Government security, where do we go from here?

Axel Rudakubana has received a life sentence with a minimum of 52 years. If he was just 9 days older at the time of the crime he would have got a full life sentence. That’s what he should have got! 

While he is now off to prison hopefully for the rest of his life there are many questions that need to be asked, and we need frank and honest answers from those we ask the questions to. Basically, this animal was flagged up time and time again to government security, the police and social services but at every opportunity to do something the warnings were ignored.

Maybe warning should have triggered some process that allowed these “government services” to remove Axel Rudakubana from public society.

However, and this is where everything gets VERY complicated, and I appreciate there is no easy option for all of us. Do we remove people from our society on the possibility of them committing a crime, no matter how major or minor that crime is or do we have to wait for them to actually commit a crime first?

It’s massive and the implications of locking someone up just because we think they are going to do something is the stuff of nightmares and Si-Fi and horror films. But if, at the same time we do nothing we are letting normal law-abiding people down.

We have to find some sort of middle ground but what that middle ground is I really don’t know.