After one 14-year-old was “butchered” in a suspected gang-related murder this week and another victim of the same age suffered life-changing injuries when she was slashed in the face by teenage girls, Labour politicians have again blamed “police cuts” for rising violent crime in London.
Young people have been caught “in the grip of” a “disease” of violence, Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy claimed, insisting that the death toll in London is rising as a result of the Conservative Government’s failure to plough sufficient funding into social work and local “youth services”.
She made the emotional claims in a BBC Radio 4 interview on Thursday, a couple of weeks after London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan demanded an overhaul of the Metropolitan Police’s gangs matrix, stating that the overrepresentation of black men recorded on the “useful” violence-preventing database was a “cause for concern”.
The murder of Jayden Moodie this week, which took place in Creasy’s constituency, was described by Scotland Yard detectives as “truly heartbreaking”.
A black Mercedes knocked the 14-year-old off of his moped in Waltham Forest, northeast London, on Tuesday, before three men emerged from the vehicle and knifed the teenager in the back seven times as he lay unconscious in the road.
The attack was “targeted and intent on lethal force from the outset”, according to the Met Police, who are looking into claims Moodie was the victim of a so-called postcode war between rival drug-dealing gangs in the area.
On Wednesday, meanwhile, three teenage girls aged 15 and 16 were charged with grievous bodily harm after a 14-year-old girl was left with “life-changing injuries” to her face in a knife attack which took place in a north London car park the previous day.
In the wake of Moodie’s murder, Creasy highlighted the loss of “213 police in total across Waltham Forest and Newham in the last couple of years”, telling the BBC: “You can’t tell me resources don’t make a difference when you are dealing with the death of a 14-year-old child.
“You can’t tell me that the cuts in the police budget haven’t made a difference to the ability of the police to be able to respond quickly when we have had situations like we have had in Walthamstow,” she added.
“I have been getting up in Parliament, begging and pleading with ministers to focus on this and give us the resources, not just with our police, but also with the youth services, the social workers, the amazing voluntary sector groups we have,” Creasy continued.
“Fundamentally these need resources and we are not getting them,” said Creasy, a former Fabian Society intern who became a Labour MP in 2010 after working as a parliamentary researcher.
In October, Breitbart London reported news that the Metropolitan Police was set to splash out almost a million pounds extra a year expanding a controversial scheme involving £150 a day anti-racist “community assessors” who monitor recruits to weed out officers who may hold negative views of minority ethnic groups in the capital.
The announcement that Scotland Yard would be hiring “at least 200 more people” in the role — which requires no formal qualifications nor employment history from candidates, who are asked only for “life experience” and “an appreciation of diversity issues” — prompted questions over the force’s priorities at a time when figures showed a 44 percent surge in London’s murder rate.
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