Knife crime, knife crime all we hear is knife crime...

No doubt you've already heard about the murder of the 2 French engineering students in London earlier this week. Every day we see the increased coverage on knife crime in the capital and there is a feeling amongst many Londoners that the problem is spiralling out of control.

The murder of the French students is very different from the knife crime that usualy graces our front pages. Take for example this story about a teenager getting stabbed to death, to me and to most Londoners this kind of story is representative of a growing endemic of knife crime (usually perpetrated by teenagers themselves). But is what we see in the newspapers representative of true crime figures? Are the headlines we see day in day out just fear mongering, or is London becoming incredibly unsafe?

Well according to the British Crime Survey overall violent crime has decreased by 41% since a peak in 1995. This is good news but what about knife crime? Knives are used in about 8% of violent incidents and that number has remained pretty stable over the last decade. But we would be wrong to assume that this evidence is proof of anything at all since they don't include under-16s and if the level of newspaper coverage given to these crimes is in any way proportional to the actual crime figures then the last two years has seen a huge increase in crimes of this nature. And guess what, up until May of this year, these crimes weren't even being recorded.

So what's being done? Knife amnesties and metal scanners at school all seem very reactionary and employing the use of methods from other big cities such as New York doesn't really inspire me with confidence either, since their murder rate is higher than most of the UK combined. Don't get me wrong, hats off to New York, they have more than halved their murder rate in less than a decade but a large proportion of their murders are due to gun crime, so should London be looking to them? I don't think so, I think we need a better role model...