Knife crime now national emergency
Police chief in UK’s second city calls for emergency powers amid killing spree
‘Every day I am nervous’
THE knife crime epidemic on our streets is a ‘national emergency’, the head of one of Britain’s biggest police forces warned yesterday.
Stabbings are increasing in all major cities as officer numbers fall and budgets are slashed, the chief commissioner of West Midlands Police said.
David Jamieson also blamed children being excluded from schools for the soaring levels.
He was speaking as a temporary Section 60 order, which allows police to use sweeping stop-and-search powers, was put in place for the first time to cover the whole of Birmingham.
Mr Jamieson said the force would be applying to the Home Office for a crisis grant normally reserved for terror attacks and disasters to tackle the problem.
He added: ‘Many of the children getting involved in these crimes have been excluded from their school.
‘This is a national emergency, and we must do something about that exclusion because those children are on almost an immediate path into crime and into violence.
‘ Certainly we’ve got a very high level of knife crime here, there’s no escaping that – and they’ve got a real problem in parts of London.’ The comments came after five stabbings in the capital on Tuesday alone. The chief constable of the West Midlands force – England’s second largest – admitted his own stretched force was facing a ‘ real emergency’ after three teenagers died in separate knife attacks over the past fortnight in Birmingham.
At a press conference on knife crime, Dave Thompson said: ‘In my mind this has become a real emergency this week in terms of the work we need to do as the police.
‘We use the words “tipping point” too often, so I have deliberately not used them today.
‘But I think we’ve been really clear that the force has reached a level, where in police officer numbers, it is smaller than it was in 1974.’ On Monday, 18-yearold college student Hazrat Umar was stabbed to death in the Bordesley Green area of the city.
His death came just five days after that of Abdullah Muhammad, 16, in nearby Small Heath, and a fortnight after Sadali Mohammed, also 16, was stabbed in Highgate.
West Midlands Police have now opened ten murder and manslaughter inquiries this year, with 269 knife crimes reported in Birmingham alone amid claims from local MPs that the city is at risk of becoming the ‘knife capital’ of Britain.
Just hours after yesterday’s Section 60 order was put in place, a 29-yearold man was seriously injured in a knifing inside a charity shop in the city centre. During the conference, a shopkeeper spoke up to call for greater numbers of police on the city’s streets.
Mehrdad Razakdost, who was knifed in the head when he tackled two suspected shoplifters in his city centre store three years ago, said: ‘The town is not really safe.
‘I see too many gangs in this area. Every day I am nervous coming to my shop and I am a grown man. It is scary.’
In London, a 20-year-old man was stabbed to death with a ‘zombie’ knife outside the busy Ilford train station on Tuesday night.
There have been 17 homicides in the capital since the start of the year.