A wave of knife crime in London might be directly linked to the police budget cuts instigated by the UK’s coalition government and continued under British Prime Minister Theresa May, a former head of Scotland Yard has suggested.
Speaking to the Observer after a week in which five people were stabbed to death in London, former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service Ian Blair said that that violent crime had risen alongside a reduction in police funding might not be a coincidence.
In 2010, when the Conservatives came to power with the Liberal Democrats and began cutting police spending, the British capital had 4.1 officers per 1,000 Londoners, but by 2016-2017 the ratio had dropped to 3.3 officers per 1,000, according to figures from city hall.
The total number of offenses involving a knife or bladed instrument recorded by the metropolitan police in the year to March rose to 40,147, a seven-year high.
“Crime is clearly an indicator of societal health, particularly violent crime. We know that crime just about peaked in 1993 and went on going down until something like 2010 to 2012, and then started to go back up again,” Blair said.
“One of the things that a statistician always looks for is to see whether a change in behavior is a coincidence or whether there is causation. It does seem odd that the cut in budget for policing by 20 percent coincides with a significant rise in crimes of all sorts. Is it coincidence or is it causation?” he asked.
His comments follow warnings by British MPs last week that police cuts might have “ dire consequences for public safety.”
Trust in the police is “breaking down” as forces struggle to respond to crime because of government cuts, said a report by the legislature’s Public Accounts Committee.
Former British home secretary Amber Rudd has angered senior officers by claiming that police cuts were not to blame for the surge in knife crime.
Blair, who as commissioner between 2005 and 2008 tried to find “lasting solutions” to youth violence, also said that the positive impact of neighborhood policing was “probably fading under the pressure of finance.”
More broadly, he said that the threat of an emerging far right and its divisive discourse should be viewed extremely seriously.
“At the end of my period of office, the far right had done what the far right always does, which is break up into lots and lots” of factions, he said.
“But what we have now is a nastiness with the English Defence League and so on. Which I imagine is of deep significance to those who are concerned about the integrity of the British state,” he added.
PROMOTING TOLERANCE
Blair is chair of trustees at the Woolf Institute, which is affiliated with Cambridge University and aims to encourage tolerance between people of different beliefs.
He said that the institute planned to carry out research into the effects on British society of the increasing polarization.
Among other initiatives the institute, which has just celebrated its 20th anniversary, is building a “UK inclusivity index” to measure and map levels of intolerance in different parts of Britain.
“It will be what we can do to assist people to understand what polarization means, what inclusivity means,” Blair said.
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