Tackling Knife crime in the UK 

What brings you here, I hear you ask? Well? I can tell you exactly what, you saw the title and you wanted to stop knife crime either in your local area or across the UK. Let me inform you of some statistics. There were 259 deaths related to knife crime in the year ending March 2019, of these 149 were in London alone; this has climbed to a 10-year high.

Now, what if I told you that we can stop this and bring the total number of fatalities and injuries as a result of knife crime down, potentially stopping this pressing matter? You would want to, wouldn’t you? I believe that we need more police on the streets and more funding from the Government in order to keep our streets safer... 

 My research shows that the London Boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth have the highest incidence of knife crime in the UK. Statistically, across the whole of London, these crimes are committed by White-European and Afro-Caribbean males between the ages of 18 and 24. (In the 10 years to 2018, there were 54,921 and 31,347 respectively).  

In Southwark the number of families with single parents is more than double the number with two parents (40,307 and 19,921 respectively). This suggests that family breakdown can lead to offending, perhaps due to the lack of strong male role models within the home. 

We have lost 20,600 police officers in the last 10 years due to Government funding cuts, we need more money spent on the police force in order to keep our communities safe and be able to walk down the street not worrying about being stabbed...

Some of the ways we can do this are by inspiring young people to become police officers in their local community, and make the role of policing more appealing to people who want to make a change but don’t know how - for example more police visits to secondary schools to talk about perks of being a police officer and careers lessons in schools to highlight the importance of the police force.

Since 2009 the UK Government has cut police funding by 16%, despite crime rates steadily increasing. This has meant that police forces have had less money to spend, which has meant that they are unable to recruit as many officers as possible and have even had to sell police stations. I believe that this massive under spending has directly led to a lack of police officers on our streets and must be rectified by central Government. 

I strongly believe that the only way to affect this change is to petition the Government. I believe that this will show them that people believe that their safety is at jeopardy.  

So please sign my petition. :)