Labour’s Chuka Umunna: Treat London Knife Crime Epidemic as ‘Mental Health Issue’

The knife crime epidemic in London, where 11 teenagers have been stabbed to death since the beginning of the year, should be treated as a ‘mental health’ issue, Labour’s Chuka Umunna has said.

The MP for Streatham blamed the crisis, which in April saw six people knifed to death in a week in the capital, on a lack of mental health treatment for youths who grow up in ‘traumatic’ environments.

“If we really want to get to grips with this issue we’ve got to tackle it as a mental health and wellbeing issue,” he told the Evening Standard.

“We are not properly looking after the mental health of our young people and you have got traumatised young people growing up in an environment which is the context in which these things happen.”

Umunna, who has been tipped as a future Labour leader, added: “I don’t think we’re doing enough to look after their mental health and wellbeing, and particularly the mental health of our young people.”

The Labour MP’s talk of knife crime as a health issue caused by trauma echos recent comments by Gary Trowsdale, an adviser to the cross-party parliamentary campaign to end youth violence in the UK.

“Violence is a disease and police are not doctors. We have whole communities now living in trauma where extreme violence is normalised in young lives,” said the Spirit of London Awards founder, who told The Guardian he believes one of the biggest reasons for soaring knife crime is mistrust in the police.

In April, Breitbart London reported that knife crime had soared to a five-year high since Theresa May kerbed police use of stop and search, a tactic that activists condemn as “racist” but which senior officers insist saves black lives.

Knife crime recorded in England and Wales was in decline at the beginning of the decade, and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) notes the trend has reversed in the past two years; figures revealed the number of stops and searches shrunk 57 per cent in 2015-16 compared to 2013-14.

Last month, Britain’s most senior police officer Cressida Dick spoke approvingly of the tactic, praising it as “hugely powerful” in fighting knife crime.

The Guardian reports, however, that “race relations experts” have told the new Metropolitan Police chief that stop and search is counter-productive and alienates ethnic minorities.

Documents leaked last summer revealed StopWatch, the UK’s major campaign against police powers to stop and search, to be backed by globalist billionaire George Soros.

As Breitbart London reported in August, the Hungarian financier’s Open Society Foundations bragged about being the only organisation “willing to fund controversial documentation and advocacy that accuses European police of discriminatory practices”.