Idris Elba's whitewashing of UK knife crime badly misses point



The new BBC documentary "Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis" could not have come at a more appropriate time. The number of knife-related deaths in Britain among ages 13 to 19 has increased dramatically over the last decade, from 56% to 83%.

Reports of such senseless violence have become commonplace.

Highlighting rising knife crime in Somerset, Bedfordshire, and Sussex — which are whiter and more rural — implies a trend without comparing absolute rates.

In early January, 14-year-old Kelyan Bokassa was killed on a London bus after two machete-wielding attackers — themselves both teens — stabbed him 27 times. Weeks later, 12-year-old Leo Ross was stabbed to death in Birmingham while walking home from school; his alleged assailant was 15. In June, three teenagers were charged with the stabbing death of 14-year-old Ibrahima Seck in Manchester.

Actor Elba, who himself grew up in crime-ravaged East London, launched a campaign to eradicate knife violence in early 2024. Now comes this documentary, which follows the "Thor" star around the country as he talks to people behind the grim statistics.

A teachable moment

Elba interviews victims, offenders, and trauma doctors. Along the way, he meets politicians and senior police officers in an attempt to devise a new, more interventionist approach to law and order — a way to stop these young men from resorting to knives in the first place.

It's apparently also important to Elba to clear up certain stereotypes associated with stabbings. A pivotal moment in the documentary comes when the actor seeks out the sister of Harold Pitman, a white 16-year-old who was stabbed to death in London last New Year’s Eve.

Here, Elba can't help but turn the meeting into a teachable moment, gently reminding Tayla Pitman that the majority of knife-crime perpetrators are white. “When Harry was killed," Tayla confirms, "[people said] 'I bet it was a black person,' and it wasn’t — it was another white boy.”

Those surprised by the race of Harry's killer were doubtless also flummoxed by the recent harrowing Netflix series "Adolescence," which chooses to address this topical issue via the real-time arrest and interrogation of a fictional 13-year-old white killer.

"Adolescence" neatly sidesteps the issue of race altogether by making the killer's victim a female classmate, also white. The violence here stems from "toxic masculinity" and influencers like Andrew Tate, among other 2025 boogeymen.

RELATED: Netflix sounds an alarm with painful 'Adolescence'

  'Adolescence' co-creator and star, Stephen Graham. John Nacion/Getty Images

Misleading statistics

The Guardian's review of "Our Knife Crime Crisis" approvingly repeats a statistic cited in the documentary: "The film immediately tackles common misconceptions around knife crime as a problem within black and brown urban communities, when in fact 69% of perpetrators are white, and it is spreading fastest in Somerset, Bedfordshire, and Sussex."

But where does this statistic come from? A cursory search turns up no clear source. Dig a little deeper, and the closest match appears to be nationwide conviction data for knife possession — not overall knife crime. In that context, around 69% of those convicted are white.

Moreover, highlighting rising knife crime in Somerset, Bedfordshire, and Sussex — which are whiter and more rural — implies a trend without comparing absolute rates.

Urban centers like London, Birmingham, and Manchester still have higher overall knife-crime numbers. The regions named may have seen percentage increases, but from much lower baselines.

An uncomfortable truth

More pertinent statistics come from the London Assembly: "Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators, and 53% of knife crime perpetrators." Moreover, the Times finds that the majority of these victims and perpetrators are under the age of 24.

Anyone who, like Elba, sincerely wishes to understand this issue, must first face an uncomfortable truth: Black teenagers are considerably overrepresented in knife-crime statistics.

That mentioning this truth in public is discouraged, to say the least, impedes any practical attempts to prevent knife crime.

Failure to police

Take the example of stop and search, which is generally seen as a highly effective method of removing weapons from the streets. London Mayor Sadiq Khan opposes the use of this operational strategy, claiming baseless charges of "structural racism" and racial profiling. As a result, the use of stop and search in the capital has decreased by 44% since 2022.

New data published in January reveals the arrest rate has dropped in part due to a dramatic reduction in the use of stop and search. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of under-18s arrested for knife offenses fell by 33%, yet offenses rose. The London Metropolitan Police conducted 118,688 searches in the year ending January 2025, roughly a quarter fewer than the previous year. Almost half of them involved black youths under the age of 24.

Given Khan's belief in the inherent "institutional racism" of his city's police force, it's hardly surprising that he would do nothing to reverse the capital's decline in law enforcement manpower.

Since 2008, the number of police stations serving the capital has decreased from 160 to 36, a 75% reduction. This is despite policing a city of about nine million people. This is expected to drop even further — to 32 (one per London Borough). Meanwhile, budget cuts have led to two-thirds of police stations closing in England since 2010.

With one station for every quarter of a million residents, it’s reasonable to assume that crime has increased. According to the Office for National Statistics, the police recorded 14,577 knife offenses in 2023, a 20% rise from the previous year. With officers constantly burdened with trivial work like recording offensive language as non-crime hate incidents, it is no surprise that knife crime — and all crime — goes unsolved.

Knives out

If policing is off the table, what's left?

Elba has a suggestion: Design kitchen knives to have dull points. Such a "solution" is in keeping with the Labour government's approach.

A little more than a year ago, the U.K. witnessed its most shocking knife crime yet. Seventeen-year-old Axel Rudakubana, a second-generation Rwandan immigrant, entered a children's Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport and began stabbing. By the time he was subdued, he had brutally slaughtered three girls: Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine.

News of the killings sparked furious protests around the country, fueled by erroneous online reports that Rudakubana was an illegal immigrant and a Muslim. The media was quick to denounce this "misinformation" as the sole culprit of the unrest, while failing to acknowledge the simmering tension built up by decades of unchecked immigration and failed assimilation.

In response to all this, the U.K. government announced a crackdown on knife sales — including a ban on doorstep sales and an age verification for online purchases. It’s part of Labour’s vow to "halve knife crime over the next decade."

RELATED: Protests and violent rioting continue to erupt across the UK over gruesome stabbing attack on girls at dance studio

  Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Token gestures

Here, it's perhaps worth stating the obvious: A knife has edges, and people die just as well from being slashed as from being stabbed. During the early 1900s, razors were the weapon of choice for many "razor gangs" throughout Britain. Besides, anything with a point can be used to kill someone. A sharpened stick, fork, corkscrew, or screwdriver can end a life.

A ban will do nothing. Newly manufactured safety knives will not only be ineffective, but no one will buy them, reducing the blade’s aesthetic appeal and function for the law-abiding majority. None of these suggestions will stop the use of weapons on our streets.

While politicians and celebrities make token gestures, teenage boys continue to die in record numbers. We must not fall victim to rose-tinted utopianism, which says we can remedy this problem with more youth clubs and pool tables. If we want to prevent young people from killing each other, we must first increase stop and search and fight the activist ideology that sees the police as a proxy for racialized state oppression.

Drill killers

Then, you must wage a genuine culture war: Go after the drill rappers. I am not advocating for the suspension of civil liberties, but anyone familiar with the genre will recognize that much of this music celebrates particular killings. Mdot, Hypo, and Showkey were all rappers killed between 2016 and 2022. Zone 2, another drill group, mentioned the killing of Sidique Kamara, a.k.a Incognito, in the song "No Censor."

Many of these murders are related to gang feuds, as they fight over territory related to drug distribution. As such, intervention starts at home. A strong father figure frequently serves as a role model, guiding a young son through his formative years. According to data, 43% of black African children in the U.K. and 63% of children of black Caribbean heritage in the U.K. are raised by single parents. As one reformed gang member told the Daily Telegraph, “I remember a member of a gang once saying to me, ‘If you are not going to raise your children, we will raise them for you.’”

Linguistic pedants have previously chastised me for using the term "epidemic" to characterize the issue of knife crime. It’s not a disease, I’m told. I would argue that young people killing others at record levels for petty squabbles, unpaid drug debts, and arbitrary boundaries on a map IS a disease.

Our cultural elites’ allegiance to these progressive nostrums is dangerous. They will be ineffective. Just like Elba’s suggestion, it’s missing the point.

Chicken-chucking, screaming teens just might save Hollywood



Upon its release earlier this month, “A Minecraft Movie” exploded onto the scene in more ways than one. On a positive note, the film has drawn large audiences to once-empty cinemas and is on track to earn more than $1 billion globally — a welcome vital sign for the American film industry after its decline during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, “Minecraft” has also sparked literal explosions of chaos in theaters. Fans, overcome with excitement at scenes like a baby zombie riding a chicken or the introduction of Jack Black’s character, Steve, have reportedly screamed, hurled popcorn and toilet paper, and even tossed live chickens at the screen — leaving staff with colossal messes to clean up afterward.

For most Zoomers, passionate moments of shared interest and fun are virtually nonexistent.

According to my high school students who watched the movie and could explain this bizarre behavior, these outbursts came from people who actually liked the movie. Reading through the mediocre movie reviews, I assumed that fans were disappointed and consequently engaged in shameless hooliganism. Quite the opposite. They were expressing their excitement at the movie’s many references and Easter eggs to the beloved video game.

Reckless or simply fun?

Of course, causing a public ruckus raises concerns about today’s youths who react so strongly to an otherwise silly movie. Such outbursts suggest that the younger Zoomers have pent-up rage, lacking healthy outlets for their aggression. The recent TV series “Adolescence,” which controversially portrayed radicalized youth engaging in violent acts, may have struck closer to the truth than we’d like to admit.

Then again, there might be a good reason to see these rampant outbursts as a salutary development. Not only are young people going to movie theaters and thereby reviving a moribund entertainment industry, but they are also charging a previously stagnant environment with some much-needed energy. This isn’t the glassy-eyed, TikTok-scrolling crowd we’ve come to expect. These lively crowds of young people are sharing an intense moment with a piece of entertainment they all love — not Beatlemania, but “Minecraft mania.”

Dwindling social outlets

Older generations, which have their own experience with various social crazes that brought them and their peers together in effusive exuberance, may not understand just how special this is for young people today.

Previous generations enjoyed countless concerts, movies, video games, and even books that routinely brought together fan communities that frequently became rowdy and occasionally chaotic — and hardly any of it, even for Millennials, was coordinated through online social media.

As a Millennial myself who’s about to turn 40, I remember the insanity at the cinema when the original “Star Wars” trilogy was re-released in anticipation of the prequels. People gasped and cried when they saw a remastered Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. I can also recall driving by bookstores — before Amazon put most of them out of business — observing the long lines of “Harry Potter” devotees decked in their Hogwarts uniforms, eagerly anticipating the next book in the series. More recently, similar fan frenzies were seen with the latest Taylor Swift concert or “Avengers” movies.

At the time, I pitied these nerds who, for all appearances, lost their minds over something seemingly insubstantial. Now, I envy them and yearn for a return to this kind of enthusiasm.

These days, pop culture has become hyper-individualized and mediated through online streaming and social media platforms. Algorithms, not authenticity, inform everyone’s taste. Nothing about it is natural or real. For most Zoomers, passionate moments of shared interest and fun are virtually nonexistent.

Zoomers don’t realize that physically gathering with fellow fans is normal and that such events add up to more than the sum of their parts. They represent rare moments of authentic public celebration. Yes, they usually center around some shallow piece of pop-culture fluff, but they generate a collective spirit that only happens when fans are allowed to “nerd out” and let go with one another for a little while.

Welcome ‘Minecraft mania’

The “Minecraft” chicken jockey mania continues this tradition. One of my students told me that watching “Minecraft” in the theater was the most fun he’s ever had at the cinema. He conceded that the movie is mostly Hollywood slop, but the audience’s reactions made it worth the annoyingly high price of admission.

He and his peers should understand the value of sharing experiences with friends and fellow fans. Active participation beats passive consumption on the couch every time.

Let the next cultural craze bring the same energy and excitement — minus the chicken feathers.

War on masculinity: Why ‘Adolescence’ contradicts its own message



Netflix’s new show “Adolescence” tells the story of a 13-year-old boy who murders one of his female classmates after being radicalized online by the likes of Andrew Tate — a man whose influence had an episode of the mini-series devoted to it.

“The best thing you can say about this is that it is addressing a legitimate concern that you and I frankly have about who is discipling this generation of young men,” Steve Deace of the “Steve Deace Show” comments.

“The best thing you can say is it has stumbled upon a legitimate concern our worldview has, but it lacks the worldview to adequately address it, and so therefore is entangled in its own idolatries that contradict its own message,” he continues.


The first glaring point Deace makes is that the show is “based on a story that undermines the premise of the entire show.”

The show is in part based on the real and recent story of a black teenager in Britain named Hassan who brutally murders a girl for no reason. However, the series blames white men, masculinity, and right-wing influencers for the violence instead of what clearly is a deeper problem.

“This reinforces our lament about how the church has largely left young men behind in the last generation,” Deace says, “They’re not getting the proper discipleship at home.”

And in order to get the proper discipleship, they need proper parenting.

“This is why we need good dads to help us exercise and navigate this tension, and this is why dads need to be connected to their heavenly father who experiences the exact same tension with them, right out of the womb,” Deace says. “Look at this beautiful creation of mine, I’ve counted all the hairs on his head, and yet, in the not too distant future, he’s going to look at me and say, ‘I think I could be like God, I’ll call my own shots, make my own decisions.’”

“We used to societally understand these things. These things used to get preached and taught from our pulpits by men worthy of such teachings and preachings,” he continues.

“If we don’t tackle these dilemmas amongst ourselves within a biblical worldview, the culture will do it for us.”

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From Netflix to reality: Glenn Beck connects HS track runner’s murder to Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’



On Wednesday, April 2, Frisco Memorial High School junior Austin Metcalf, 17, was fatally stabbed at a track meet by Frisco Centennial High School’s Karmelo Anthony, 17. According to police and eyewitness accounts, Metcalf confronted Anthony about sitting in a tent designated for Memorial athletes.

Anthony refused to leave and taunted Metcalf by saying, “Touch me and see what happens.” When Metcalf grabbed him to force him out, Anthony then reached inside his bag, pulled out a knife, and stabbed him in the chest in front of his twin brother, Hunter, who held him as he died.

“I grabbed his hand and looked in his eyes. I just saw his soul leave, and it took mine, too,” he told FOX 4.

Glenn Beck is nearly driven to tears by this heartbreaking story. It’s uncannily similar, he says, to “Adolescence” — a four-part British crime drama miniseries that premiered on Netflix mid-March.

The show paints a clear picture of “what students are like, what they're talking about, how callous they are on life,” he says. “You see what school is like and what all of our kids are actually dealing with, and it's terrifying.”

 

Both the death of Austin Metcalf and the disturbing events in “Adolescence” seem to beg the question: “Is there no value to life anymore?” — especially in youth culture that has grown so ghastly in the digital age.

“Life has become so meaningless that that will get you killed,” says Glenn.

But it’s not just the children he feels sorry for. The parents have it rougher than ever, too.

“It’s so hard to be a parent now,” he admits.

All his kids have “finished adolescence” and thankfully “everybody made it out alive,” but the last 10 years he describes as “relentless.”

Your best efforts to be the perfect parent always fall short, he laments. “You just feel like a horrible parent because you're like, 'I don't know what to do'” — especially when you’re constantly facing one of the most sinister foes there’s ever been: the internet.

“I’ve always hated helicopter parents, but my gosh, if you're not a helicopter parent in your own home,” he trails off, insinuating that overprotectiveness is almost the only hope for parents these days.

“If you want to understand how screwed up our children are” — how something like a seating dispute at a track meet could leave a child dead — “just watch ['Adolescence'].”

To hear more of his analysis, watch the episode above.

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Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ and the war on white men



Netflix is up to its old feminist tricks with the new show “Adolescence” — a miniseries that initially appears to be a crime thriller but ultimately unfolds into blatant propaganda that paints white men in a negative light.

The story centers around a young white boy accused of murdering one of his female classmates, who cyberbullied the young boy and called him an “incel.” The term, meaning “involuntary celibate,” orbits around the online “manosphere” and red-pill movements.

“I don’t like the demonization of any group based on skin color, and I don’t like the denial that the demonization of white men and white people and particularly white evangelicals is going on globally, and we can see it right here in this miniseries that Netflix has put on,” Jason Whitlock of “Fearless” comments.


While the entire series is clear in its anti-man message, episode two is where Whitlock says, “They play a big card.”

That is, it brings Andrew Tate into the show by name.

“You’ve got this murder of a young teenage girl by a 13-year-old boy, and the next thing you know, halfway through episode two, they’re basically saying, ‘Well, you know what the motive is? He was radicalized by Andrew Tate,’” Whitlock explains, noting that this is where the show quotes the online red-pill accounts that say 80% of women are attracted to only 20% of men.

While Whitlock abhors much of what Tate has done or said in the past, he’s not on board with a “four-part series that basically says Andrew Tate is the driving force of this.”

“This all connects to the demonization of white men, ‘cause that’s what this miniseries is about, that the patriarchal ways of Western civilization have clearly outlived their usefulness, and that the solution to fixing angry young men is bowing, submitting to female leadership and more female involvement in everything,” Whitlock says.

“They’ve set up Andrew Tate as the scapegoat, as the distraction. The manosphere, the red-pill movement, all these angry men that reject feminism, they’re the problem,” he adds, noting that they’ll never go after the real problems plaguing society.

Which is why Whitlock is taking the conversation to one of the greatest conservative voices out there today on Friday, May 2.

“I just want to set the table for a conversation I’m going to have with Tucker Carlson,” Whitlock says. “Because it’s important. The demonization of white men that’s going on in global culture. Netflix, the U.K., everywhere. Everybody’s doing the Macarena on white men.”

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Netflix sounds an alarm with painful 'Adolescence'



Let’s get this out of the way first. The new Netflix limited series “Adolescence” is utterly astonishing.

Astonishing in a good way, as you may never see a more amazingly crafted piece of television.

The four episodes explore Jamie’s initial denial of guilt and his father’s horror at seeing the CCTV footage of his son stabbing the girl over and over again.

The writing, acting, and production are top notch. However, the reason “Adolescence” stands out from other top-tier shows is that each of the four hour-or-so-long episodes is done in one take.

That means the whole one-hour episode is one very long camera shot. It also means the actors — including the young teen playing the lead role — cannot make any mistakes. All of the actors, for a whole hour, are basically performing live theater. No retakes, no catching their breath to refocus on the scene. Just one long camera shot.

And there are four episodes. They did this four times! So yeah, that’s astonishing. They deserve to win all the awards at those insufferable awards shows.

But it’s also an astonishing gut punch, particularly for parents of teens.

Telling it how it is, probably at your kids' school

I understand the story was based on real-life events, but the script seems to have veered off on its own, and this storyline is indeed all too realistic, not to mention incredibly painful to watch.

“Adolescence” tells the story of a 13-year-old boy named Jamie, who is attracted to an older girl at school who is bullied by someone sharing topless photos she apparently had taken. After Jamie tries to be kind to her, in a self-professed attempt to date her, she rejects him and then mocks him on social media as an “incel” — involuntary celibate.

The mocking escalates, and he responds, one night while he and his friends are out roaming the town, by stabbing her to death.

The four episodes explore Jamie’s initial denial of guilt and his father’s horror at seeing the CCTV footage of his son stabbing the girl over and over again. The second episode has the police interviewing kids at Jamie’s school, where it becomes obvious that these kids are living in a world that the adults are not bothering with; the disrespect shown to the teachers seems to underscore the fact that the teachers are not connecting in any meaningful way with their students.

The third episode aims to reveal what’s in Jamie’s head — it’s a long interview with a psychologist — and we get a pretty clear picture of a 13-year-old who is dealing with adult issues, over-sexualized behaviors, and social media bullying — all without the benefit of any adult intervention.

The most painful television I've ever watched

The fourth episode — quite possibly the most painful I have ever watched — concerns the parents struggling with the guilt that their neighbors and community have already assigned to them. The parents and their 18-year-old daughter endure a highly unpleasant family outing where the father is recognized as the killer’s dad. After the older sister shows love and compassion for her parents despite having just endured said outing, her father asks her mother, “How did we make her?” To which mom replies, “The same way we made him.”

The point being that they did the same things, and one child seems to be coping and well-adjusted and loving ... while the other stabbed a girl multiple times, in uncontrollable rage.

But let’s go back and talk about what is depicted.

  1. A hardworking father running his own plumbing business, who often leaves by 6 a.m., not to return till 8 p.m.
  1. A child trapped, spending all day in an institution where adult order and control has broken down, with rampant disrespectful behavior toward whatever authority does exist but especially among the teens toward each other. Young teens at the school engaging in adult sexualized behavior (nude photos, mocking a 13-year-old for being a virgin), and no adults caring enough to see or intervene.
  1. A 13-year-old who regularly comes home, marches upstairs, and spends the rest of the night on his computer by himself — except when he is out with his friends, fairly late at night with no adult supervision.

We find out about the dad’s long hours and the son’s computer time during the parents’ painful self-examination in episode 4. They rightly surmise that they could have done better, but regarding the computer time, the father points out that all the kids are that way these days.

'All kids are like that' — no excuse

Yes, they are. But they don’t have to be. And “kids being that way” — as well as tired parents working long hours — cannot be an excuse for no communication. Parents have to talk to their kids. A lot. There has to be a relationship.

The unsupervised roaming around at night goes hand in hand with the complete lack of communication. Obviously, parents should know where a 13-year-old is, especially at 10 p.m. That issue is never addressed, nor is the fact that the child’s school is a cesspool of toxic, inappropriate behaviors. Schools bear far too much resemblance to prisons — architecturally and procedurally — and the inmates can be feral in both.

I know. That’s pretty much every middle school, junior high, or high school, right? But if you’re thinking that — why are your kids there, again? Because there are alternatives. The point here is that the older your child gets, they continue to need plenty of time with you. And you have to be the one who makes sure that happens, because they won’t.

Failure of authority

Other reviewers are saying this miniseries is a referendum on “toxic masculinity.”

I guess it is a male child who stabs a female child, and that’s about as toxic as it gets. But it isn't because of his masculinity. It is a lack of masculinity.

We see teachers with no authority to provide a safe and effective learning environment; a father with no time to build trust so that Jamie can bring him his problems; parents caught up in their own problems and pursuits, who have a niggling feeling that all that computer time is not great, but they are willing to tell themselves “all kids are like that” while their son is alone in his room being torn to shreds, his confidence destroyed, his moral compass irretrievably broken.

Should you watch it?

I can’t recommend it, really. It’s peppered with profanity, but that pales in comparison to the emotional pain of watching it unfold. (The acting is exemplary, particularly Owen Cooper as Jamie and "Adolescence" co-creator Stephen Graham as his dad.)

However. If you have a teen in school ... or a teen who spends a lot of time alone in his/her room or on his/her phone or computer ... or a teen who’s out at night, you know not where ... then YES. You should watch all four episodes. In fact, you should go get that teen and have them watch with you. And then you should talk about it. All of it.

What could be a more important use of your time than that?

Another perspective

Dr. Justin Coulson raises some excellent points with his thoughtful review of “Adolescence” that I think are also worth consideration.

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