Lancashire Police ramp up the fight against knife crime with a week of intense action
Operation Sceptre is a national week of initiatives to get knives off the streetsOperation Sceptre is a national week of initiatives to get knives off the streets
Lancashire Police are ramping up the fight against knife crime with a week of intense action.
It comes after a spate of stabbings across the North West in the last few weeks - including a 17 year old boy who was knifed in the back in Blackburn last week.
Officers will be doing knife sweeps in public places, have surrender bins for bladed weapons, and target criminal gangs as part of Operation Sceptre.
One person who almost lost their life to knife crime is Stuart Newton.
He was randomly attacked by a stranger and stabbed 12 times during a family festival in Southport in 2019.
He said: "The ambulance turned up, unfortunately, the injuries were that bad I had bled out. I was literally dead on my feet. Both lungs had collapsed, I had problems with the heart, so they put me in the ambulance and we had to do eight blood transfusions in the ambulance and stabilise my lungs before they could even think about moving me to the hospital.
"The trauma surgeon said you're internally bleeding... you've got minutes left."
"I didn't know at the time but it was only afterwards after surgery when the police had come to see me that the police had been sent ahead of the ambulance to take forensics off my dead body because they were expecting me to turn up at the hospital dead on arrival...which was like wow...you know."
Sergeant Nick Miller is from Lancashire Police, he had this message for anyone thinking of carrying a knife with them: "They need to think about the impact that it has not only on themselves but also on their families, their friends that may be with them at the time they're possessing them, to think about how it impacts them and also the impact it has on the victim's families as well for the loss of the loved one.
"And also anyone that may be with that person at that time when they commit the offence they also are culpable to that offence as well. That's what people need to understand, just because they're not holding the knife, it doesn't mean they are not responsible for what actions they take at that time."