1st editorial Be Safe

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Shopkeeper Ashok Patel, pictured top was About stabbed repeatedly 5,800 in the head as he bravely officers in 32 boroughs are defended his shop from armed involved in Operation thieves last December.. Mr Patel, Big Wing which is looking 64, grabbed a baseball bat to chase off into crimes like robbery, burglathe raiders but when he slipped the thieves ry and gang crime.Police are serving pounced on him, using kitchen knives to stab warrants, conducting stop and search and his head, stomach and hand and then have installed search arches at transport hubs. left him for dead. Mr Patel, who has Among those arrested was a boy of 15 who was owned the off licence for 13 years, found concealing a knife in his underpants in Islington, spent two days in hospital the Met said.The arrests made since Wednesday morning recovering after receivincludes a 17-year-old male arrested in Islington, north London, ing 24 stitches to a after a loaded revolver was discovered hidden in a moped outside his deep wound in home and a man arrested in Hillingdon, west London, on suspicion of three recent knife-point robberies in Drayton.The Met said knife crime offences had his head.

fallen by 11.5% during 2013-14, with 1,300 fewer offences - the lowest figure in the last seven years.The drop in knife crime offences was driven Only by the fall in robberies, the Met said, with knife crime robberies last down 19% (1,300 fewer offences).Violent knife crimes that week a fatal resulted in injury had fallen by just 1%.Crimes where a stabbing was knife has been used to injure are down by 0.7% (22 reported from the fewer offences), which includes the number of Blackberry BBM party in injured victims aged under 25 years. London, yet data compiled by Temporary Det Ch Supt Gordon the Guardian shows that the highAllison, head of Trident which est rate of severe knife related crime deals with gang and youth recorded in the capital in the 2010-2011 violence, said knife financial year is less than 0.5% of total crime for crime continued each area.The highest number of murder knife victoity”. tims (or otherwise where the weapon used was a “sharp instrument”), for 2010 and 2011 calendar years, was only six - in just two London boroughs.As the chart below shows, in most London authorities the numbers of such deaths were on average between two and four. That being said, the figures for Southwark, where the stabbing took place just after a Jessie J concert, spiked from no homicide victims of knife crime in 2010 to six in 2011.In order to paint an accurate picture of seriously injured knife crime victims across London we cross-referenced crime data from the Metropolitan Police’s website with scraped knife crime figures from this freedom of information response also provided by the Met. The merged data shows the percent of severe stabbings in individual boroughs in the financial year 2010-2011.Haringey recorded the highest rate of seriously injured knife crime victims in London which was 0.31% of the total levels of crime re Crime.



Up to 1,000 people a month are victims of knife crime in London, according to alarming new statistics.They show that around 400 a month are being injured in attacks — many of them seriously — while others are being threatened. In the first four months of the year, 11 people were murdered in knife attacks. Four teenagers have been stabbed to death so far this year.The statistics, obtained after a Freedom of Information request, reveal that there were 1,038 victims of knife crime in London in January, of which 410 were injured and four killed. The remainder were threatened with knives. The figures for February show there was a total of 818 victims, in March there were 993, and in April there were 892 victims. The number injured in attacks reached a peak of 420 in April, the equivalent of 14 people a day.In total for the first four months, 284 were seriously injured with knives, 413 suffered “moderate” injuries and 870 minor injuries.The figures come as Mohamed Abdullahi, 20, was stabbed to death in Islington on Saturday in a suspected gang feud. Lyn Costello, the founder of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, said: “Although we have seen less homicides through knife crime than in the same period of previous years, the figures for knife crime overall remain astoundingly high. We must continue to do all we can in order to reduce these numbers.” Camilla Batmanghelidjh, the founder of youth charity Kids Company, also said knife crime levels in London remained very high. “We do not see any signs that the violence among young people on the street is going down. A Scotland Yard spokesman said the number of people in London injured as a result of knives fell 28% between April 2012 and March 2013.



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Crime, by definition, is illegal, and so is very hard to measure. Police figures generally undercount crime substantially and can be extremely misleading. Accordingly recorded crime statistics need to be treated with great caution and have sometimes been shown to show opposite trends to victim surveys or to violence as measured by hospital intake.[1] However, police figures are usually the only available way to gauge local crime.

Greater London is served by three police forces; the Metropolitan Police which is responsible for policing the vast majority of the capital and is geographically divided into 32 Borough Operational Command Units, the City of London Police which is responsible for The Square Mile of the City of London, and the British Transport Police which polices the rail network and London Underground.


Until the late 1990s crime figures for varying crime types were not released to the general public at individual police force level. The annual publication ‘Crime in England & Wales’ produced by the Home Office began to break the figures down to a smaller area in 1996. [2] Crime figures in England & Wales during the late 1990s and early 2000s were often misinterpreted in the media and scrutinised because of frequent changes in the way crimes were counted and recorded that lead to rises in the crime category ‘Violence Against the Person’.

Commenting on figures from 1 April 1998 onwards, the then-Home Secretary Jack Straw said “changes in the way crime statistics are compiled are in line with recommendations by senior police officers. They are intended to give a more accurate picture of the level of offences”.[4] The largest increases were recorded in the “Violence Against the Person” category owing to the inclusion of common assault figures to accompany other offence types within this category that include assault occasioning actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, harassment, murder, possession of offensive weapons and a selection of other low volume violent crimes grouped together by the Metropolitan Police as ‘other violence’.


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