Rising knife violence alarms Britain as youths take up arms

LONDON — Ali started carrying knives when he was 14, long before his childhood friend was stabbed to death while walking down a well-lit street in South London in March.

“When you’re leaving the house, you don’t even think about it. You grab your keys, wallet, phone and knife,” said Ali, a 19-year-old student who provided only his first name out of fear he would be approached by the police.

Ali said he had never been involved with the gangs and violence associated with the Surrey Lane public housing project where he lives. Nevertheless, like many young people in London, he said he carried a knife with the idea of protecting himself.

The trend of young men arming themselves with knives has become an enormous concern for the Metropolitan Police, Britain’s largest police force, which last month reported a 24 percent increase in knife crimes over the past year, bringing knife-related offenses to a five-year high.

Seemingly daily, the British tabloids have published stories of young men inexplicably knifed as they waited for a bus, or of being chased down and stabbed.

Last month, two teenagers in London were stabbed to death within 90 minutes of each other, and in the same week the police verified a riveting video that showed a passenger disarming a knife-wielding man on a bus in North London.

Just on Thursday, the police thwarted a suspected terrorist attack in central London, arresting a 27-year-old man armed with a bag of knives. The episode took place near the Parliament building, where Khalid Masood stabbed a police officer to death in March as part of Britain’s worst terrorist attack in more than a decade.

It’s not just an increase in knife crime that has officials worried, but the increase in people carrying the so-called zombie knives and machetes inspired by horror films that can be bought for less than $10 on the internet. While the sale of such weapons was outlawed in Britain last year, a thriving black market exists online.

The increase in knife attacks in Britain, where handguns are almost impossible to obtain, had been attributed in recent years to budget cuts to youth-services programs and statistical anomalies caused by changes in statistical accounting. But police officials said this no longer explains either a sharp rise in overall crime rates or the growing prevalence of young men carrying knives.

“At the very root of all this are youths who tend to have been victims of violence in the past and do not want to become victims again,” said Patrick Green, manager of the Ben Kinsella Trust, an organization that works to reduce knife violence. “They sneak knives out of the kitchen drawer without being aware of the risks and consequences of their actions.”

The knife issue is a “broad and complex societal problem,” the police say, that reaches beyond their control.

“The Met police can only solve the end result,” said Steve O’Connell, the chairman of the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee. “We know that if you are carrying a knife, there is a big chance of you becoming a perpetrator or a victim of a knife crime,” he added. “We need to persuade youths that they don’t need knives.”