Sudden concerns about knife crime are overdue. Regardless of race, all fatalities should be considered tragic

Over the weekend, we heard a great deal about the apparently random attack on 17-year-old Jodie Chesney in a Romford park and that of 17-year-old Yousef Ghaleb Makki in Manchester.

The extensive media focus on A-level student Jodie’s tragic murder could be down to the absence of known provocation, which sends ripples of fear through every community, knowing that it could potentially happen to anyone. In addition, Romford is not an area renowned for high levels of knife crime.

On Sunday afternoon, however, the question as to whether media coverage of Jodie’s murder was racist was asked. Why should the colour or ethnicity of a victim even matter? Moreover, is it even necessary to include this information?

What should be important is that another person has lost their life and left a grieving family behind who have to try to make sense of their sudden death.

The alarming rise in knife crime nationwide – and particularly in London – is a topic that I have written about many times. According to police statistics and media coverage, 23 men and women (that we are aware of) have been stabbed, over half of them fatally. Nevertheless, these figures still appear to vary from resource to resource. In the case of non-fatal stabbings, we also have to remember that not all victims report the crimes, because of the fear of reprisals.

According to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), newspapers are obliged to “make a clear distinction between comment, conjecture and fact”, yet time and again we see biased media reporting, which affects people’s perception of an issue.

Between 2017 and 2018, there were 14,769 knife crimes recorded in London. Alarmingly, Anti-Knife UK figures show that those killed ranged vastly in age from four-year-old children to victims in their 80s. Of all the fatal stabbings in London over the past year, the victims have predominantly been black. In my constituency of Tower Hamlets last month, David Lopez-Fernandez, a Spaniard, was stabbed to death.

“It’s deeply saddening what has happened. There have been 723 homicides in the UK – the highest since records began. It’s taken the murder of two non-black members of society for the home secretary to act, as though black lives don’t matter”, said Roderick Lynch, chair of the Liberal Democrat campaign for race equality.

“Young people have nowhere to go in their spare time, youth provisions are closed down, community groups have had funding cut, parents can’t cope and communities are at risk. Getting to the point, criminals are running the streets,” he added.

“The limited number of police officers we have are playing catch-up. With one hand tied behind their backs, the government now acknowledges that it’s a state of emergency. Was it not a state of emergency in 2018, when there was 723 homicides? Or it did not matter as it was predominantly black-on-black crime? Every life matters and one murder is one too many.”

The most important question to ask is: what measures should be taken to truly tackle this alarming issue? Politicians give lip service to the problem in their speeches and manifestos, yet the problem continues to escalate.

Theresa May promised a “cross-government response” and said that there was no correlation between certain crimes and police numbers, yet if the current trajectory continues, 2019 will exceed the record figures of 2018 for knife crime.

Speaking on LBC radio, Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick said that London will get 3,000 officers, of which 1,500 will be brand new to the service. But it is not enough. She went further and said that since 2014 the numbers have gone down considerably and said there is a link in the rise in crime and the reduction of police numbers.

Dick did a merry dance as she tiptoed through the tulips, avoiding Nick Ferrari’s questions, but in the end she had to agree with her predecessor, Sir Bernard Hogan Howe, in that the country is short of 20,000 officers.

It’s clear that unless we invest in services for young people as well as funding for our police, this will likely be the state of things for a while.

In 2017, I supported the family of Syed Jamanoor Islam, who was murdered outside his home in Mile End. I championed their efforts to campaign against knife crime; they spoke at community meetings, to young people and appeared on television to stress that we as communities must work collectively to prevent knife crime.

The current situation in London bears similarities to that of Chicago 20 years ago, yet that city has reduced the problem by 40 per cent through a model devised by Dr Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organisation.

He established Cure Violence, which uses public health methods to tackle violent crime and treats it in the same way as an epidemic.

We should be looking to approaches like those, not denying all responsibility, to solve the issue at hand. And above all, we have to do our utmost to prevent yet another family from enduring the tragedy of losing a child.

Rabina Khan is a Liberal Democrat councillor for Shadwell in Tower Hamlets