Approach To Knife Crime Has To Be More Holistic

THE solution to the knife crime epidemic has to be proactive, not reactive.

Essex Police Federation wants to see a more holistic approach to tackling the rising tide of knife possession, as new figures show over 22,000 knife and weapon possession offences were recorded over the year to March.

That figure represents a steep rise of 34% since 2015.

Essex Police received £1.76m from the Home Office, which the force says is being spent on its anti-knife campaign Operation Sceptre.

Chairman Steve Taylor said: “We would like to see the money spent on better equipment to help us deal with knife crime when we encounter it. For example, slash-proof gloves. Maybe we could be better equipped to be more proactive in the area of knife crime if we have more pieces of equipment to help us do it.

“The real solution for knife crime, and this is my view, is multi-agency. It’s educational. It’s societal. It’s not just reactive. At this stage, the only part the police can play is reactive.

“Overtime as a solution is a one-time thing – once you’ve spent that £1.7million on overtime, what do you do with tomorrow’s problem? Investing in equipment, in training, maybe you’d get more bang for your buck.”

Stop-and-search is also an important tactic for officers in combatting knife and weapon possession.

Steve explained: “[Tactics have to] include stop-and-search. Once of the reasons, you could argue, is we don’t stop-and-search as effectively as we could do, because we’re on our own.

“Maybe we’re less inclined to be proactive when we are single-crewed. Maybe one of the reasons is officers thinking, ‘I don’t want to stop and turn over that group of individuals there because I don’t want to get stuck with a needle’.

“Spending more time on patrol isn’t the answer because these are not new officers. We’ve not got a cupboard full of officers that we can deploy just for the issue of the day. They’re officers, invariably, on overtime, [it’s about] stress and workloads.”