Police Commissioner Blames Knife Crime On Video Games
It’s that old cookie again, this time coming from an interview with Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione in Australia. He believes that youngsters are being desensitised by hours of exposure to brutal video games that reward the player for such acts as murder, rape and theft. This interview comes after a rise in knife crime amongst youngsters in Australia over the past few months.
Speaking to The Australian Telegraph he said,
How can it not affect you if you’re a young adolescent growing up in an era where to be violent is almost praiseworthy, where you engage in virtual crime on a daily basis and many of these young people (do) for hours and hours on end.
That’s not going to affect the vast majority but it’s only got to affect one or two and what have you got? You’ve got some potentially really disturbed young person out there who’s got access to weapons like knives or is good with the fist, can go out there and almost live that life now in the streets of modern Australia. That’s concerning.
Arguments in the past have been made for parents who buy violent games for their children, who are not old enough to purchase them in the first place. Or that films and music have just as much of a role to play in desensitisation as video games do. What are your thoughts on the Police Commissioners comments?
3 thoughts on “Police Commissioner Blames Knife Crime On Video Games”
I personally think the police need to look at more fundamental aspects of crime. Background of the person ie previous mental health issues, wealth of family, area they live, family type aka single parent, relatives in jail etc. All too easy to blame games for things, when in most part they need to examine the basics. If it really did have an affect wouldn’t there be more cases?
After all these stories, I’m always left wondering how I missed the rape key in GTA.
It’s apparently such a major part of the GTA franchise that it’s astonishing that I’ve managed to play all of them without ever finding and pushing it even once.
I’m not sure it’s even possible in GTA, that was just the picture I chose. He’s already been jumped on by several papers saying he has no idea what he’s talking about and that crime amongst youths has actually dropped to a 40 year low in most countries involved in the video game era. So he was probably making up the whole rape thing!