Time to get a grip on knife crime, Mr Khan

To begin to tackle the increase in violent attacks our municipal leaders must accept responsibility

Yesterday, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, decided for political reasons to pin the blame for the tragic rise in violent crime on the Government’s schools policy. Mr Khan is in charge of the Metropolitan Police, with the power in his hands to help put a stop to the murders on his city’s streets. Surely he would want to take responsibility? Apparently not. Instead of engaging constructively with the issues, the Mayor instead prefers to play party political games.

The current spate of knife murders didn’t come from nowhere. Nor should the solutions be a mystery. A decade ago the think tank I founded set up a programme to investigate violence prevention strategies. Its researchers went to America and looked at Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Boston and even New York before coming back to examine Glasgow and Liverpool. They found the cities that have successfully controlled their levels of gang activity, and thus violence and violent crime, have all employed a two-pronged approach. First, policing needs to be robust, effective and well co-ordinated. Second, the younger members of gangs need to be stripped out through remedial support.

While Mr Khan seems happy to pay lip service to what needs to be done, he has done very little to actually tackle knife crime on the front line.

Take the issue of stop-and-search. A continuing failure to reintroduce much higher levels of stop-and-search has increased the pressure on the police, as they have to pick up the pieces of the damaged lives following an attack. There is no question that the fall-off in stop-and-search has licensed the carrying of knives and drugs on our streets. Knowing that there is a chance that you could be stopped by the police makes carrying a knife or drugs more difficult.

Although we hear some worry that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to be stopped, we rarely hear that if you are from an ethnic minority you are also some six times more likely to be killed. Stop-and-search, properly used, works. Then there is the Mayor’s new London Violence Reduction Unit. What could have been positive news was marred by Mr Khan suggesting that it would not deliver results for a decade – when people are dying today. It is too complacent.

But perhaps his and other leaders’ greatest failure has been to fundamentally misunderstand the lessons from Glasgow – a city that had successfully driven knife crime and homicide down through a “public health approach”. Too many observers are happy to take on board the social work-style intervention strategies targeted at youths likely to get involved in gangs but choose to neglect the importance of the tough policing that has also taken place.

In Glasgow, this began with a surge in stop-and-search that left people under no illusion that if they carried a weapon there was a high chance they’d be caught. This was accompanied by a doubling in the length of prison sentences for those found to be in possession of knives. There was also a Group Violence Intervention during which gang members were identified, called in by the police en masse and given the clear message that the violence must stop, that help was available to get back into work and education and that continued violence would be met with severe consequences.

It is good that the Government has committed to more police on the streets and is increasing resources, but that alone won’t solve this. Sadly, in London the situation remains dysfunctional, with very poor coordination between agencies.

While some boroughs have worked hard to resolve this problem, in others there has been a failure to take a long-term approach, with programmes implemented and then quickly discarded. Too often there has also been a failure to communicate with gang-impacted communities over a sustained period of time. The solution to this epidemic of knife attacks is not rocket science. Other cities have shown the way. The key to success is combining police enforcement tactics with intervention and prevention programmes. The route to failure is for our municipal leaders to shirk responsibility and to turn this issue into a party political game.