Knife Crime

Debate between Douglas Carswell and David Simpson

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about knife crime. I intend to speak for only about 10 or 12 minutes to give others the opportunity to contribute.

In September, only a few weeks ago, 17-year-old Jay Whiston died after being stabbed. I cannot say more or elaborate on the detail as the matter is to go before the courts. I can, however, say that Jay, a student at Tendring technology college, is desperately missed by his family and his loved ones. Jay’s death has raised concerns locally about knife crime in Clacton and I want to address some of them today.

Jay’s mother, Caroline Shearer, is a formidable woman, with enormous reserves of energy, determination and grit. However enormous and unimaginable her grief must be, she has not withdrawn into despair. She has set up a campaign organisation aimed at changing attitudes towards knives and knife crime—Only Cowards Carry. Caroline’s efforts have struck a chord in our part of Essex. Thousands of people have rallied to support her efforts. Young people, including some who never knew Jay, have volunteered to help. I was struck by this last Saturday, when a shop that was given voluntarily to the campaign group was staffed by dozens of young people. Many hundreds of people have come forward to show their support.

Why have Caroline’s campaign and the efforts of the local Gazette resonated so widely? Why have thousands of people signed up in support? Why have hundreds of people, including teachers, offered their time voluntarily to support Caroline’s efforts? Such support is a good thing. It shows a strong sense of civic-mindedness and community spirit in Clacton, and a sense that together we really can change things. However, part of the reason is a little less positive, because it is also a reflection of how widely shared concerns about knife crime are.

Too many young people have come forward in Clacton with a story to tell involving someone carrying a knife or offensive weapon. I have been struck since Jay’s death by how many young people have said things to me about knife crime. That shows how ubiquitous carrying a knife has become for some people in our community.

There have been far too many incidents in my part of Essex. Liam Mearns died of stab wounds last December. In January, a security guard was stabbed in Walton. A 24-year-old was stabbed in St John’s road. In March, a 23-year-old was stabbed in Dudley road. The strong prevailing thought among local people is: enough is enough; something must be done. However, as is so often the case when we hear people say that, we must ask what can be done. I shall offer my thoughts and will be keen to hear what colleagues think.

First, we need an acknowledgement that knife crime is a problem. It is a problem locally. Too often in the past, incidents involving knives have been treated as one-off, ad hoc incidents. I remember being told—I am not playing the blame game—that part of the problem was caused by sensationalism. We need to recognise that the problem of knife crime is not a problem of perception; it is a real, genuine problem. We must recognise that there are legitimate concerns that must call forth a public policy response. The criminal justice system and those in charge of it need to recognise that there are legitimate concerns, but the response of the criminal justice system has simply not been up to matching those concerns.

Secondly, we need local solutions. The Minister might be pleased to hear that I will not ask him to do anything. I am not looking for central Government action or hoping for ministerial fiat to solve the problem. I mean no disrespect to the current Minister, who is honourable, decent and highly competent, but decades of central direction and hoping that the man or woman in the Home Office will do something has been part of the problem. Generic, one-size-fits-all answers are almost by definition too bland to have specific meaning. We need the very opposite of a one-size-fits-all solution from Whitehall.

We now have locally elected police and crime commissioners. This debate is, as much as anything, an appeal to the Essex police and crime commissioner to act. Essex has an excellent police and crime commissioner, Nick Alston, who is absolutely not a party politician. He was born in a local police station. He has given years of service to his country and served in the Navy. He owes his loyalty not to the party machine—not to the dreadful party hierarchy in London—but to local people. Local people gave him the job by a narrow margin and local people will hold him to account. I hope that Commissioner Alston will take a lead and devise local policing priorities for Clacton that reflect local concerns about knife crime.

Whenever we have a debate about public service provision or public policy, we often hear about so-called postcode lotteries and the concern that provision differs among areas. A postcode lottery is what happens after years of policing being run from the Home Office. Paradoxically and counter-intuitively, when the setting of standards and priorities is left to the Home Office, we end up with postcode lottery policing. The police commissioner will give us the opposite of postcode lottery policing: postcode-specific policing.

Let me set out what I should like policing in the CO15 postcode to be. I should like there to be much more aggressive stopping and searching. The police need to stop and search on a targeted basis, and they need to be prepared to do it unapologetically. At certain times and in certain places in Clacton, young men—I am sorry to say that it is mainly young men involved; I do not mean any disrespect to the male half of the human species, but that tends to be the case—should be targeted, and stopped and searched. We should not be apologetic about that. Carrying a knife in Clacton ought to carry a risk of being stopped and searched, and if people are found to have a knife, they should be prosecuted and convicted.

Stop-and-search can be controversial. I am pleased to say that English people naturally resent any form of arbitrary intrusion, but people in Clacton would not regard such a measure as arbitrary. It would command local support and be regarded as legitimate. This is a brilliant example of how directly elected local police commissioners can do things because they have a certain degree of legitimacy and local support. If the police in Clacton stopped and searched certain people at certain times, it would command widespread support within the broader community.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining this debate. Northern Ireland’s figures for knife crime are not as high as those for the mainland; we are into tens of thousands here and the figure in Northern Ireland is around 1,000 in the year up to September.

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point about the local community. There needs to be support from the local community, whether on stop-and-search or whatever, but there also needs to be proper protection for the local community—for those willing to give evidence, to report knife crime or to report that someone that they know is involved in it.

[Mr Carswell]

That is absolutely spot on. I want us to do much more to encourage people, especially young people, to report knife crime. If one knows that someone is drink-driving, telling someone about that is no longer seen as snitching, but as the sensible, legitimate thing to do, because the price we all pay for allowing drunks to drive a car is the risk that innocent people will be killed. We must have the same mentality about carrying a knife. If people are to be prepared to tell someone in authority—that could be children telling a grown-up or a teacher, or young adults telling the police—they have to be able to do so not only confident in the fact that they will be treated confidentially and that there will be action, but with the recognition that doing so is legitimate, that they are not a snitch and that they are doing the right thing. That is vital.

One of the reasons why the campaign against drink-driving—I will talk more about this in a moment—has been so successful is precisely because people who know that someone is drink-driving are not prepared to stand or sit idly by and let that person carry on getting into a car under the influence of alcohol. We should have exactly the same social constraints on people who are prepared to walk around with an offensive weapon. That action must be seen as illegitimate, and reporting it to someone in a position of authority must be seen as legitimate. Incidentally, one of the great achievements of the Only Cowards Carry campaign is the attempt to get that message across to young people aged six or seven so that they realise from an early age that if they know of someone carrying a knife, they have a responsibility to tell a teacher, an adult or someone in a position of authority.

[Mr Carswell]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s point about the vital need for a tailor-made solution that commands support and legitimacy among the local population. I am deliberately not asking for a one-size-fits-all, blanket solution. I fully understand that the approach for which I am calling could well cause resentment in some parts of the country, but we are discussing democratically legitimising the actions of authority. Robert Peel said, when he founded the police:

“The police are the public and the public are the police.”

We can use the new instrument of democratic legitimacy that is given to us through police and crime commissioners. A creative commissioner will be able to do things that would previously have caused resentment.

[David Simpson]

The hon. Gentleman talked about drink-driving. At this time of year, we see graphic advertisements, warnings and detail in the media about that. Would he be in favour of something similar for knife crime?

[Mr Carswell]

Absolutely. There are strong parallels with the campaign against drink-driving, but it is important to remember that the success of the campaign against drink-driving was not simply due to high-profile publicity. Such publicity had a role to play, however, as raising awareness is vital, and raising awareness of knife crime in that graphic way could be important, especially in schools.

I do not want to sound cynical about human nature, but we must remember that the fear of getting caught also changed attitudes. Some of us will remember that 30 or 40 years ago people complained about the police campaigns to stop and breathalyse drivers. Many of the arguments that we would hear if we encouraged the police to carry out more stop-and-search would be about whether that would be legitimate. People used to say, “It is not an offence to have a few beers; the offence is to have an accident.” We now recognise that being drunk is the crime, just as it is the carrying the knife that is the crime. We change such attitudes through a combination of high-profile publicity campaigns and a criminal justice system that is prepared to be aggressive. I mean to use the word “aggressive”, because the system needs to be more aggressive.

A generation ago, incidences of drink-driving seemed to be rising inevitably. If we were having the debate in the 1970s, we might have seen ever-higher drink-driving as inevitable, saying, “Alcohol is getting cheaper,” “More people are driving,” “It is family breakdown,” or, “It is social disorder.” We now know such arguments to be nonsense, however. The police started carrying out the equivalent of stop-and-search—breathalysing. They did not, however, use blanket breathalysing. On the contrary, they targeted certain times, places and, probably, types of people—again young men, most likely. It therefore became clear that drink-driving carried the risk for someone not only having an accident, but of being caught, and there were serious consequences if they were caught, so attitudes started to change. We need a similar approach to carrying a knife—not blanket solutions, but targeted stop-and-search.

The criminal justice system also needs to change its response when someone is found to be carrying a knife. Imagine if, in this day and age, someone was found to be over the drink-drive limit and the police only cautioned them. Of course that would not happen, because someone who is over the limit can expect the police to bring forward charges and the criminal justice system to prosecute. We need to make it absolutely clear that knife crime is unacceptable. Blanket rules are never a good idea, because they always have unintended consequences, but the default rule in normal circumstances should be that if people are found to be carrying a knife or a concealed offensive weapon, they can expect to be prosecuted. If that started to happen, attitudes would change.

A higher incidence of drink-driving once seemed inevitable—it was thought that nothing could be done—and we could expect to hear many of the arguments against breathalysing to be used against stop-and-search. However, with a much more robust attitude from the criminal justice system, and with a willingness to target certain people at certain times in certain places, attitudes can shift. Absolutely nothing is inevitable about more knife crime. Just as we reduced the incidence of drink-driving, we can change attitudes towards knives and those who carry knives.

Clacton needs a criminal justice system that is prepared to reconfigure its priorities and to shape a specific public policy solution to meet concerns about a Clacton-specific problem. It can be done, as the criminal justice system now has a measure of local accountability that allows it to be more experimental and to do things that it might not have considered over the past generation. The criminal justice system and those who run it would find that, if they were to do that, they would command widespread popular support. Most people in Clacton, including the overwhelming number of young people, are good, decent, law-abiding people who would not dream of carrying a knife. All too often, however, there is a minority—not as small as we once thought—who are prepared to carry knives. Unless we are prepared to tackle that minority, the many tragic, awful, hideous incidents to which I referred will become part of a long roll-call of tragedy and mishap.

I hope that the criminal justice system acts. As I said, I do not expect the Minister to have the answers; in fact, I think that the solution lies with the police and crime commissioner. I very much hope that we will now begin to see a change in attitude in the criminal justice system in Essex and among those who run it. If that happens, I am confident that we can reduce the number of incidents involving knives in Clacton.