Police to use £1.2m in fight against knife crime
POLICE officers will be kitted with body armour, Tasers and body cameras and tasked with disrupting knife crime through raids and stop and search.
South Wales Police has revealed details of how it plans to use £1.2m allocated to it by the Home Office to tackle the growing problem of knife crime.
The money will be used to extend the Op Sceptre knife crime team in Cardiff as well as creating a team in Swansea. The Op Sceptre team, named after a national initiative led by the Metropolitan Police, was set up in the summer of 2018, initially as a 12-month pilot to reduce knife crime and related offences in Cardiff.
The teams will work both undercover and in uniform, using Tasers and wearing body armour to raid homes. There will also be targeted use of stop and search.
Chief Constable Matt Jukes explained: “We’ll have sergeant-led teams in Cardiff and Swansea with a team of half a dozen upwards officers dedicated to work on the streets. But we’re also backing that with officers who are working on the investigations to follow those through.
“These are officers who have the capability to deploy both in plain clothes, undercover effectively, and in uniform.
“Their business is to get out there and disrupt people we know are involved, particularly in streetlevel drug-dealing, where they’re carrying knives to protect themselves and their drugs, or they’re buying drugs and they’re concerned about their safety and carrying knives because of that.”
The officers will primarily target individuals through intelligence and aim to “disrupt” troublemakers.
Chief Constable Jukes added: “For officers, both covert and overt, body armour is very important so they’re protected in that way.
“Tasers are incredibly important to us in tackling knife crime. In the past, we only really had the alternative of using conventional firearms. It’s much better now to confront that threat with Tasers – it’s safer for everybody.
“What we want to do is send a message that is clear – people who are dealing drugs, bringing vulnerable young people and dangerous commodities to our streets are not welcome and we will disrupt that.
“Disrupting them means stopping and searching them, arresting them on the street when there’s evidence to do that, taking off their front doors and arresting them in their home or where they’ve set up their drugdealing, taking them out on the road.