Knife crime: escort pupils to school, police urge

Chaperones could be used in high-risk areas as study forecasts where fatal stabbings will occur

CHILDREN should be escorted to school by “adult chaperones” in knife crime hotspots because of rising violence, police have suggested.

The warning is based on a study that predicts where fatal stabbings are most likely to happen, based on the most comprehensive knife assault data yet to be assembled.

Police say the forecasts will enable preventive action in “high risk” areas, such as chaperones to escort children and knife arches at school entrances to detect those carrying weapons.

A group of academies in London has already deployed teachers in hi-vis vests to chaperone pupils to their bus stops or stations, while some schools have introduced knife detection wands because of concerns over an increasing numbers of pupils carrying weapons.

The research, led by Det Ch Insp John Massey, of the Metropolitan Police homicide squad, found it was possible to forecast which parts of London were most likely to suffer fatal stabbings by looking at non-fatal knife assault data from the previous year.

“Isolating the most vulnerable areas allows more selective targeting, for example of schools, with additional resources such as physical safeguarding measures,” said Mr Massey, who conducted the study in conjunction with the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

“These might including journey-toschool chaperones, knife arches at school entries, close monitoring of pupils’ exclusions, internal peer relationships and gang affiliations and greater local authority and police oversight upon specific, vulnerable youths.”

His analysis involved manually coding 3,506 incidents where people were stabbed and cut but survived in 4,835 London census areas, then comparing them to the locations of 97 homicides in London in 2017-18.

He found more than half of the areas had no knife assaults at all in the first year and of these, just one per cent saw a homicide in the second year.

More than two thirds of all killings were in areas where there had been assaults. Of the 41 neighbourhoods that had six or more injuries in the first year, 15 per cent went on to suffer a homicide the following year.

“These findings indicate that officers can be deployed in a smaller number of areas [to] have the best chances there to prevent knife-enabled homicides,” said Mr Massey.

Prof Lawrence Sherman, the Cambridge criminologist and co-author of the research, said a key strategy should be stop and search, targeted on the precise areas where knife crime was most likely to occur. “We have evidence that when you target stop and search in areas that are known for weapons crime in the US, there are substantial drops in shootings,” he said.

“Better data is needed to fight knife homicide. The current definition of knife crime is too broad to be useful, and lumps together knife-enabled injuries with knife threats or even arrests for carrying knives.”

Statistics do not at present distinguish between knife incidents with and without injury

“Police IT is in urgent need of refinement,” Prof Sherman said. “Instead of just keeping case records for legal uses, systems should be designed to detect crime patterns for prioritising targets.

“We need to transform IT from electronic filing cabinets into a daily crime forecasting tool.”

The research was published in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-based Policing.