As I write this, London is going through a knife crime epidemic, the worst situation we’ve seen in years. Over 1,000 young people have been stabbed or attacked over the last year. As the Deputy Mayor of London, under Boris Johnson, I regularly wept my way through memorial services devastated at the loss of yet another young life and the impact on the grieving families and friends.
I witnessed the work of many of the excellent organisations tackling this problem, often started after suffering their own personal losses – the Ben Kinsella Trust and Barry and Margaret Mizen come to mind. But there are many others who are working to tackle this across our capital city.
In Ken Livingstone’s last year as Mayor of London, 27 young people were killed on London’s streets. After Boris’s arrival and the appointment of Kit Malthouse to take charge of London’s policing this figure gradually reduced, however over the last three years we have seen a significant increase again with 132 people losing their lives in 2018, many of them teenagers.
This is a time for communities to come together, it is not just a case of leaving this to the police. Schools need to be safe places for children and just as we are now focussing on the damage of social media, there must be no knives in our schools, and our streets need to be safe so that young people do not need to carry a knife.
There are so many organisations that want to offer support, sport, opportunities and training for the next generation, but they are constantly saying we have no space – we can open up our school premises – not to take more time of the teachers, but for those voluntary organisations to have the opportunity of using school gyms and playgrounds. There are fantastic cadet groups all across the City, not just the scouts and the guides, but the police cadets, the fire cadets, the air and army cadets, and long term groups like the boy’s brigade, all of these organisations under the “YOU London” umbrella.
The decisions about what needs to happen in each community need to be made locally, whilst I warmly welcome the Government’s extra funding for the Youth Endowment fund, and the early intervention programmes, these need to be in partnership with committed local policing and joint engagement with schools, councils, and voluntary organisations working with local employers and shops to have a co-ordinated approach. Local shops and businesses can be part of the Safe Haven network ensuring that our young people can feel safe in their daily lives.
The local police usually know exactly where the likely hotspots for trouble and confrontation are and they need the day-to-day resources to tackle these, but the longer term solutions rest in providing alternative options for our young people to be able to engage in meaningful training and job opportunities which will be more profitable and enduring than the quick fix of a gang life.
The work of the Jimmy Mizen trust encourages young people to also be part of that change – pupils have hosted safety conferences so that they can be part of the decision making, encourages their leadership potential and supports their self-confidence to be part of making the change in their community.
London has recently seen the change under the current Mayor to larger Command units losing our local Borough Commanders, and Borough command structure – thus it is even more important for the police to get to know their local area and to enable the public to get to know their local safer neighbourhood teams and how to contact them.
With eight murders so far in 2019, and more with life-changing injuries, local communities need to be listened to so that we stop losing our young people to knife crime.