Copyright newstatesman
Crime, in Britain at least, is local. Violent people don’t tend to travel far to do their worst. Increasing the time it would take for someone to drive to a given place by just ten minutes reduces the probability of them committing a violent act there by 92 per cent, according to “Commuting for Crime”, a rare paper from 2021 analysing the travel patterns of criminals, by the London School of Economics. We are a provincial people, even in our darkest endeavours. Part of the psychic terror of the knife attack on the 18.25 service from Doncaster to King’s Cross – which at the time of writing has no motive attached – was that it was, literally, out of place. On top of the horror-film nightmare of being trapped in a cramped, ever-shrinking space as you flee down a carriage is the randomness: Why here? Quietly, this is the question that has been haunting the commuter belts, dormitory towns and suburbs of Britain over the past decade. In 2018, when Donald Trump described London hospitals as a “war zone” of “knives, knives, knives”, it was actually the home counties and English shires suffering a far greater rise in knife crime than the capital. That year, people became more likely to be attacked with a knife in Bedfordshire than in Manchester or Merseyside. Overall, the number of knife attacks, knife-inflicted homicides and knife-wound hospitalisations are all down on last year. Yet the ambient dread settling like dew across the nation seeps through those headline stats. If they wanted, anyone could get hold of a knife. And, unlike a shooting or a bomb, it is an intimate act. “Knifing is something much more complicated, emotionally, because you need to be much closer, you need to be literally at arm’s length,” says Professor Tom Kirchmaier, director of policing and crime at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance. Then there is the changing nature of knife crime. The likelihood of being attacked, at random, by a stranger, is very slightly ticking up. Mass stabbings of that nature – Nottingham, Southport, Hainault, the Manchester synagogue, Uxbridge, Huntingdon – generate a bubbling fear at the pit of Britain’s stomach each time they happen. This again. And again. Where next? While the number of knife attacks is still highest in urban centres, such as Birmingham and London, knife crime is rising at a faster rate in the provinces: those in-between lands where people move out to for more space and a promise of safety. Certain scorches on this evolving heatmap are particularly poignant. In England, the highest rise in knife crime over the past year was in Cambridgeshire (14 per cent): the suspect arrested when that King’s Cross service pulled into Huntingdon was from Peterborough. In Greater London, one of the highest rises was in Hillingdon (38 per cent): the gateway-to-Metroland borough featuring Uxbridge, where Wayne Broadhurst, a 49-year-old dog walker was killed in a triple knife attack resulting in the arrest of an Afghan refugee less than a week before. This shifting geography is partly down to gang activity moving to the outskirts of cities, as drug demand is easier and more profitable to exploit in less-saturated markets, says Professor Kirchmaier. “It became clear that it’s actually quite easy to do it elsewhere, because these market towns had no defence, they weren’t used to these problems, and quite easy to reach from London,” he tells me. “And the dark net didn’t help: everybody can buy their gear online now, and so they all start their own little gang and have all these rookies running around creating markets.” Gangs are in large part a response to poverty, which has metastasised even to the smartest notches in the commuter belt, as I have written recently in this column. But how is this related to the rogue attackers we’ve seen of late? Again, place matters. Over two-thirds (69 per cent) of knife homicides happen in the same areas where at least one non-fatal knife assault had taken place the year before, found a 2019 study by the University of Cambridge. So if a drug dealer or shop lifter armed with a knife threatens or stabs someone in a town, the risk rises of a fatal attack being carried out there. Overstretched police forces aren’t equipped to monitor all these weapons, especially when you can buy them in your local Tesco. Some suspects, of course, have travelled a lot further than Peterborough to Huntingdon. The Afghan refugee in Uxbridge, the Somali asylum seeker who fatally stabbed 37-year-old Gurvinder Singh Johal inside a Lloyds Bank branch, and a Moroccan asylum seeker who stabbed a pensioner to death in Hartlepool are all recent cases cited by politicians who see high-profile attacks as a border control issue. While official statistics don’t break crime down by migrant status, the idea that multiculturalism is somehow to blame has taken hold in mainstream quarters – as it did long ago for violence in London. But those dealing with knife crime on a daily basis see this as a red herring only serving to feed conflict. One police insider who sees white-on-white stabbings in his patch go unreported by the press suggests tabloids are wrong to cherrypick violent crimes committed by migrants. What the new map of knife crime in Britain shows is that it can happen anywhere, if the conditions – poverty, illegal drugs, failing mental health services – are there. As dormitory England wakes up to another tragedy, it finds a homegrown threat creeping ever closer to home. [Further reading: Pervasive mass violence has paralysed our failing government]
