Why crime scourge has gone on after infamous murder
IN DECEMBER 1995, Philip Lawrence suffered a fatal stab wound as he tried to protect a pupil from assault at the gates of his London school. Two decades later, 16-year-old Bailey Gwynne was killed by a fellow pupil in Aberdeen in a row over biscuits.
In those intervening 20 years since the death of Mr Lawrence, a former Ampleforth College pupil, countless initiatives have been launched to try to wipe the scourge of knife crime among young people and halt its insidious spread into the nation’s schools but the problem remains stubbornly intractable.
Figures released last week showed a 21 per cent rise in the number of knife offences in England to 37,443 per annum. Only a fraction of the offences occurred in schools but that trend is also disturbingly upwards, with the number of knife-related incidents in Britain’s schools rising last year by 42 per cent.
Equally, there are concerns the many initiatives to tackle the problem, from weapon amnesties to the use of knife-detecting equipment, may not be as effective as hoped. Research by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has suggested that law enforcement strategies, from tougher sentencing to searches and seizures, had little or no long-term impact on the number of knife deaths.
The think-tank is one of a growing number of voices, including police themselves, calling for a fundamental policy shift which recognises knife crime as a complex public health issue. The theory goes that it is only by education, the early identification of vulnerable individuals and intervention in arenas from primary school classrooms to deprived homes that knife crime can be reduced – policies credited with helping to achieve a dramatic drop in such attacks in Scotland.
Cressida Dick, Britain’s most senior police officer, said this month: “We are all committed to notion that prevention is better than enforcement. Most offenders have suffered some kind of adverse experience of a significant sort when they are young and/or have limited or problematic family lives and parenting, all things that can lead to other negative outcomes and not just being subject to, or causing, serious violence to somebody.”
The thorny question remains of whether the theory can be successfully put into practice in an age of austerity.