Knife crime decline in two Teesside communities
A crime-fighting project has helped drive knife crime down by more than 75% in a year in two Teesside communities.
The Parkfield and Oxbridge areas of Stockton had a 76% fall in knife crime, with a 71% drop in robberies, in the past year, a Safer Stockton Partnership meeting was told. Knife crime lead Detective Chief Inspector Stu Hodgson attributed this to ‘Clear, Hold Build’, the Home Office crime-fighting project which brought a larger police presence and improved communication and confidence with the community.
The meeting heard crime had reduced by 34.6% in the programme area in the last 12 months, with work done to disrupt three organised crime gangs. The council’s head of community safety Sharon Cooney said they also provided high-visibility enforcement patrols in hotspots: “I don’t think it can be denied it’s had an impact on anti-social behaviour, knife crime, that kind of thing.”
Marc Stephenson, assistant director for community safety, said Clear, Hold, Build had been a success with organisations coming together with a collective aim. He said: “We’ve been able to pool resources and effectively multiply our force tenfold in some instances.”
Det Chf Insp Hodgson said: “That tells me if we work together and collaborate across the rest of the local policing area, we can see those reductions. It’s clearly had an impact.
“The collaboration is absolutely key. We all have a part to play around the table. We all need to get our heads together to see how best we’re going to go forward. Everything will be bespoke.”
He also spoke of a 29% knife crime reduction over the last 12 months in Stockton town centre: “Cleveland Police has one of the highest knife crime rates in the country. We’re currently third highest per population of 1,000.
“We were second highest, things are moving in the right direction slowly but obviously it’s not where we want to be.”
He said the force area had 810 crimes involving a knife or blade, including needles and other sharp objects, in the last year, a 10% drop from the previous year. Many suspects and victims were males under 24, and knives were actually seen in just over half of cases.
He added 57% of all serious violence in Cleveland was knife crime-related: “So we have a large problem and essentially a lot of it’s committed by young people.
“Specific to Stockton, we’ve had 213 knife crime offences in the last 12 months, which is a 23% reduction.” He said robbery was a key focus, accounting for a quarter of the force’s knife crimes, mostly involving threats as opposed to showing weapons.
“If we drive down robbery, we can make in-roads around this. We have to focus where there’s a knife seen and there’s damage been caused to people.
“We only had five outstanding suspects for knife crime in Cleveland, which for a force area is a fantastic result. We did an operation to arrest those five people, which was successful in the main.
“When we have knife crime suspects, we’ve proven we can arrest them. We’re good at that.
“The problem is, we don’t want those knife incidents, we don’t want people getting hurt. It’s going to be about prevention and education.
“When I took over as the knife crime lead in Stockton I wanted to make sure our ship was in order. I’m now confident we have daily scrutiny on knife crime, we target our offenders, we are going into schools using our intervention.”
Now he said more coordination was needed between organisations: “We need to get better understanding what everybody else is doing, so we can move forward as one team.
“I’m confident there will be funding streams out there that we’re not maximising. We pursue well, we prepare for knife crime pretty well, it’s that prevention and protecting people going forward.”
He said the main driver for young people carrying knives was fear: “I do genuinely think young people believe they’re safer carrying a knife. In fact it’s statistically proven they’re not, they’re far more likely to come to harm.
“We have kids feuding all the time and having fall-outs. Now it seems they’re far more likely to take hold of a knife than they used to be. They probably have this perception that the person they have an argument with has armed themselves with a knife as well, and they do so to even that up.”
As discussion turned to exploitation of young people and organised crime gangs, he said presentations were given to children in schools, with a surgeon who talked about knife injuries and VR headsets used to put people in situations.
Stockton district commander Superintendent John Wrintmore said: “The headset does take you through a decision-making process with different outcomes.
“Some completely come out of the blue, others you see coming over the horizon, and it’s that early intervention and prevention, understanding which children are at more risk.”
Det Chf Insp Hodgson added: “The key for me is making sure we’re going into the right schools in the right areas. We have hotspot areas for knife crime but the schools in those areas aren’t necessarily the ones we need to target because the children don’t live there.”