Despite the galloping developments in trauma medicine which have otherwise helped murder rates fall while stabbings rise across the country, London has still defied overall trends, and even lockdowns keeping many people at home to witness a record year of youth murders.
Two murders on the same day last week pushed the sad toll of murders of teenagers in London to 30 in 2021, a new record. The next-nearest was 29 underaged teens killed in 2009, and the LondonWorld local-focus site claims 2021’s killings are the highest since the Second World War.
The two latest murders which pushed the city’s teen murders to record heights took place on Thursday, with a 16-year-old boy stabbed in West London just hours after a separate incident saw a 15-year-old boy stabbed in South London. As The Times reports, gang crime and street violence are blamed for the record slayings of young people.
Community-funded crime tracking project Murdermap claims, meanwhile, there were 127 murder and manslaughter cases of all kinds across London in 2021. 80 were said to have been perpetrated with a knife or sharp instrument, the project said, 18 with no weapon, and 12 with firearms. Full and official government statistics on violent crime in London for 2021 will be released later this year.
The mayoralty of Sadiq Khan has long been associated with rising violent crime, even as crime fell elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Breitbart London reported in 2019 the first three years of Khan’s leadership saw considerable rises in knife crime, robbery, and gun crime. Indeed, knife crime peaked at an all-time high just before lockdown, which saw crime fall across the board as people were asked to stay indoors.
While it has continued a steady rise, murders in London have not yet reached the all-time peak that was witnessed in the 1990s, however, despite ‘knife crime’ — including non-fatal stabbings — soaring. In fact, it seems the true scale of violent crime in London and elsewhere is masked to some extent from the public by considerable advances in trauma medicine, meaning many people stabbed today who would have died in previous decades are now fortunate enough to live, breaking some of the link between stabbings and murders.
As Breitbart London reported on this positive medical development — which nevertheless gives ineffective political leaders a figleaf to hide behind as murder statistics are more in the public eye than non-fatal stabbings — in 2018:
…apologists for Mayor Khan have stressed that, despite massive increases in offences such as acid and machete attacks, moped-enabled crime, and terrorism which have been apparent during his time in office, homicides do remain below their high points in the 1990s — but this does not account for the fact that the establishment of the London Trauma System incorporating specialist Major Trauma Centres and Trauma Units in 2010 has greatly increased victims’ odds of surviving potentially mortal injuries in recent years.
Other factors improving the survival rates of victims of violence include the expansion of London’s Air Ambulance Service, which is now attending more stabbings and shootings than road traffic accidents for the first time in its 30-year-history, and the widespread adoption of techniques developed on the battlefield in war zones like Afghanistan by doctors and paramedics, such as the routine use of tourniquets.
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