The number of knife crime-related incidents in England and Wales has reached a record high, rising by seven per cent over the previous year.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that in the year to September, police logged 44,771 knife crime offences. There were 617 homicides last year in England and Wales, with 40 per cent of those murders being committed with a knife or sharp object.
Helen Ross from the Office for National Statistics Centre for Crime and Justice said: “In the last year, there has been no change in overall levels of crime, however, this hides variations in different types of crime.”
“For example, there have been continued rises in fraud, vehicle offences and robbery, and decreases in burglary and homicide,” adding that: “Although the number of offences involving a knife has continued to increase, there is a mixed picture across police forces”.
The figures, which do not include data from Greater Manchester, due to a discrepancy in data logging, underline the scale of the knife crime epidemic currently plaguing the United Kingdom, a country with very strict gun laws.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan sought to play down the figures, and said in a statement: “The scourge of violent crime is still rising — and faster elsewhere than here in London. The only solution is to be both tough on crime & on the causes. When will the Government finally fully reverse their cuts to the police, youth services, schools, sports facilities & councils?”
Under the leadership of the London mayor, however, the number of child stabbing victims in the capital reached an 11-year-high in November and the murder rate in London climbed to its highest level in a decade, with three men dying in one knife attack last week.
Tackling the scourge of knife crime has been a top priority of British police; however, street gangs in Britain are increasingly stashing knives and other weapons in playgrounds and parks to evade stop-and-search tactics taken by police, Detective Chief Superintendent Lee Hill told The Times.
The senior officer said that in a series of recent weapons sweeps in north London, police found knives, swords, and a machete at just one children’s playground in Islington.
“These knives could have fallen into the wrong hands; worse, they could have been acquired by young children,” said Mr Hill.
In October a trauma surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, Martin Griffiths, warned that knife crime criminals are updating their methods in order to brutally maim and disfigure their victims.
“We’re seeing more complex wounds in areas where bits join together on the body, junctional areas, like the neck and the groin, and that suggests a movement towards more severe wounds and more numbers of wounds. We’re seeing more victims with multiple injuries,” he told the BBC.
“I hope it’s just a blip, but I worry there’s a change in attitude towards knife injuries. That people are becoming better educated in how to cause damage,” Griffiths added.
While knife crime and violent assaults have continued to surge in the United Kingdom, murder levels have not grown at the same rate, a discrepancy attributed to the hard work of experienced trauma surgeons in London, who have become expert at saving the lives of severely wounded people who would have otherwise become murder victims.
Breitbart London reported a 2018 study which found over 1,600 murders were in effect prevented over the preceding decade by special emergency care in the country, with surgeons with military experience and service in theatres like Afghanistan and Iraq comparing London hospitals to war zones.
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