been longer: Pybus drove to the police station while still drunk.)

It took Parkington several weeks after Moss died to tell their sons they would never see her again. “I sat them down and told him that mummy was poorly and in hospital but that the doctors couldn’t do anything more to help her,” he tells me, distraught. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

In the meantime, Pybus could serve as little as half of his sentence — just two years and 4 months if he keeps his nose clean in prison, meaning he would be out before his 35^th birthday.

What message does this send to abusive men? One that is loud and clear: that compared to men, some women’s lives are worth very little indeed.

In the days since, much of the coverage given to the attack — both in the UK and abroad — has focused on the new type of terrorist threat posed by “incels”, or involuntary celibates. The police, for now, have ruled out terrorism and links to far-Right groups as motives for Davison’s actions; what drove him to such violence remains unclear and the investigation is ongoing.

And yet, at least in the way much of the media has covered this tragedy, the matter is all but settled: Davison was an incel, another young man driven to violence by a nefarious online movement that breeds terrorists.

But as someone who has spent years researching incels, such assuredness leaves me uncomfortable. Though the language changes from one news outlet to another, their reports are all essentially the same: “Plymouth shooter was a product of a violent, misogynistic ‘incel’ subculture.” The pieces tend to include quotations from former or current government officials, or experts in terrorism or gender-based violence who explain the danger facing our communities when thousands of young boys are radicalised online, just like Jake Davison.

The source of all this speculation is Davison’s digital footprint, the collage of his social media presence, including a now-deleted YouTube channel and a now-suspended Reddit account that chronicles a long history of isolation and self-doubt. He was a frequent poster in various Reddit communities, known as “subs”. Some were popular with incels; a few were “photo-rating subs”, where users are encouraged to rate each other’s appearances.

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Interestingly, despite the certainty of many who have described him as an “incel”, Davison was also active on an anti-Incel “watchdog” sub, and two others dedicated to debunking the tenets of the incel ideology known as the “Black Pill”.

Of course, these things are never black and white. Davison certainly talked like an incel, using their terminology  and citing concepts from evolutionary psychology popular in “black pilled” circles. He uploaded a number of confessional-style video bogs lamenting his lost youth and his inability to lose weight, as well as the crippling insecurity that prevented him from talking to girls. In one video, he spoke emphatically about why women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance, to be “picky” for reproductive reasons. Just days before the attack, he claimed that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

But most of his videos just showed him lifting weights. In one, entitled “Older vid when I was a bit leaner”, he starts posing to the camera, with an Eminem track blaring in the background.

Still, according to the definition provided by incels themselves — a man unable to form a romantic or sexual relationship despite desiring one — Davison would have met the criteria. He was a virgin at the age of 22, and had never had any kind of a girlfriend.

But Davison himself did not self-identify that way. The one time he mentioned the word in a video, he paused to clarify that he did not include himself among their ranks, but considered them “people like [himself]”. This detail appears to have been lost on much of the media — as have Davison’s broader criticisms of the incel movement.

Three months ago, he described on a Reddit thread how much of the misogyny of the incel movement was “just toxic negative bullshit” and explained how he was excited for the end of lockdown, to begin driving lessons and start socialising more. Soon after, he responded to a post in the same subreddit by a depressed 17-year-old, encouraging him to overcome his insecurities, stand up to bullies, and not “let the blackpill or whatever shit you read online drag you down”.

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Davison’s final post to the site, written just two days before the attack, was less optimistic. He explained that he was a loner by nature, something which he used to accept. But now he felt that he should have tried harder. “It’s vital you try your best to integrate with people, fit in and establish a solid social life and develop socially you can’t afford to be a loner as a young person it will only destroy your life,” he wrote. He sounded defeated but introspective, like someone taking accountability for his choices, not “echoing” an ideology.

None of this is to say that Davison wasn’t influenced by, or protective of, the incel community. But does that mean the media is right to ascribe his horrific attack to that relationship? I’m not convinced it’s as clear-cut as that.

Indeed, it’s striking just how inaccurate and irresponsible some of the commentary by self-appointed incel experts has been in recent days. Take the claim, made in the Guardian a day after the tragedy, that incels “actively recruit” young men, recalling the tactics used by extremist groups such as ISIS. I’ve spoken to dozens of incels for my research, and not one of them has suggested this happens. Overwhelmingly, these young men find the content on their own, which isn’t difficult to imagine for young people with internet access.

Most are “lurkers” who do not even interact with other members of the community. They also do not “actively incite” acts of violence, such as an “Incel Uprising” or the “Beta Rebellion,” as has been suggested. Unlike in other groups, who offer the promise of some kind of reward for such actions — the caliphate, the ethnostate, or eternal salvation — there is no common goal that binds incels together or mobilises them toward violence.

That is not to minimise the potentially toxic effect of a fatalistic, misogynistic echo chamber in which misery and failure are celebrated, or to deny the possibility that some very vulnerable individuals with a predisposition toward violence might come across their community and use it to ascribe their vengeance to some greater purpose. The murder of ten people by Elliot Roger in 2014 tragically demonstrated this is possible.

But the coverage thus far has focused on the “incel angle” to the exclusion of everything else, at times even cherry-picking details in a way that feels intellectually dishonest. For if we’re going to look at the case of Jake Davison honestly, we have to look at the whole picture.

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We know that an assault allegation from September of 2020 led police to seize Davison’s firearm and revoke his licence the following December. It was returned just a week before the attack, for reasons that are unknown. The Independent Office of Police Conduct is investigating the decision to do so.

We also know that Davison’s mother, Maxine, and other relatives reportedly “begged police and NHS to help him with mental health problems — he had been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit disorder — though the timeline is unclear. Neighbours have commented that he was “a troubled soul”, who had always been very quiet and close to his mother, but had recently begun to clash with her.

For now, that is all we know about this devastating atrocity and the man who committed it. Yet somehow, armed only with (understandable) indignation and a few hot takes from social media, we seem to have lost sight of the perpetrator behind this awful attack, preferring instead to blame the atrocity on incel culture. In some ways, this is an understandable response to tragedy. It is more comforting, after all, to seize upon a simple explanation — in this case that incel culture is to blame — than accept that the situation is more complex.

But doing so makes it impossible for us to have the more important discussion about how we got here in the first place — and why certain men are drawn to incel culture. What is it about these communities that makes them appealing? Is it our increased isolation and lack of human contact? Or is it, as incels suggest, the fact that they feel marginalised in our current “woke” culture? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but if my research has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t help incels — and, in turn, protect our daughters — until we have that honest conversation.

Around 25 minutes later, during which time a neighbour in pyjamas had trundled her bins out for collection and another had unlocked his bicycle and cycled off, the boys were back. They looked agitated. One of them hid the machete under a car and they walked off. Later, I found out a boy had been seriously wounded half a mile away and taken to hospital. Luckily it had not been fatal.

Some are not so lucky. This year has seen a flurry of street killings of teenagers — one every fortnight in London alone — most often by other teenagers.

Three days into 2021, Olly Stephens was  stabbed in a Reading park. He was 13 years old, as were the girl and one of the boys charged with his murder. The other boy was 14. A few weeks later, Keon Lincoln was stabbed to death in Birmingham, at the age of 15. Two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder. On February 18, Drekwon Patterson, 16, was chased and stabbed to death by a gang of youths in Wembley. On April 23, Fares Maatou, 14, was fatally stabbed in the head with a machete while in his school uniform. He was outside a pizza restaurant in East London, at 4pm. Again, two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder.

The list of children killing children gets longer by the day. Just last week, two teenagers were arrested after a 16-year-old was stabbed to death outside a school in Luton. On Thursday a 17-year-old was killed in Streatham, south London and on Friday, a 15-year old was stabbed to death during the school run in Hayes, west London. A 15-year-old has been charged with his murder.

Yet amid all this bloodshed, little is being done. Since street homicides involving young people started escalating in 2018 — most notably among black, working-class Londoners — politicians and media-minded crime chiefs have given us the usual spiel: it’s drug turf wars, middle-class cocaine snorters, rap music… But while these explanations may sound good, they are wafer-thin on evidence.

The Home Office now has a Serious Violence Strategy, London’s Mayor has a Violent Crime Task Force, and police in many cities have stepped up stop-and-search for weapons. But, just like the last time there was a panic and a clampdown (a decade ago), the deaths keep on coming.  This time, though, the people involved in the killings are getting younger.

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Amid this blood-soaked landscape, youth worker and writer Ciaran Thapar’s new book, Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City, stands out. Thapar is at the front line of this most recent rise in street killings, supporting young people at risk of joining gangs in Brixton, south London. He is immersed in his neighbourhood, where he builds trust and friendships over time, and his book is partly the product of this. Cut Short follows three teenagers and a community centre manager he knows and looks at the knife crime phenomenon from street level, rather than top down.

For the boys he meets and works with, the threat of serious violence looms large from the moment they walk out their front door. A wrong look, a wrong answer, and in a split second they’ll be in a life or death situation. Jhemar, whose older brother is stabbed to death during the course of the book, compares picking up a knife before going out to putting on a pair of shoes. Most kids do not carry knives with the intent to kill; they carry them with the intent to save their own lives.

Territorial feuding is partly to blame for the violence. When one of the boys, Carl, is shot at, it’s because he was “standing in the wrong street”. According to Thapar, the “hyperlocal and ever-shifting” feuds are turbocharged by social media. Shaming, beefs, abuse, rivalry — even the Zombie knives and machetes — are glorified 24/7 on Snapchat and IG. But in London in particular, these territorial wars are rarely about defending drug turf, as it was a generation ago. A former gang member tells Thapar: “It’s less about money now and it’s more about emotions. It’s more mindless now.”

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Nevertheless, a The Wire-style drug turf war narrative is pushed by everyone: from London mayor Sadiq Khan and Met Police chief Cressida Dick to successive Home Secretaries and the otherwise clued-up Labour MP David Lammy. It’s super convenient, because it allows them to deflect responsibility away from the real reasons teenagers are killing each other and onto people they say are fuelling the drug trade, in particular “middle-class cocaine snorters”.

Yet it is duplicitous to make this link. The teenagers being killed in London are far removed from the powder cocaine trade. Apart from cannabis, the drugs they are most likely to end up selling, sometimes out of London on “county lines”, are crack cocaine and heroin, mainly to semi-homeless, addicted drug users, not the middle classes. Even if everyone did stop snorting coke, teenagers locked out of mainstream jobs would still be recruited to sell crack, a far more lucrative version of the drug.

Besides, when you look at individual teenage homicide cases, it’s clear that the vast majority are not killing each other over business. It’s about insults, bullying, resentments and arguments. Once these would have ended with a black eye — now they end in the morgue.

In 2018, I interviewed Jason (not his real name), who had been relocated to a secret address by Operation Trident (the Met Police unit set up to tackle gang violence involving black offenders), after he was run clean through with a machete when he was 17. It was a surprise to his family and doctors he survived. “No-one fist-fights anymore,” he told me. “It’s hard not to get involved, most kids your age carry a knife or machete, so you have to.”

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By Max Daly

There are many examples of petty beefs turning into deadly clashes. At the Old Bailey last month, a jury heard that Kayjon Lubin, 15, was stabbed to death last December in Beckton, east London by two 17-year-olds who believed he had taken their e-scooter. In September, a teenager who was 15 at the time was jailed for stabbing to death another 15-year-old, Baptista Adjei, on a packed bus in Stratford, over a Snapchat argument. Osman Sharif, 16, was hacked to death with a meat cleaver in a Tottenham street because of a row over some laughing emojis. Syed Jamanoor Islam was stabbed to death by a 16-year-old in Mile End in a feud that started with eggs being thrown by the victim’s brother as a joke.

But whatever specific incident sparks the individual killings, the truth is that these teenage deaths mark the end point of a process, a grim assembly line. On the whole, the victims and perpetrators involved, as academic reports into youth violence have always told the government, have similar backstories. These are not just any children, they are children who have usually suffered continuous trauma and have been rejected, shamed and belittled all their lives: at school, sometimes at home, by the police and even, as their neighbourhood becomes gentrified, by the well-off homeowners who fear passing them in the street.

They are known to social services from a very young age. They live in council housing in deprived areas. They have been excluded from school and have ended up at a Pupil Referral Unit. Many have experience of the care system, have been victims of abuse, and have absent fathers. In London, an overwhelming proportion are black, mixed race or from other ethnic minorities. Jason told me: “When I was younger no-one showed me respect. To get respect I turned into a monster. I’ve witnessed a lot of people die. It’s a normal thing. I’ve lived in care, I’ve lived everywhere, and most places I get looked at like something is wrong with me. So black kids have to be tough.”

As Cut Short points out, if the Government was sincere about tackling these deaths, it would be looking into the “trauma, fear and exclusion of young people”, it would drill down into “how unsafe and alone” they feel, and seek to expose the “failures of the state to care for its citizens”. But why bother, when you can solve the problem in one fell swoop by, as one MP stupidly suggested at a House of Commons briefing attended by Thapar, by “blunting the end of knives”.

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Sadiq Khan, the knife-crime fall guy

By James Bloodworth

They might live in claustrophobic neighbourhoods made worse by the intrusive and violent world of Snapchat, but these kids aren’t stupid, and what is happening in the political world is not lost on them. Tony, who runs the local community centre, described by Thapar as a “tiny island amid a sea storm”, says he believes that the nationalism and xenophobia around Brexit, and scandals such as Windrush and Grenfell, make young people in areas such as Brixton “feel like they don’t belong … it sends the message: you are not wanted”.

Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder — when faced with the Government’s abdication of responsibility for them — whether black working-class children who have led highly traumatised lives really are not wanted. I have no idea whether Jason has managed to escape the clutches of gang life. Or whether he is still alive. But what he told me should be beamed onto the walls of Parliament — along with the testimonies from Cut Short: “Most teachers told me I would end up dead or in jail. I got told I was worthless. It breaks your spirit. A lot of black kids get their spirit broken. Schools give up way too early, they kick you out from an early age. No school I’ve ever been to has helped me … Youth clubs are good. Even two hours talking to people, it’s support. But they shut down youth clubs and instead they spend all the money on a week-long knife crime clampdown.”

Cut Short ends with an appeal to the Government to treat youth knife crime violence as a public health emergency — just like Covid-19. It also calls for society to help out. “Start with something small. Walk into your local community centre, youth club…drop your defences. See what happens.” Given the subject matter, the book is surprisingly hopeful. By the end, with the help of various mentors including Thapar, the three teenagers are able to jump off the conveyor belt and create new chances for themselves — getting into university or making music. People have actually spent time with them; they have given them the confidence to step away from such a dangerous life.

Every time we hear about another child being stabbed to death, it should stop us in our tracks. We should hear the sound of a tolling bell each time. It should serve as a reminder that this death, this family’s grief, and this teenager sentenced to life behind bars, are all symptoms of a society that simply does not care enough. We might comfort ourselves by thinking that these children, who lie bleeding to death on the streets they grew up on, are different, that they are not like us. But they are our collective responsibility. Until we accept that this violent epidemic is a reflection of something toxic at Britain’s heart, it will only get worse.

I have walked the streets of London and Liverpool on my own for the past 20 years, at all times of night, rarely giving it a second thought. So reading women’s accounts of their everyday experiences, and talking to the women in my life about theirs, is a glimpse into an alien world. I am left with the terrible, bleak feeling that it will be impossible to ever make women feel adequately safe.

There is a kind of stereotyped masculine response to these female fears. That is: they are irrational. Murder, especially the murder of women, and especially the random murder of women by strangers in the street, is vanishingly rare. You are far more likely to be hit by a car on your walk home. So if you worry about it, goes this response, you are wrong.

This response is not exactly wrong, but it misses the point by a distance. It’s absolutely true that murder is rare in the UK; you are less likely, as a citizen of the UK in 2021, to be murdered than almost any other human in history. The Crime Survey for England and Wales puts the UK’s homicide rate at about 1.1 per 100,000. For comparison, according to the UN, the USA has something like 5 per 100,000; Brazil, about 27.

In the UK, and many other countries, the number of murders per year has been dropping since at least 1990. Going further back, there was a surge in the later years of the 20th century, but on a longer timescale the trend is clear: you were many, many times more likely to be murdered for most of human history than you are now in the UK, or in most other countries.

To carry on in the same stereotyped vein, if you are a woman, you are even less likely to be murdered. Of the 695 people murdered in England and Wales in the year to March 2020, 506 of them were men. And for the specific issue of murders on the street, by strangers — the fear we’re dealing with — the disparity is greater still: 154 men were murdered by strangers, and just 23 women. 

All this is true. But that doesn’t mean that the streets feel safe for women.

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From Covid to crime: how media hype distorts risk

By Tom Chivers

For one thing, it’s not just getting murdered that women fear. They fear getting abducted. They fear being raped. They are made by men to feel uncomfortable. Men yell things out of cars at women as they drive past, or follow them as they walk home, shouting out to them. One woman I know finished a half marathon as a bunch of men at the finish line loudly rated the attractiveness of the runners (“would, wouldn’t.”) 

I’m a bit sceptical of surveys like the recent one which found that 97% of young women have been sexually harassed, because the definition of “sexually harassed” varies, and I’d say some of the things they include in their data are borderline. But I bet that most women have some stories like the ones above. 

It’s mercifully true that almost none of those cases will escalate into murder, and few into actual violence. But, equally, I don’t think it’s irrational to be unnerved, in a world where these things happen reasonably regularly, and so to avoid being out alone after dark. 

If men being threatening is the main driver of women feeling unsafe, you might think that we have a clear way to move forward. Simply get men to stop being threatening, and women will feel safe. But I worry that will fail, on two grounds. One, I don’t think it’s possible, and two, even if it were, I don’t think it would work.

The first trouble is that we bump up against the law of large numbers. Imagine that the average woman walks past 200 men in a day. I expect working women in large cities see much more than that, in non-pandemic times, but others who are at home or who live in small communities see far fewer, so perhaps that number’s about right. In a year, that’s 73,000 encounters; in a decade, 730,000. Even if only a tiny fraction of men are dangerous or threatening, women will occasionally encounter them. 

Forget “not all men”: even if it’s “almost zero men”, there are enough to make women feel threatened. And it’s probably not almost zero men; it’s probably some relatively small but non-trivial fraction of them. (Or, even worse, a larger fraction of men, but only some of the time, for instance when drunk.) How many incidents per decade would it take to make you anxious? One? Two? 

There’s more than just this going on though. We’re also battling against human psychology.

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The inescapable misogyny of modern life

By Tanya Gold

In the US and UK, crime has been falling consistently for 30 years. In America, there are something like half as many violent crimes per person per year, and about half as many property crimes, as there were in the early 1990s. In the UK, the crime rate has fallen to something like a quarter of its 1996 peak.

But in both the USA and UK, most people believe that crime is increasing. The percentage who think so has dropped in the UK over the last 10 years, but still, nearly two-thirds of adults think that crime is more common now than it was a few years ago. Almost 80% of US adults think there is more crime now than a year ago. People’s perception of the risk of crime is only very loosely tied to the actual risk of crime in their country. Bringing it down — making people safer — will probably only have a relatively small effect on how safe people feel.

What’s more, while it is true that things like traffic accidents are much more common, humans are much more likely to be scared of dramatic, rare risks than common ones: “They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former,” wrote the security expert Bruce Schneier back in 2006. 

Schneier also points out that personified danger, dangers with identifiable victims, is far scarier than anonymous, statistical risks. 10,000 faceless people dying of diabetes will never get to us in the way that a single named child ill with bone cancer will. If there’s a human agent behind the risk, that’s even worse. And risks that we don’t choose, risks that are beyond our control, are scarier than those we choose. High-profile murders by strangers meet all of these criteria. They are almost designed to scare us. 

And we will always keep hearing about them, once again because of the law of large numbers. There are about 70 million people in the UK. If we get the risk of murder down to an unrealistically low one-in-70-million per year, we will still hear about them once a year, because they will make the news. The news will never dedicate 100 times as much coverage to diabetes deaths as they do to street murders, because that’s just not how the media works or, really, ever could work. A newspaper headline of “100,000 aircraft landed safely yesterday” would not sell many copies.

More than that, women tend to be more risk-averse than men. I want to be really clear about something: this is not “irrational”. There’s no optimal level of risk aversion, no correct amount to be worried. But it is an empirical fact that although men are more likely to be victims of crime and violence, they are less likely to be worried about it. 

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When abused women fight back

By Julie Bindel

That makes sense. Even if I do get jumped in Finsbury Park as I walk home some night, there’s some deluded bit of me that thinks I could fight, or at least run. I would feel like I have some control, and risks we think (rightly or wrongly) that we can control are less scary. Most women do not have that feeling. It is hardly surprising that the world is scarier for women.

Plus, we’re diurnal animals. The night is frightening for us, and has been since before we evolved from our common ancestor with chimps. You don’t have to go all evolutionary psychology to think that being alone on a dark street is going to be scary for humans, whatever the real risks are.

Women also differ widely in their responses to things. There is a great essay by Scott Alexander, called “Different Worlds”, talking about how the same situation will be perceived entirely differently by different people. We all have different levels of threat-perception, and almost all signals we receive from the world are ambiguous. Some people will read some behaviour as dangerous, some as benign.

I read this story, about a woman’s reaction to unwanted attention on a train, and it felt threatening and unpleasant. But perhaps some other women might think it was harmless flirting. And the survey into sexual harassment I mentioned above included “being stared at” as sexual harassment, but I remember some female friends, when they were single, telling each other about that guy at the bar “checking you out”. The line between flirty “checking out” and harassment-level “being stared at” will be different for different women. Which is entirely normal and unavoidable. But it does mean that some women will be much more likely to feel threatened than others. Which will in turn mean that it will be harder to reach a point where all, or enough, women feel safe.

What can be done? Certainly men could be more aware of behaviour that might seem threatening. And doing whatever we can to reduce the level of crime, improving rape conviction rates, reducing workplace harassment and stigmatising the sort of creepy behaviour I talked about above — those things are good in their own right, and probably will have some effect on how safe women feel. I’ve seen women suggesting curfews for men — I’m not sure how seriously — and no doubt that would lower the incidence of attacks, although it’s not really proportional or realistic; it would involve punishing an awful lot of innocent men for the actions of a terrible minority. As would restricting alcohol sales, given that at least half of attackers in violent crime are under the influence.

Fundamentally, we are fighting too many things — especially the law of large numbers, a sensationalist media, and human psychology — for it to be realistic that women will ever feel safe enough. Men will never understand how women feel; but even worse, we may never be able to entirely change it.