HOW LONDON STREETS RUN WITH BLOOD UNDER VIRTUE SIGNALLING MAYOR KHAN
A special investigation into knife crime by HARRIET SERGEANT who’s talked to gangsters, grieving parents and horrified hospital staff
Harry Pitman, 16 and 6ft 3in with a shock of red, curly hair and a broad, smiling face, travelled from his north London home in Haringey to enjoy the 2024 new year fireworks.
He made for fashionable Primrose Hill, which gives a sweeping view of the capital. With 20 minutes until midnight, it was packed with revellers eagerly awaiting the display to erupt above the London Eye. But Harry got into a fight with another boy his age.
it was the usual teenage argy-bargy over a girl. in the past it would have ended with words and maybe a punch thrown. But in today’s London, the other boy whipped out a hunting knife and stabbed Harry.
He collapsed to the ground and nearby police officers frantically tried to revive him.
they failed, pronouncing him dead just before midnight as 600 drones took to the night sky to spell out in bold, shimmering letters: ‘the mayor of London Presents . . .’ before proclaiming, ‘London — a Place for Everyone.’
Well, not for Harry Pitman. Or for yet another family left smashed for ever by the stabbing of a young person. the following day, Harry’s sister, tayla, 19, said: ‘His dinner is still in the oven. mum can’t bring herself to remove it.’
She added: ‘it doesn’t seem real, i keep expecting him to come through the front door.’
London is in the grip of a knife-crime epidemic. Last year, there were some 14,500 knife crimes recorded in London
He collapsed to the ground. Police tried to revive him
— almost 40 a day — up from nearly 11,500 in the previous year.
the attacks are brazen. Only last month, a mobile phone video posted online showed a teenager stabbing a boy multiple times on a Beckenham train in broad daylight.
the assailant is unconcerned by the gasps and screams of horrified passengers, as he brings down a foot-long blade on his victim, again and again.
the next day and another attempted murder — this time on a platform at Kennington station. two men were stabbed, including a member of the public who had bravely intervened.
Knife crime is disproportionately affecting young people such as Harry Pitman. teenagers in the UK today are twice as likely to be fatally stabbed as they were ten years ago.
a nurse with 15 years experience in a London trauma unit, told the mail that when she first started, a teenager with stab wounds was a big deal. ‘now it’s normal. We see several a day. it midlands Police in the is an awful situation when it’s same period. not news that a young person has as Police and Crime Commissioner, been stabbed.’ it is on Khan’s watch that
Since London mayor Sadiq Khan this is happening. Of course, knife took office in 2016, knife crime has attacks blight many cities across increased by 54 per cent. Far from the UK but the carnage in London diminishing, as it briefly did during outstrips everywhere else. Only 15 lockdown, it is rising at its fastest per cent of the population lives in rate for five years — up 20 per cent the capital, but it is here that a last year alone, according to Office third of all knife offences occur. for national Statistics figures the London mayor’s response is released this week. telling. He claims deaths by a sharp
this is more than double the 8 instrument have actually fallen. per cent rise recorded by West But this is thanks to the nHS rather than any action from him. Since 2010, stabbing survival rates have increased by 50 per cent due to improvements in nHS trauma units. ‘all the extra practice we get,’ as one doctor said, grimly.
recently, the mayor’s Office was rebuked for making the false claim that knife and gun crime have tumbled since 2016.
in fact, points out Ed Humpherson, the director-general of the Office for Statistics regulation, knife crime ‘ has significantly increased,’ and Khan’s claim, ‘has the potential to mislead the public’. For any politician to fudge the figures on a crime as deadly as this, is beyond the pale.
the sense of frustration in the apparent misorder of Khan’s priorities is summed up by Home Secretary James Cleverly when he said this week: ‘i’ve heard him talk more about Gaza than black kids getting murdered in South-East London. Unacceptable.’
Similarly, the step-mother of Jodie Chesney, stabbed in the back at the age of 17 while innocently sitting with friends in an East London park, accused the mayor of being ‘more interested in raising revenue through Ulez than in doing the right thing for Londoners’. She added: ‘His legacy is normalising knife crime, as well as draining every penny from the public.’
How have we reached the point where carrying a knife — and using it — is normal? and not just a kitchen knife but monstrous, sword-like blades?
as someone who for the best part
of 20 years has written about gang violence and spoken with its perpetrators and those closest to its victims, I hope to answer these questions.
In this three-part series for the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, I will examine the main drivers of the new knife epidemic and how the next Mayor — be it Khan, if he is re- elected next week, or his successor — can help rid our streets of this scourge.
Two changes are responsible for the surge in deaths: The first is Khan’s impact on policing, which has led to the second — a disastrous normalisation of knife carrying.
Until we recognise and address this, deaths, and especially teenage deaths, will continue to proliferate. There will be more anguished relatives like 20-year- old Elham Habibi whose brother Ilyas was murdered at the age of 17, stabbed in the neck outside Sutton train station last December.
‘The bloodshed must stop. It’s outrageous what is happening on the streets of London.
‘My brother must not become just another statistic in this list of young people being struck down in their prime,’ he said.
Unfortunately, while Khan is Mayor the evidence suggests that is exactly what will happen.
In his 2015 election campaign, he pledged to reduce ‘Stop and Search’ — the controversial police tactic of body-searching anyone on the street who they believe is carrying a weapon or anything else illicit.
‘I’ll do all in my power to further cut its uses,’ the then-prospective Mayor vowed. True to his word, the number of Stop and Search incidents recorded in his first full year in charge of the Met dropped to 139,200, from a peak of 365,500 during his predecessor Boris Johnson’s mayoralty.
The most recent figure recorded in 2022-23 of 179,600 represents a modest rise, but Khan has hardly embraced the police tactic in the way Johnson did.
The result? Homicides ‘involving a sharp instrument’, as recorded by the Met, from 2007 to 2014, almost halved during Johnson’s time at City Hall — from just over 10 deaths per million of population to just under seven.
Stop and Search stokes resentment among ethnic minority groups that feel unfairly targeted. Last year, there were 27 stop and searches for every 1,000 black people compared to nearly six for every 1,000 white people. But the hard truth is that it is the most effective means of keeping people of all backgrounds safe.
As Chris Hobbs, a retired Met officer, pointed out to me: ‘Just about every dead victim of knife or gun street crime would be alive today had their assailants been stopped and searched.’
And this applies most forcibly to ethnic minorities. The focus under Khan, and the Left generally, is on the proportion of ethic minorities searched — not on the grotesque rate at which they are dying.
If you are black, you are five times more likely to be admitted to hospital as a result of being stabbed than if you are white or Asian.
But front-line police are not going to make those all-important stop and searches if they do not feel supported and that starts at the top with the Mayor.
Sixteen-year-old Marques Walker was caught carrying a knife three times by police in less than two years.
That could have been three lives saved, considering that while on bail he murdered 14-year-old Jermaine Cools, knocked to the ground during a brawl with other boys. Marques pulled out a socalled zombie knife — a large serrated blade designed to look fearsome — that had not been confiscated by the police, and stabbed Jermaine seven times as he desperately rolled back and forth on the pavement trying to protect himself.
One wound in the boy’s body was seven inches deep. Jermaine’s heartbroken father, restaurant owner Julius Cools, said he has put a photo of his son on his old bed and cannot leave the house without first going into the room to see it.
‘Jermaine was everything to us, a bright light in our world,’ he said.
It is not easy to make Stop and Search work when trust in the Met is at an all-time low. It would have taken imagination, guts and a willingness to confront both the Met and the liberal Left consensus — qualities our Mayor has sadly failed to display.
As an African Caribbean community leader put it to me: ‘Being stopped and searched by the police can be repulsive,
‘ The scene looked like a terror atrocity’
‘One wound in the boy’s body was 7 in deep’
inconvenient and annoying. But it is nowhere near as inconvenient as being stabbed to death or wearing a stoma bag [because of abdominal injuries] for the rest of your life.’
But not only has the number of knife crimes increased under Khan, but they are occurring over a greater area. Before, fatal stabbings were confined to a relatively small group of Londoners and to limited pockets of the capital.
In its report, It Can Be Stopped, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank showed the number of neighbourhood wards with a recorded murder jumped from 79 in 2015 to a staggering 119 neighbourhoods by 2018 — two years after Sadiq Khan took office.
‘Anyone can be a victim of knife crime now,’ says Tilisha Goupall whose 15-year- old brother was stabbed to death in front of her after an evening out at the cinema. ‘It’s not segregated. It’s across the city.’
This means, says another CSJ report published this week, that more than one in 10 Londoners now knows someone at risk from gangs, knife crime, gun crime or other serious violence.
Nikita Malik, from the CSJ, told the Mail: ‘Under Sadiq Khan, London has seen a surge in violent crime in recent years.
‘The fact that so many Londoners know someone at risk from gangs and criminality reflects the tragic normalisation of extreme violence in our city.’
And it means more and more teenagers feel the need to carry a knife. As one young offender put it: ‘If young people see others carrying knives and they’re seeing others getting stabbed, then they are obviously going to be carrying knives for protection.’
In April 2019, Sadiq Khan told ITV’s Good Morning Britain he’s ‘done all he can’ to crack down on violent crime and laid the blame firmly at the door of parents, saying: ‘It’s your job to stop them leaving the house with a knife, it