Fight Against Knife Crime Simply Needs More Officers

GETTING more officers on the streets is a vital weapon in the war against knife crime, says South Yorkshire Police Federation.

Figures show that in the 12 months to the end of March 2019, police and the courts dealt with 22,041 possession offences for knives and weapons. That is a 34% increase on 2015 and the highest total since 2010.

South Yorkshire Police will get £1.6m from the Home Office to combat the problem in the region and to pay for a violence reduction unit (VRU).

But the cash is a ‘sticking plaster’ solution, according to South Yorkshire Police Federation Chairman Steve Kent, who sees getting more officers on the beat as the long-term way to resolve the issue.

He said: “The only way we’re going to deal with this long-term is to have more officers on the beat. It’s simple as that. More officers on streets, more officers on the beat.

“It’s good that we’ve got this £1.6million, but that is being run completely on overtime. So, you’ve got officers that are quite happy to do it and are doing it, but they’re tired because they’re already having to do their normal workload and then come in on their days off for overtime to do this.

“So, it’s a bit of a sticking plaster. This trend [knife crime] is rising, what we need to do is return to old-fashioned policing where we’ve got cops on the street, out there, not unfairly targeting people but looking out there with their eyes and ears and if they find people who they suspect of carrying knives and drugs etc., stopping and searching them.”

And policing must be more proactive, he said.

Steve added: “We’ve become so reactive as a police force because there’s so few of us reacting to the number of incidents there are, we’ve never got time to be proactive and to go out there and to do some old fashioned police work, which is what the public want.

“We’ve seen a decline in London with stop and searches, and we’ve seen the result. There’s no better measuring tool than that.

“Yes, this £1.6million is good news because it’s given us the money to go and fund it. But long-term there need to be more resources to give officers the ability to go out and tackle the issues proactively.”