Knife deaths are not causing the “collective outrage” they should because the majority of victims are from black communities, a top police officer has said.

Martin Hewitt, an assistant commissioner at the Met police, said that, although the police are putting “enormous effort” into tackling knife crimes, not enough preventative work was being done.

His comments come as charity campaigners have warned that London has reached a crisis point in violent crime after eight people were killed in seven days in the capital.

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In total 26 people have been murdered by knives this year alone. Six of them were teenagers, and most of them were black. Hewitt told BBC News that he fears this is having an impact on how people react and how the issue is tackled.

He said: “I do fear sometimes that because the majority of those that are injured or killed are coming from certain communities and very often the black communities in London, it doesn’t get the sense of collective outrage that it ought to do and really get everyone to a place where we are all doing everything we can to prevent this from happening.

“It’s an enormous effort on our part. We are putting enormous resources in to try and stem the flow of the violence and having some success at doing that. But collectively we all ought to be looking at this and seeing how we can prevent it.”

Meanwhile, Patrick Green, the chief executive of knife-crime awareness charity the Ben Kinsella Trust, said authorities had not done enough to educate young people on the dangers of carrying knives, despite a rise in violent attacks. He said: “We are at crisis point. We are seeing a steady increase in violent crime, and I think things may well get worse before they get better.

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“I think what we are seeing now is that we haven’t done enough to help educate young people not to carry knives in the first place or to turn away from violence and I think until we do we are not really going to solve this problem.”

Green added that long-term solutions would take time before they became effective and said it would not be possible to “arrest our way out” of the problem.

He said: “It’s not like flicking a switch. We can’t just turn this around really quickly. We have an overstretched police force doing the best that it can in terms of enforcement, but we haven’t invested enough in helping young people understand carrying a knife won’t protect them, it won’t solve conflicts, and we need to do far more around that approach to tackle this issue.”

The charity was set up after the murder of 16-year-old Ben Kinsella, who was stabbed to death in Islington in 2008 after a night out celebrating the end of his GCSEs.

Green, who joined the charity in 2012, said a raft of measures including education, mental health support and social service efforts are needed to curb “the underlying issues that drive young people to violence and to carry knives”.