Speaking after three people die in capital, mayor says public health approach will take time

Efforts to reduce violent crimes such as stabbings by treating them in part as a public health issue could take up to a decade to bring proper results, London’s mayor has said, following the deaths of three young people in the capital since Thursday.

Sadiq Khan, who is facing pressure following an increase in such crimes this year, said the police response also played a role, and that the rise in murders should also be seen in the context of cuts to policing and public services.

The Home Office minister Victoria Atkins denied that police cuts could be blamed, saying a government study had found no apparent connection between police numbers and earlier rises in violent crime.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme after three males between the ages of 15 and 22 died in stabbing incidents on Thursday, Friday and Sunday, Khan said London had since 2016 followed the example of Glasgow, which saw a significant drop in violent crime after establishing a violence reduction unit to treat the problem in a holistic way.

But he said the effects would not be immediate. “It’ll take some time. The reason I know it’ll take some time is because of the lessons we’ve learned from places like Glasgow in Scotland, where it took them some time to turn this thing around.”

Asked how long it might take, Khan said: “According to Glasgow – and we’ve got the violence reduction unit in Glasgow helping us – to really make significant progress can take up to 10 years, and a generation.”

On Sunday, police arrested two men after a man, believed to be 22, died following a stabbing shortly after midday in Anerley, south-east London. On Friday, 17-year-old Malcolm Mide-Madariola died after being stabbed outside Clapham South tube station. The day before Jay Hughes, 15, was fatally stabbed near a chicken shop in Bellingham, south-east London.

Khan said the challenge was to break a wider culture in which the use of knives had become normalised among many young people.

“The reason why they say this is because they saw in Scotland what we’re seeing in London, which is children in primary school thinking not only is it OK to carry a knife, but it gives them a sense of belonging, joining a criminal gang. It makes them feel safer, and they don’t see anything wrong in getting involved in this sort of behaviour,” he said.

“On the one hand we’ve got to be tough in relation to enforcement, and that’s why we’ve got officers as part of the violent crime taskforce doing intelligence-led stop and searches, taking knives off our streets, offensive weapons off our streets, guns off our streets, making arrests.

“At the same time, on the other hand, we’ve got to be giving young people constructive things to do, investing in youth centres, youth workers, after-school clubs.”

Khan said efforts had been hampered by a significant drop in police numbers, and a loss of facilities such as youth centres. “In London we’ve had a public health approach in the context of record cuts in policing and public services.”

Some critics of Khan’s approach have called for a resumption in routine stop-and-search operations, a tactic which has been used less since Theresa May as home secretary changed the approach amid concerns people were being unfairly targeted.

The London mayor said the Metropolitan police had set up a taskforce to target “habitual knife carriers” in certain areas, which had made more than 1,300 arrests in six months, and that there had been a wider increase in stop and search.

He added: “But you’ll appreciate that because we have fewer officers than any time since 2003 at a time when our population is going up, it’s more and more difficult.”

Atkins disputed this, saying: “As a result of that very intensive piece of work we found that the claim about police numbers isn’t supported by the evidence of previous spikes in serious violence.”

Atkins said the “nature of crime is changing”, for example with gang activities being organised via social media.

She said: “Gangs are far more ruthless than they used to be, the levels of violence that doctors are seeing in A&E shows that incidents that before perhaps wouldn’t have resulted in fatalities now are resulting in fatalities,” she said.

“When we talk about the nature of crime we’re taking into account, for example, that the gangs that are behind the vast majority of these murders, are using social media to communicate.”