“You can’t arrest your way out of knife crime” has become the new anthem for a doomed policy on stopping teenagers killing each other with bladed weapons in this country. It’s a great tune for whistling in the dark.
On LBC this week, Sophie Linden, the Deputy Mayor responsible for crime and policing in London, made sure she levered this unctuous nonsense into a discussion with Eddie Mair. Ms Linden was deputising for Mayor Khan who had sensibly chosen to exercise his grip on the latest spasm of violent murder in his capital from the safety of a hotel bedroom in Morocco.
The truth is that you absolutely can arrest your way out of this problem and that’s what the general public expect you to be doing. You can flood areas where knife crime is highest with police – the places that the academics and pressure groups forever ranged against decisive action only experience on TV proleporn. You can fully enforce the law and shut down the problem virtually overnight.
This runs counter to almost every argument advanced by the professional thinking classes on the causes, consequences and cures of knife crime so is well worth consideration in my view. Their default counter-argument is as atavistic in its way as its punitive alternative: knife crime is a societal issue, it should be medicalised as a long-term public health problem, it requires many more inconclusive (but well-heeled) research studies that always seem to hedge their conclusive bets and provide policy makers with little in the way of a short term fix.
Meanwhile, left out of the self-referential debate on these sylvan heights, the front-line professionals, parents and fearful communities are co-opted into narratives of grievance and victimisation that gain lots of retweets on Twitter but are sadly not yet able to raise dead teenagers.
Of course the other problem with a sustained enforcement approach is going to be boots on the ground. Police numbers in England and Wales fell by 20,000 between 2010 and 2018, taking them to the lowest level in 20 years. Over the same period, recorded knife crime rose nationally by 20 per cent. In some force areas, away from London, the increase has been staggering – 77 per cent in Yorkshire and Humberside. The relationship between fewer police officers and more crime, particularly violent crime, has become almost theological in its sophistry but it is a brave (or deluded) politician that can continue to say to disbelieving voters and broken front-line officers that this correlation is no more than a coincidence.
To be strictly fair, decisions about police funding cuts towards the middle part of the decade seemed to be borne out as recorded violent crime fell. This was probably due to the impact of the cuts not being fully apparent to communities and criminals in them until a point where it was clear they could act with much more impunity and much less likelihood of apprehension. As the tide of visible authority receded in the poorest communities, trusted neighbourhood beat police teams were replaced by fewer community support officers who were sometimes, as was the case in Norfolk, axed altogether with diminishing resources diverted to emergency response officers. In this context rising levels of crime and reducing confidence in the police as the institution to protect us is a political if not a scientific reality.
What does this have to do with knife crime? Almost everyone, including the National Police Chiefs Council agrees that community policing is the cornerstone of the system. Seen, available and trusted officers embedded within communities they become familiar with can be transformative. That visibility denies space for criminals to operate in and improves morale for the law abiding.
This trust and familiarity enables communities to improve and allows intelligence to flow easily to prevent crime. In this model, violent crime culture cannot entrench itself in neighbourhoods because consistent and predictable enforcement is married to the hard slog of good preventative high visibility policing. This relationship is now badly fractured, with communities only experiencing policing as a response activity by harried officers with stacked up calls for urgent help across their force area. If you want to grow a culture of lawless impunity that feeds into gangs, drugs, knives in marooned postcodes, austerity policing is a great precursor.
The temptation for ministers, battered by events and mesmerised by Brexit, is to reach for the handy shibboleth of serious-minded hand-wringing, put on a conference, commission a review and hope for jam tomorrow instead of blood tonight. As with our disordered prison system, this administration is also hog-tied by austerity decisions they made that have in some areas of England and Wales almost eliminated visible authority. It’s not a pretty sight, watching ministers’ mental gymnastics as they try to publicly reconcile announcements to increase resources to combat violence with their predecessors’ alacrity in putting them in that position.
The problem with the conversation on knife crime is that it often seems to avoid the here and now preferring to dwell on past mistakes or future perfection. This is the dreary function of a political and professional class who are physically or philosophically remote from where the action is and who remain squeamish in the face of robust intervention by the state to get back control of the streets.
So it’s time for action. If the Home Secretary can declare a major incident over a few rogue dinghies in the Channel, he can and should respond in kind to knife crime and give the police chiefs he’s meeting this week the resources and the backing for an assertive, immediate enforcement offensive against it. The public need to know that he’s not hiding behind the institutional timidity that has characterised the debate while young people are being slaughtered on the streets. He can provide the resources to restart community policing so that we aren’t put in a position again where the party of law and order has through misguided policies surrendered parts of our capital city and pockets of other urban areas to staggering levels of feral violence. There’s no help from the Mayor’s office, he’s fiddling with emissions while his boroughs burn. This is on Sajid Javid.
Make no mistake, there will have to be blood on the carpet. Taking back these zones of impunity will be hard, long and fraught with difficulty. There will inevitably be reaction. But the price of otherwise allowing whole communities to slide into “acceptable levels of violence”, to use the horrible calculus of the Northern Ireland Troubles, is politically and morally unacceptable. What about all the good people in these places? The parents who desperately need somewhere safe to bring up their kids? The kids who want to get on in life away from gangs? The vast majority of people who don’t go out after dark looking fearfully through the curtains. Who speaks for them?
We need an enforcement response. Now. And when knife crime is gripped – as it can be – we need to start asking those other very awkward questions about what has made it normal for children to arm themselves with blades and use them in one of the most advanced and richest nations in the world. That’s when the real work starts.
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