There were four more stabbings in London over the weekend, bringing the total number of fatalities in the capital this year to 68. Nick Ferrari, was quick to take to the airwaves to label Mayor Sadiq Khan as “incompetent”. The President of the United States also thinks the Mayor should shoulder the blame. He fingered the London Mayor on Twitter, calling him a “national disgrace” who is “destroying” London. He also retweeted the alt-Right columnist Katie Hopkins, who described London as “Stab-City” and “Khan’s Londonistan”.
But is this a true reflection of the facts? Knife crime, it’s true, has risen in London, but it is not significantly higher than it was in 2011/12. There were just over 14,000 knife or sharp instrument crimes recorded by the Metropolitan Police in 2011/12; there were 14,700 in 2017/18.
The more worrying statistic, in fact, is that knife crime is rising more steeply outside the capital, beyond Khan’s purview. 42 out of the 44 police forces across England and Wales have reported rises since 2011. There were 39,818 offences in the 12 months to September 2018, compared with 23,945 in the year ending March 2014. Knife crime has now risen for the fourth consecutive year in England and Wales.
As the BBC reports:
West Midlands Police has seen an 87% increase in knife crime offences since 2013/14, while there has been a 47% rise for the Metropolitan Police, a 95% increase for Cambridgeshire Police, and a 99% increase for Thames Valley.
Of course, behind every statistic is an individual tragedy. There was heavily pregnant Kelly Mary Fauvrelle, who was killed on 29 June in Thornton Heath, aged 29. Or Jodie Chesney, a 17-year-old who was stabbed and killed while playing music in a park in Harold Hill, Havering, on 1 March. Or 16-year-old Sidali Mohamed, a refugee from Somalia who was stabbed to death outside a Birmingham sixth form college on 13 February. Many of the victims are, indeed, extremely young. The number of 16-year-olds treated for stab wounds has doubled over the past five years.
So what is to blame? Suspicion has fallen on everything from austerity to drill music to family breakdown to the personal failings of Sadiq Khan. But some of these explanations carry more weight than others.
Austerity measures introduced since 2010 do appear to have had an effect, though not always in an obvious way. A recent study by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime found that councils which had implemented significant reductions in youth services were more likely to have seen an increase in stabbings. Correlation does not equal causation, of course, yet the four areas worst-hit by youth spending cuts saw some of the largest increases in knife crime. Nationwide, councils have cut spending on youth services by about 40% since 2014; Wolverhampton, which reduced spending by 91% is covered by the West Midlands force, which has reported an 87% rise.
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