Knife crime better than last year...

Official figures released today suggest that the current panic surrounding the ostensible rise in knife crime has more to do with an increase in news reports than actual incidents involving knives. The British Crime Survey, which acquires figures via interviews with members of the public, claims that, despite the popular perceptions that insist we're all destined for a stabbing on our way to the shops, knife incidents are actually down by 43,000 on the last year. In London, there has been a 16% decrease in 'knife enabled' crimes.

Considering the amount of fuss that all three of the major parties have been kicking up about stabbings of recent, the results will perhaps come as a surprise for many of us. Most likely the whole ruckus can be attributed to them either having nothing better to talk about or wanting to distract us from something else - like their expenses, for example.

Obviously, it's a bit shitty for people to be getting stabbed in the streets, and we should do anything that we can do in order to stop it. However, as the problem has clearly been around for a while, and at worse levels in the past, then the moral panic that politicians and the media have collectively whipped up of recent can be seen as a demonstration of the ways in which politicians try to feed us problems that we don't really have in order to keep a hold over us. That's not to say that the knife epidemic isn't a problem, but that politicians have benefited from amplifying its status.

The figures also revealed that crime in general is decreasing and that the frequency of knife incidents is higher in cities than in rural areas.

Written by Oli Anderson on 17 Jul 2008 1:53 PM. Permalink