Labelled by Labour MP, Sarah Jones, founder of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime as a ‘public health emergency’, knife crime is an epidemic, which plagues the streets of London. With 76 fatal stabbing in the city in 2018 and a 16% rise in the total number of recorded offences involving knives from April 2017 to March 2018 from the previous year, knife crime is on the rise.
One of the main reasons for this is the drastic decline in police numbers. Since 2010, police numbers have fallen by more than 20,000. This was after cuts made by Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary as part of the government’s policy of austerity. While May rejects the link between knife crime and the number of police officers, the decline in the number of police is highly responsible for increased violence on our streets. In 2018, the Home Affairs Committee said forces in England and Wales were struggling to cope amid falling staff numbers. Data gathered by this committee suggests the police have lost a fifth of their neighbourhood policing capacity since 2010. Neighbourhood teams play a key role in tackling gang crime thus explaining the rise in gang violence.
However, cuts to the police are not the only element of austerity that has led to this rapid increase in knife crime. A £400 million reduction to youth work budgets since 2010 has led to the disappearance of over 600 youth centres and 130,000 places for young people. This means that local authorities find it impossible to do local intervention work with families when they need it most. Furthermore, a lack of provision for those who are excluded from school has led to more crime as those excluded have few alternatives but the streets. A letter sent to the Prime Minister by the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan and eight England and Wales police and crime commissioners, emphasised that in London and the West Midlands, two of the areas most affected by knife crime, permanent exclusions have increased by 62% and 40% respectively since 2013/14.
Moreover, the mental health crisis among young people adds to this issue as at least 150 are being turned away each day by NHS psychological support services, which simply do not have the capacity or resources to cope with the demand. Crime has always stemmed from poverty and a lack of alternatives.
Austerity has worsened poverty in the UK: The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7% rise in child poverty from 2015 to 2022. A clear solution to prevent this knife crime crisis is investing in the areas most affected and providing routes out of poverty.
This worked in Glasgow in the mid-2000s, which was known as Europe’s murder capital, with 40 killings a year; double the national average. The establishment of a pioneering Violence Reduction Unit, with powers to invest in communities, workplace opportunity and educating at-risk teenagers on the deadly consequences of carrying a knife has meant that in 2017 where 35 children and teenagers were killed with knifes in Britain, not one of these deaths took place in Scotland.