Another teenager has been stabbed to death in London, as Britain remains in the grip of a violent knife crime epidemic.
Metropolitan Police officers and the London Air Ambulance tended to the victim at Lanfrey Place, a stone’s throw from the West Kensington tube station, after he was attacked in broad daylight.
An official police statement relays that the victim, described as “a male, aged in his late teens”, was taken to a hospital in the city’s centre but died from “stab injuries to the chest”.
The slaying comes at almost the same time as the Met reports than another stabbing victim, a 37-year-old male attacked on March 3rd, has died of his injuries, and close on the heels of the particularly shocking and seemingly random killing of 17-year-old Explorer Scout Jodie Chesney in a public park in Romford.
“Someone knows who did this … We need for Jodie to have justice. No-one thinks this is OK. Surely nobody who knows the guy who did this thinks it is OK,” said Jodie Chesney’s father in a public appeal.
“You can’t get kudos for stabbing a 17-year-old in the back. So just dob them in, grass them up, this is not alright,” he told the press.
“It was obviously a murder as well, it wasn’t an accident … it was so ferocious, the attack. She lost so much blood. This was on purpose; someone meant to murder her.”
One 20-year-old male has been detained in connection with the killing, and police now believe up to four people were involved — having previously believed there were only two suspects.
Recently, the BBC spoke to former gang member Robert Bragg, who said he “wouldn’t be able to” count the number of people he has stabbed, explaining: “We wanted to be bad — look bad, become the gang that everyone feared. We had to carry out a lot of violent crimes to become that gang.”
He told the broadcaster that “Giving tougher sentences will prevent people from carrying knives because nobody wants to go to jail for 10 or 15 years just for carrying a knife.”
However, senior police officers and left-wing pundits such as Gary Younge seem unconvinced by the experienced criminal’s prescription, suggesting that “more policing, stiffer penalties and longer sentences” should be de-emphasised in favour of “understand[ing] knife crime as a public health issue.”