Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) on Monday said the police would start keeping records on people with criminal records found carrying baseball bats, knives or other weapons in their vehicles.
Officials said the decision was in response to a recent spate of violent attacks, including an assault with a baseball bat on a 19-year-old student in Taichung after he sideswiped a car, and the stabbing of a convenience store clerk after the employee asked a customer to wear a mask.
While the police should be aware of who has weapons in their cars — and remove those weapons if the individual has a criminal record — preventing criminal violence requires a multi-tiered approach.
In an article on The Conversation Web site regarding knife violence in the UK, the author lists adverse environments for children to grow up in, with austerity as the No. 1 cultivator of violence. The author cites research showing that when home, school and recreational environments “fail to nurture [children], protect them and help them to achieve their potential,” they become “disaffected, fearful and vengeful.”
Overwhelmingly, those who engage in violence as adults come from broken families that fail to teach the skills needed to cope with stress and adversity, and to develop productive social relationships.
The WHO has a fact sheet listing promising youth violence prevention programs, including “life skills and social development programs designed to help children and adolescents manage anger, resolve conflict, and develop the necessary social skills to solve problems,” and programs to teach positive parenting skills, among others. Experts have also long said that group-oriented activities with a focus on cooperation and team spirit — for example, sports or volunteer activities such as beach cleanups — help build confidence and a sense of responsibility and belonging.
Extracurricular activities in Taiwan, like cram schools, are seen as a means of improving academic competitiveness, rather than as a means of developing team spirit and other important social skills. Also, such activities often exclude children from disadvantaged families who cannot afford the extra expense. The government should address this by improving children’s access to socially productive activities.
The government could also increase police presence in areas where violent attacks are more prone to happen, although they should do so with caution. National Public Radio in the US published a piece on its Web site on April 20 citing a study by researchers at New York University. The study found that “adding a new police officer to a city prevents between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides, which means that the average city would need to hire between 10 and 17 new police officers to save one life a year.”
However, the study also found that increasing the number of police officers could lead to more arrests for what the researchers called “petty crimes.”
Therefore, a larger police force would ideally be accompanied by an increase in community engagement, such as police involvement in volunteer activities, youth ride-alongs or other activities that would improve public trust in the police while deterring criminal activity.
Schools are important in preventing youth violence, and this can be achieved through educators being alert to behaviors that would indicate trouble in a student’s private life, as well as through providing access to confidence-building activities. One such activity could be optional self-defense classes. Most fatal knife and baseball-bat assaults could be prevented with basic self-defense knowledge.
The recent increase in violent activity might be caused by a number of factors including pandemic-related stress or job loss. Regardless of what the instigating factors are, the root causes are likely pre-existing social issues that cannot be solved by searching vehicles alone. The government must understand and tackle these root causes of violence.
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