Police chiefs have described the recent spate of knife crime in the country as a national emergency and are calling for action to stop the bloodshed.

There have been 17 homicides in London so far this year, six of which happened in nine days. Five people were stabbed on Tuesday, four of whom were attacked in less than eight hours and one who died.

In Birmingham three teenagers have died in knife attacks in the space of two weeks, and 269 knife crimes have been recorded so far this year. Hazrat Umar, 17, was killed in Bordesley Green on Monday; Abdullah Muhammad, 16, died in Small Heath last week; and seven days earlier Sidali Mohamed, 16, was stabbed outside a college in Highgate.

David Jamieson, the West Midlands police and crime commissioner, said in Birmingham city centre on Wednesday: “I would ask the home secretary now to give a special grant here in the West Midlands to help the chief constable and his staff actually tackling what is a serious outbreak we’ve seen here in Birmingham and other parts of the West Midlands.

“This is a national emergency, and we must do something about that exclusion of children because those children are on almost an immediate path into crime and into violence.”

Richard Garside, the director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said it was not surprising to see sudden increases in the number of knife attacks in certain areas before they quietened down. He explained this trend was a result of geographical and temporal clustering.

He said: “There’s geographical clustering that’s related to poverty. There’s a reason for example why mostly young males are being stabbed in parts of Lambeth, for example, or parts of Birmingham rather than outside Buckingham Palace or a village in rural Oxfordshire.

“Then there’s a temporal clustering where something happens, there’s a retaliation, and then a response to that.” He added the current spate of attacks are a result of “toxic combination of both”.

Garside said it was not accurate to describe the spate of knife crime as a national emergency. “It’s a very small number of the general population that’s either being victimised by this or in fear of their lives. It’s why these incidents seem quite shocking and why the policy world seems to fail to address it in a systematic level because for the vast majority of people, this doesn’t affect them.” He added this results in a level of “shock and complacency that sit side by side”.

Earlier this year, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, introduced measures where children as young as 12 could be hit with new asbo-style orders designed to clamp down on knife violence. But the move has been criticised by anti-violence campaigners.

Pippa Goodfellow, the director of Standing Committee for Youth Justice, said: “Knife crime Asbos are a knee-jerk reaction that let down the communities that are suffering most. Labelling them as ‘preventative’ is completely misleading. There is no evidence that they will prevent harmful behaviour or address the root causes of knife-carrying. Those working with young people to tackle these issues on the ground have not been listened to. Their voices must be heard. Reaching yet again for the easy but ineffective punitive option is not the answer.”