Knife offences in London have increased by 86 per cent in a decade, a shocking report has found.
London’s iconic West End has more knife crime than almost 15 per cent of the rest of the capital combined, according to research from the Policy Exchange.
Just five per cent of robberies and 0.6 per cent of ‘theft from person’ crimes in London were solved last year, the research – titled Your Money or Your Life: London’s Knife Crime, Robbery and Street Theft Epidemic’ – found.
The report’s author, ex-Scotland Yard detective chief inspector David Spencer, said his former force must take an unequivocal ‘crime fighting first’ approach to save the city from a knife, robbery and theft epidemic.
Knife offences across the country have increased by 78 per cent since 2014, but Mr Spencer said these figures had been skewed by the scale of the issue in the capital, where there were 16,879 knife crimes last year alone - about a third of the total across England and Wales.
