Labour has called on the government to reverse police cuts
New statistics show that there was an increase in knife crime, murder and robbery in the year ending in September 2018.
The number of murder victims increased by 14% year-on-year from 649 to 739. These figures exclude the terror attacks in London and Manchester.
The number of robberies recorded by police increased by 17%. The Office for National Statistics said this was evidence of a “real change in these crimes”.
There was an 8% increase in offences involving a knife or sharp instrument.
Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said:
“Serious violent crime continues to rise yet the government remains in denial about the effects of its own policies. The Tories have cut police officer numbers.
“They have also exacerbated all the causes of crime, including inequality, poverty, poor mental health care as well the crisis in our schools, especially school exclusions.
“Labour is committed to increasing police numbers and to reversing the austerity policies which are contributing to crime.”
Since they came to power in 2010, the Conservatives have been cutting the public sector as part of their ‘austerity’ agenda.
Since 2010, their governments have reduced police numbers by more than 45,000 in England and Wales. This is a 19% drop in the workforce.
A disproportionate amount of knife crime takes place in London. Labour’s London Assembly team has called for the government to grant it more resources to tackle the issue.
5 Responses to “Police record an increase in serious crimes amid cuts”
Patrick Newman
I hope someone has properly briefed Ms Abbott about the costs of recruiting more police officers (10,000 equates to approximately to half a billion) as people may remember her car crash interview in the 2017 election! However, it is wrong to see the big increase in crime as just a matter of police numbers. The whole austerity programme has had devastating effects on inner-city communities with losses of public services across the board. All cuts are factors in not dealing with the underlying causes of crime – schools, community and youth services, probation, community health, mental health, cost of living and benefits. Labour in power will have their job cut out. May has switched off and her concerns are all about staying as Prime Minister for a little bit longer!
Tom Sacold
We need proper intelligence led, stop and search operations in all areas of high knife crime. As always the only really effective deterrent against crime is probability of being caught and locked up.
Dave Roberts
Let us look at the the ethnic origins of vast majority of the perpetrators and victims because it seems to me that all commentators are in denial about this and not just the Guardianista loony left with their ” its always somebody else’s fault approach”. The simple fact is that African Caribbeans who make up less than ten percent of the population of London are vastly over represented as either, as I have said, perpetrators and or victims of knife and gun crime in London. Other groups are either victims accidentally or very rarely perpetrators. Why is this?
The answer as far as I can see is that with the said African Caribbean community there is an accepted culture expressed in both music and behavior of violence, both misogenistic and homophobic, and an exaggerated cult of masculinity which manifests itself in an aggressive for so called ” respect” which is in fact not that at all but some kind of deference to the behavior displayed.
Hip hop, rap and now drill music with all of the above concomitant phenomena is now favourably reviewed in the liberal media as a valid genre instead of the abomination that it is.
Until there is an outright rejection of this ” culture” and a move to if not eradicate it or at least to drive it underground then all efforts at stopping the wave of knife and gun crime that we are witnessing is doomed to fail, drowned in the meaningless rhetoric that we see above both in the article and the comments so far.
Dave Roberts
Well? Anything to say for yourselves? Or have I won the argument?
Dave Roberts
The situation then, is it not, is that the vast majority of the perpetrators and victims of the current knife and gun crime wave are of West Indian descent but nobody on the left wants to talk about it? I rest my case.