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| Getting stabbed in the guts is part and parcel of life in a big city, apparently. |
When London's Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan was elected in May 2016, one of the loony left ideas he ran on was to greatly reduce the number of "stop and searches" by the Metropolitan Police (the Met) targeting violent gangs.
During the reign of his predecessor Boris Johnson, this tactic had been one of the main tools for reducing gang and knife crime in the capital, which is largely a Black thing. But with Khan in office "stop and searches" plummeted from over 400,000 a year to 150,000. The inevitable result was that knife crime shot up, along with other forms of violence like acid attacks.
Things became so bad that in October 2017 it was reported that there had been a 47% rise in knife crimes in London, with 35 young people under the age of 25 stabbed to death in a 12-month period. This was such a big surge that it actually pushed up the national figures, all thanks to Mayor Khan's loony left notion that reducing proactive policing would somehow make criminals behave better.
Knife crime was also pushed into the headlines on New Years Day when four young men were stabbed to death, indicating that 2018 was going to be an even worse year.
But now it seems that someone has sat Mayor Khan down and slowly explained things to him, because he has now completely reversed his original policy, and is instead calling for a vast increase in "stop and search."
Writing in the London Evening Standard newspaper, Khan outlined his new "tough-ish" approach to ethnic knife crime:
"Met Commissioner Cressida Dick and I fully agree that the Met must continue to ramp up its fight against violent crime. Londoners will see a tougher crackdown throughout 2018. This will include a significant increase in the use of targeted stop and search by the police across our city. I know from personal experience that when done badly, stop and search can cause community tensions. But when based on real intelligence, geographically focused and performed professionally, it is a vital tool for the police to keep our communities safe. It will let the police target and arrest offenders, take the weapons they carry off our streets and stop these attacks from happening."
This is almost as big a U-turn for Khan as if he actually admitted Islamic terrorism was a problem and not just "part and parcel of living in a big city."
