Why So Many Knife Attacks?

I woke up this morning to news of an anti-migrant riot in Belfast, with organized groups of Northern Irish deliberately setting out to burn the homes of migrants:

Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes.

This is an intriguing development that deserves its own discussion, which I'll take up separately. But it comes in the context of a remarkable cluster of knife-attack news:

• The demonstrations in the UK following the conviction of Henry Nowak's Southampton murderer
• A homeless man slashed five people in New York's Penn Station on Sunday
• Decarlos Brown Jr, accused of stabbing Iryna Zarutska to death on a Charlotte, NC light rail train, was found incompetent to stand trial in federal court, after the same outcome in state court
• In Februiary, another Charlotte, NC man was accused of a knife attack
• Karmelo Anthony was found guilty for stabbing Austin Metcalf to death at a Texas track meet last year.

This is a wide range of separate incidents in widely different locations and circumstances, but there are common factors that connect many of the cases. For instance, in the Penn Station slashing at the link:

The homeless madman accused of slashing five people with a dagger in Penn Station was roaming free despite an arrest just weeks earlier in New Jersey and a conviction for an eerily similar stabbing.

Hector Deleon, 51, was quickly released on cashless bail after his 2022 arrest for slashing a man in the neck in Newark — and then received just two years of probation as a sentence, court records show.

Deleon doesn’t appear to have spent any significant time behind bars in that case or in the years that followed, even as he racked up more arrests — including one just two weeks before Sunday night’s rampage.

DeCarlos Brown, accused of the Charlotte knife attack on Iryna Zarutska, had a lengthy record of encounters with police and mental health authorities:

“I think there are multiple failed opportunities here, in the mental health space and in the criminal justice space,” said Kenneth Corey, a former department chief for the New York City Police Department who now teaches at the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Policing Leadership Academy.

Court records show Brown was initially charged in 2014 with being a felon in possession of a firearm, which is sometimes used by federal prosecutors to pull cases into the federal system where there are often stiffer penalties. Federal prosecutors did not take the case, and the state charge was dropped in exchange for a guilty plea on a charge of robbery using a deadly weapon, court records show.

. . . Corey said many federal prosecutors offices tell police and local officials they lack financial resources to try more cases of felons in possession of a firearm, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. But he believes the charge could be used better as a tool against the small percentage of people responsible for repeated violent offenses.

“They end up taking only the worst of the worst because they don’t have the resources,” Corey said. ”And to be clear, despite multiple previous arrests, I’m not sure this man’s case rose to anywhere near that threshold.”

. . . In January, Brown was arrested after repeatedly calling 911 from a hospital, where he complained that someone was trying to control him with foreign substances. He was quickly released without bail on a promise to return for court, which is standard for lower-level misdemeanors.

Micah Emmanuel Ragin, the other Charlotte man accused of a knife attack, also had a long arrest record:

A North Carolina man accused of stabbing another individual in broad daylight has faced more than 18 criminal charges over the past decade, including assault-related cases and a domestic-violence conviction, before the latest violent incident, court records show.

. . . Altogether, court records indicate Ragin has faced more than 18 charges in several counties over multiple years before the current felony accusation.

The Penn Station slasher, Hector DeLeon,

was quickly released on cashless bail after his 2022 arrest for slashing a man in the neck in Newark — and then received just two years of probation as a sentence, court records show.

Deleon doesn’t appear to have spent any significant time behind bars in that case or in the years that followed, even as he racked up more arrests — including one just two weeks before Sunday night’s rampage.

. . . His at least seven prior arrests – six of which unfolded in New Jersey – include busts for aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, use or possession of drugs, assault, domestic assault and criminal mischief.

Before the attack at Penn Station, Deleon was most recently busted May 22 in Long Branch, New Jersey for theft and possession of drug paraphernalia charges.

On the other hand, Karmelo Anthony, the track meet stabber, had a clean record, although his behavior prior to the stabbing was puzzling:

Students who were under the tent during the stabbing testified on June 5. A student witness stated that people, including Metcalf, had confronted Anthony and asked him to leave the tent, to which Anthony allegedly said, "touch me and find out", and kept his hands in his backpack, warning that he had something. Witnesses estimated Anthony was asked to leave as many as 15 times.

The UK stabbings seem both to be related to an overall sense of entitlement and resentment in ethnic communities, stoked on one hand by frustration that the prosperous lifestyles they'd been led to expect from migration hadn't materialized, while they also weren't being welcomed by the native population (with whom they compete for jobs), although they somehow also expect the native population to accept their continued adherence to the cultural norms of their former countries.

The US attacks seem more connected with outright mental disorder mixed with criminal history, although enititlement and resentment are also factors. However deranged DeCarlos Brown may have been, he is reported to have said, "I got that white girl" following the stabbing.

Karmelo Anthony appears to have felt entitled in some way to stay in a tent connected with a different school, despite a long-standing convention that team members stayed in their respective school tents. This, of course, in part had a racial basis, but he took his sense of entitlement seriously enough to kill someone who disagreed with him.

Clearly now in the UK, the authorities are nervously trying to deal with a restive native population for whom the recent knife attacks are bringing the migration problem into clear focus. There's little question that measures to deal with the overall cluster of entitlement, resentment, and the decline of social decorum are failing on both sides of the Atlantic.