There have been three stabbings in broad daylight and seven arrests in dawn raids on an organised drug-trafficking gang in one 24-hour period in Sadiq Khan’s London.
On Monday at 5:05pm, two men in their 20s were attacked and received “slash wounds”, which were not life threatening, on the busy High Street in the affluent West London borough of Kensington.
Police said that one of the victims had been chased into upmarket grocery shop Waitrose “before being assaulted by the second man who was subsequently arrested”, reports the Daily Mail.
In a separate incident at 6:20pm, a man in his 20s was found with stab wounds in a residential part of Bermondsey and was taken to a south London hospital where he remains in critical condition. There have been no arrests to date, according to police.
These recent stabbings follow on from a weekend of violence in the capital after Albanian national Edmond Jonuzi, 35, was fatally stabbed near the busy Turnpike Lane underground station on Saturday and three people were violently stabbed over a two-hour period across the capital on Sunday.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick attempted to defend her force’s performance last week by selectively using statistics to overstate claims about London’s declining crime rate.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, seven individuals were arrested in coordinated cross country raids by London’s Metropolitan Police, Suffolk Police, and Essex Police in connection to a Newham gang that is believed to be responsible for a cocaine and heroin drug-dealing network from London to Suffolk, known as a “county line”.
A number of items were seized from the properties, including a stolen moped, a ten-inch hunting knife, drugs, and a phone believed to be used in running the operation.
A recent study conducted for Waltham Forest Council found that the London borough’s gangs were becoming more organised and with the London illegal drugs market getting to saturation, gangs have begun running county lines to move their product out of London, sometimes using coerced women and children as drug mules.
Also, five members of a Notting Hill, West London, gang who made “drill music” videos glorifying violence were jailed on Monday for conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
Drill, a form of hip-hop where music videos include footage of weapons and lyrics that threaten violence against members of rival gangs, has been blamed by Commissioner Dick for the rise in knife and gun crime.
Judge Ann Mulligan will decide on Friday whether to also impose Criminal Behaviour Orders on the gang to ban from making drill music in the future, which would be a UK legal first.
Under Labour’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, homicides in London have risen by 27.1 per cent, youth homicide by 70 per cent, and knife crime has risen by nearly one-third. London has also become an acid attack capital and there has been a 50 per cent surge in moped muggings.
More than 60 people have been killed due to violent crime in the nation’s capital so far this year.
A children’s poverty charity warned that London is set to see an “unprecedented rise” in gang violence and knife crime this summer because children will be out of school and largely unsupervised by their parents, leaving them vulnerable to the influence of, and abuse by, gangs.
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