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Editorial Knife crime is a class issue

“As crimes pile up, they become invisible.” ― Bertolt Brecht

EVERY 12 minutes, in every hour, throughout the year someone is a victim of a crime in which a bladed or sharp object is used.

These kinds of statistics regularly excite a political knockabout in which the government of the day presents the figures in the best possible light. But behind the highly charged coverage of victims and their families there is less rational investigation and reasoned debate than the issues demand. Unless we believe that behind every criminal act there lies the malign moves of an evil agency we need to seek solutions in the human and social circumstances in which both victims and perpetrators exist.

The latest crime figure show a complex picture. Knife crime is up 33 per cent but knife injuries and gun crime are down in London. Nationally the Office of National Statistics record an 11 per cent increase in robbery and increases in theft.

These patterns of reported and recorded crime in themselves show that crime is a complex social problem subject to a wide range of influences.

For many victims there is no resolution to the conflicted feelings which accompany the deeply upsetting and highly personal experience of crime. The reality is that many crimes are perfunctorily recorded, barely investigated and quickly forgotten by officialdom.

In a remarkable episode of transparency the chief constable of the Greater Manchester police tells us that — on his ground — about 600 offences a day are recorded but barely investigated.

In a revealing admission that illustrates the ways in which the performance culture under which public services operate he reports that six in 10 crimes are no longer fully investigated. Crimes are ranked according to solvability criteria and are “screened out” in the absence of CCTV images, forensic evidence and witnesses.

This is a reasonable response by a public servant faced with the kind of cuts that affects all public services in austerity Britain and it one that, to his credit, worries him.

At stake here is the reputation of the organisation he leads and the credibility of the police as a whole.

Labour has focused on the resourcing issue and has claimed it as its own in a remarkable turnaround in public perceptions in which the Tories — intent on cuts — have almost wilfully thrown away the electoral advantage that traditionally they held over crime and public order questions.

From Maggie Thatcher’s boot boys to the red-faced recipients of a dressing down by Theresa May — then home secretary — the police have lost something of the favoured status that they enjoyed when an aroused working class presented a more immediate danger to the propertied order.

The police naturally make much of the constraints on their effectiveness that wide scale spending cuts have produced. They are right to do and lost in the media frenzy about her mojito moment shadow home secretary Diane Abbott has made some pertinent points about crime that will be well received throughout police ranks. She was right to accuse ministers of failing to face up to the relationship between policing cuts and rising crime levels.

Crime is a class issue and working people, by and large, experience it differently to the rich. The resources devoted to tax avoidance as compared to those targeted on benefit fraud is but the most striking example.

Unless Labour finds a new way to frame policy around crime and policing that both responds to public concerns and holds the promise of a systemic change that could make a real impact on all kinds of crime it will find itself subject to the same criticism that the Tory government currently endures.

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