Knife Crime Down but questions over stop and search persist

The Metropolitan police yesterday claimed a limited success in the fight against knife crime, citing a 12% fall in incidents since May, but at the price of long-term resentment over the widespread use of stop-and-search needed to achieve it.

Commander Mark Simmons - who is in charge of the Met's Operation Blunt 2, launched in May to tackle knife crime - told a seminar organised by the Commons home affairs select committee that, while they did not give the whole picture, the statistics showed a significant fall: "We think we are on the right track," he told MPs.

He said it did not detract from the individual tragedies of the 22 teenagers killed this year to say that the number of young victims of knife crime had fallen by 18% since May.

Simmons said the use of stop-and-search powers had been an "absolutely key tactic" for the police, with 150,000 searches since the campaign started in May. He said there had been 5,000 arrests as a result of the these encounters and that 3,200 knives had been recovered. He defended the use of "section 60" searches under which the police do not even need to have "grounds for reasonable suspicion"; he argued that the power had not been used randomly but had been based on intelligence and profiling about the risks at specific locations at specific times of the day.

Collection of knives seized by police. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

The seminar - held in Stockwell, south London - heard leading criminologist Dr Marian Fitzgerald from the University of Kent outline her reservations about the use of section 60 stop-and-search powers, which has been authorised in 10 London boroughs as part of a drive against knife crime. 

She said while young people accepted stop-and-search if there were grounds for suspecting a crime, section 60 did not require the police to have any reasonable grounds for suspicion and in 97% of cases produced no result, with no knives found. This was bound to have a long-term impact on the predominantly young black people who found themselves repeatedly being searched.

But the criminologist also questioned whether the Met had the power to use stop-and-search powers in a routine way: "Section 60 [of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994] only allows them to be used in a designated place for 24 hours extending up to 36 hours in exceptional circumstances. I have not heard any explanation from the Met police how they now believe it is possible to use them on an almost permanent basis across 10 London boroughs," she said.