A recent survey claimed that 30 per cent of youths have carried a knife. To connect the recent spate of knife attacks with this survey does seem like a perfect correlation, until you notice that 30 per cent of young people are not murderers or in the morgue right now. When considering this, you begin to realise that the correlation isn’t as clear-cut after all. By ordering police to charge every lad found in possession of a knife, we’re criminalising vast numbers of lads who aren’t criminal types. This is not a positive way to tackle the problem.
When I was a teenager I had a mate called Lee who used to love designer labels on his clothes. I don’t remember him ever having a fight, all the way through our school days, not once. However, when we were old enough to go out to nightclubs, Lee started to carry a scalpel. One night, the local bully humiliated Lee by slapping him around the dance floor of a club in front of at least a hundred people. Lee didn’t take out his scalpel; he just got humiliated. He never carried the knife again. The fact that he was carrying a blade didn’t make him a potential killer. It didn’t even make him capable of defending himself. It was just the stupidity of a teenager.
This is where the correlation is wrong; it relies on an assumption of intent without bothering to investigate whether that intent exists at all. If young people have violent intent, they’ll figure out how to wound whether or not police are cracking down on knives. After all, Damilola Taylor was stabbed in the leg by a broken bottle.
A police caution is only available to a suspect who voluntarily admits the offence. If you remove the option of a caution, no young person of any sense would admit. What’s the point? ‘Possession of an offensive weapon’ is one of the easiest offences to wriggle out of, with the defence of ‘reasonable excuse’. For example, ‘I was helping mum cook and put it in my pocket and forgot it.’ Or ‘I found it in the street and meant to hand it in.’ Since the criminal types are the ones most likely to know how to wriggle, you end up in the situation where you’ve criminalised the lads who are not criminal types, while the ones we need to worry about in the future will be regarded as ‘persons of good character’.
If we do want to reduce the amount of knives on the streets, then maybe we should look at the spontaneous opportunities that kids have to pick up a blade. The majority of knives that teenagers are found in possession of are ordinary kitchen knives. Kids are stealing their weapons from the kitchen utensil drawer. How many mums know how many kitchen knives they have in their utensil drawer? If they’re anything like me, they probably have a favourite knife they use all the time and the others just lay there untouched and forgotten about. Would they notice if their 14 year-old son took one?
If the answer is no, then maybe we should campaign for mums of teenagers to empty their utensil drawers of the unwanted kitchen knives that are likely to be taken out by their children. A campaign such as this will show that we can enact sensible policies, while millions of mums across the country would genuinely appreciate the advice.
Dan McCurry works as a legal executive is East London, defending people arrested in the police station under the legal aid scheme