Over at The Times, Lib Dem Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne notes that a cosmetic surgeon helped to cut knife violence by 40 per cent in Cardiff, and asks: why isn’t his no-brainer idea being copied across Britain? Here’s an excerpt:
Nearly 50,000 people have been treated in hospital for knifings since the Government came to power. The toll of knife crime has rightly gripped the media, since there can be few more horrifying thoughts for any parent than to think of their child being attacked by knife- wielding thugs. …
Effective action is about stop-and- search, particularly working from intelligence. Many people on violent estates know exactly who the menace is, but are afraid to say. So visible policing is essential not just for reassurance – many young people carry knives because they are afraid – but also for intelligence-gathering. Metal-detecting arches have had outstanding success in areas such as Newham in East London. …
Judges can already send someone to jail for four years for just carrying a knife, let alone using it. But you cannot punish anyone unless you catch them first. We should do a lot less posturing about punishments, and a lot more catching criminals with the obvious tools we have to hand.
You can read the article in full HERE.
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2 Comments
But isn’t this the sort of “police state database” which elsewhere we have been complaining about? Feed the information – gained from other source – in, find the correlations, stop and search on those correlations. The likelihood is that some correlation which seems odd or unfair gets thrown up to “red flag” potential knife carriers, and we shall be up in arms complaining that this is stigmatising people. And if we start with knifing incidents, what other A&E data might we want to pass on to the police to analyse as it may point to trouble-makers elsewhere? Many domestic accidents might be possible pointers to domestic abuse either of partners or children, for example.
What also if people who have been victims of knife crime are scared to seek hospital treatment for fear the information will be passed on, used to track down suspects, and those then questioned by the police come back for revenge?
This is not a big database / police state issue. The Cardiff Model uses anonymous data and very little of it: just the time and location of an incident and the weapon used. It’s really simple, really cheap and really effective. The data goes to community safety partnerships so it’s not just driven by what the police want. It just helps to show the overall patterns of violence in an area so there can be an informed, community-wide response.
There’s no good reason for not rolling this out across the country.