Knife Crime Epidemic: Victims with Life-Threatening Stabbing Injuries up One Third in Two Years

The number of patients with life-threatening stabbing injuries being seen by specialist trauma doctors at hospitals across England has risen by 34 percent in just two years, according to NHS figures seen by The Guardian.

In the period 2017-18, figures from nine out of 11 major trauma centres at NHS hospitals reported they had dealt with 2,278 serious knife injuries compared to 1,697 in 2015-16 — an increase of more than one third.

“The rise in knife crime in England is a source of serious concern both for the society we live in and for those of us who have to help care for the injured and their relatives where life, often young life is being so tragically lost,” Dr Taj Hassan, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the newspaper.

Doctors also said that they have said they have seen an increase in the severity of attacks and victims are coming into accident and emergency with multiple wounds.

Dr Ross Davenport, a consultant trauma and vascular surgeon at the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel, East London, told The Guardian that there has been a “sustained year-on-year increase”, adding: “Previously we used to see one or two wounds per victim. Now we are frequently seeing multiple wounds, five or sometimes 10 stab injuries on a single patient.”

The figures reveal there was a 37 percent rise in adult victims — and a 24.4 percent rise in victims under the age of 18.

Remarking on the figures changes, King’s College London hospital’s Dr Malcolm Tunnicliff said: “The majority of knife crime victims we treat are young adults.”

The findings come after official statistics revealed that across England and Wales violent crime involving blades or knives has risen by 12 percent, with London seeing its highest level of knife crime ever.

The capital saw a total of 14,987 crimes with a blade last year — an increase of 15 percent and representing 38 percent of all knife crimes across England and Wales. On average, there are 41 knife crimes in London every day.

In May, U.S. President Donald Trump highlighted the effect of London’s deadly knife crime epidemic, saying it is like a “war zone” — possibly in reference to Breitbart London’s reporting the month previous on comments made by Dr Mark Griffiths, the lead surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust, who said his military colleagues compared the situation in London’s hospitals to medical units in “war-torn Afghanistan”.

London’s left-wing Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan, a vocal critic of President Trump, has focused policing on hate crime and devoted £34 million to green projects but continues to blame central government for police spending cuts and claimed the crime wave was a national problem before moving to treat rising violence in his city as a “public health” issue.

In July, former Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose tough-on-crime stance cut crime in the city during his time in office, said Khan “should be ashamed of himself” for spending his time “attacking” President Trump while “crime is spiralling” out of control in London.