A 14-year-old boy died, two police officers and two citizens are hospitalized in serious conditions, not life-threatening, but will undergo surgery. It is the sad, yet another, assessment of the latest knife attack in London.
It’s just after 7 in the morningand a thirty-five-year-old, slightly bearded, wearing a yellow sweatshirt and black trousers, wanders around the English capital with “a samurai sword”, a machete of at least 50 centimeters, to attack anyone who comes within range.
As we write the identity of the attacker is not disclosed and, it seems, there is no direct link with Islamic terrorism. Yet, as reported by the Telegraph, witnesses say that the man threatened the police by shouting “do you believe in God?”. Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, said he was “absolutely devastated” by the attack. He was echoed by Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, stating that “such violence has no place on our streets”. The English press refers to it as the “sword attack”.
We are in Hainault, east London, in a residential neighborhood, and there are once again a mother and father mourning a barely adolescent son, an innocent man stabbed in King Charles’ country. Sunak said this attack, along with the rise in knife crime in London, would “shine a spotlight on the reality of Labor in power”. The statement is in full election campaign style, given that tomorrow, May 2, Londoners will vote in the mayoral election
The Labor Party Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a European capital, already in his second term and seeking a third, for his part replies that he has “inherited cuts to the police and services imposed by the government”. Khan speaks the truth. But he is still not exempt from responsibility.
Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows that the closure of 70% of London’s police stations, due to austerity policies that began in 2010, led to an 11% increase in murders and assaults in nearby neighbourhoods. The closure of stations reduced “police deterrence” and increased levels of violence, the report said.
In 2010, the English prime minister was the conservative Cameron: from then until Sunak, through May, Johnson and Truss – all conservative governments – no one bothered to remedy the crisis of agents and security. For years, the controversy has been going on between Scotland Yard and the government over the introduction of more severe measures against the police, imposed by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May: since then the police have been less free to stop and search suspects.
The measure was introduced in response to requests dAndanti-racism movements. In fact, after the famous riots in England in 2011, the practice that the English call StopWatch, or the possibility of stopping alleged perpetrators without too many elements; and we began to work against the excessive presence of whites among the police forces. This resulted in a decline in applications for the police which coincided with government cuts in resources for the Metropolitan Police.
The riots affected several neighborhoods of London such as Lambeth, Haringey, Enfield, Waltham Forest and Tottenham, devastating them. The urban warfare led to 215 arrests. As in the United States, in that case too it all started with the killing of a twenty-nine-year-old black man by the police. From the London suburbs, the revolts spread throughout the country, directed by “civil rights” groups, capable of influencing the government’s choices. It may be a coincidence, but it is since then that crimes related to stabbings have started to grow exponentially.
One of the first things a statistician does, is to see if a change in behavior is a coincidence or if there is a causal link. Since 2016, 70% of police stations have suffered cuts due to austerity policies. According to data, published last week, by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), knife crime has increased in London by 22% in just one year.
There were 14,626 stabbings in 2023, the highest figure in the last eight years. That means 40 knife attacks a day. And if you look at the data from 2016, just before Sadiq Khan was elected mayor, knife crime increased by 54%. Nearly two-thirds of Londoners believe crime and public safety in the capital are getting worse, and half of teenagers in England say they have witnessed or experienced violence: crime is an everyday reality for young people. In London it is common to see teenagers armed with knives as long as their legs and entire neighborhoods are seen as war zones. Just as it is equally normal to walk the streets, not only in the suburbs, to see “altars” with flowers and photos dedicated to lives tragically cut short by a stabbing.
In 2017, Mayor Khan thought of ato strategy: publish the London Knife Crime, an 80-page dossier to report the problem and also give advice to knife shops in London to reduce the risk of “accidental sales” (as those for terrorist and criminal buyers were called). In 2019, the Home Office allocated £460,000 to six British companies to develop new technologies useful for identifying people carrying knives in crowded places. Also in 2019, a metal detector was considered to be installed in the West End of London. Police were sent to the center of a sidewalk to invite passers-by to inspect. However, it has already been five years since, on the initiative of the government, first aid programs for victims of stabbings were introduced in schools.
Sadiq Khan, meanwhile, has preferred to dedicate huge resources to combat online racism and £34m to environmental projects: a disputed use of money because, they complain in the city, it could have been used to increase the number of officers. The mayor of the capital also obtained that metal detectors be installed in schools to detect the possession of knives, but it is not known how many have been found and seized, just as there is no official statistic for the declared victims of Islamic terrorism. It is imposed by the government that all this data is not made public because it is susceptible to “racism”.
If London has surpassed New York in terms of monthly murders, it’s certainly not just the Labor mayor’s fault. In 2012, the Metropolitan Police launched Gangs Matrix, a database useful for profiling London gang members in order to identify, evaluate and prevent incidents as well as map weapons in the city. In October 2022 it was closed because it was judged to be a “racist system”: annual statistics periodically revealed that 72% of those identified on Gangs Matrix as “responsible for violence reported by gangs” are people of colour, immigrants and Muslims: discriminatory data for the government and the associations that pushed for the closure of the monitoring system. Since last February, a similar system has been introduced, but radically modified: data can only be kept for three months. This way it will be less racist.
