The Color of Knife Crime in Britain

The other day, someone stabbed a man in Trafalgar Square. It’s barely news. London is infamous for stabbings and acid attacks. Some months, London’s murder rate is higher than that of New York City.

Crime has surged under Mayor Sadiq Khan, and it has taken a gruesome turn. Gangs make a point of stabbing people in the rectum. If they cause enough damage the victim will have to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. This is called “bagging” or “dinking” someone.

The mayor’s solution? Knife control. “No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife,” Khan tweeted in 2018. “Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.” The “knife control” movement has given birth to hashtags (#KnifeFree), “weapons sweeps” of scissors and pliers, and amnesty campaigns for “pointy knives.”

Who’s doing the stabbing? In December 2016, the London Metropolitan Police Department issued a report on the racial breakdown of people “proceeded against” in Greater London for knife crime between January 1, 2015 and January 31, 2016.

“Proceeded against” means criminal proceedings were started, which is a step forward from arrest and equivalent to indictment in the United States.

Suspects identified their own race or ethnicity, and the Metropolitan Police apparently gave them great freedom. For example, there were “white” suspects supposedly from Kuwait, Turkey, Somalia (!), and the non-existent countries of “Eire” (which for some reason is listed separately from the Republic of Ireland) and the “Irish Free State,” which ceased to exist in 1937.

According to the report, police “proceeded against” 2,782 people, of whom 2,619 were identified by race.

• Of those identified by race, 1,091, or 41.7 percent, were black. (This included 375 “Black-African” suspects, 335 “any other Black background” suspects, and 381 “Black Caribbean” suspects). (Page 8)
• Some 38.4 percent or 1,005 were white. (This included 287 “any other White background” suspects, 665 “White British,” and 53 “White Irish” suspects). (Page 9)
• “Asians” accounted for 360 or 13.7 percent. In Britain this usually means South Asian or Middle Eastern, and included 148 of “any other Asian background,” 80 Bangladeshis, 69 Indians, 40 Pakistanis, 14 Chinese, and 9 mixed Asian/whites. (Page 7)

The report doesn’t tell us the race of people convicted of knife crimes, nor does it say who was charged with simple possession, threats or intimidation, actual wounding, or murder. But based on racial statistics of the population of London, we can calculate racial differences in likelihood of being charged.

Unfortunately, the most recent publicly available racial statistics for Greater London are from 2011:

White: 59.8 percent

Asian: 19.73 percent (includes 1.24 percent mixed Asian/white)

Back: 15.58 percent (includes 2.26 percent mixed black/white)

Other: 4.92 percent

Given the limitations of using population data that do not match the arrest period, it is still clear that blacks are vastly overrepresented in arrests: more than four times more likely than whites to be “proceeded against.”

Asians are charged in almost perfect proportion to whites: only about 8 percent more likely.

The British almost never release race data on crime, but the level of black knifings has led to an unusual degree of candor. In 2017, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said “more black boys” should be locked up because “other approaches are no longer working.” She said blacks were more likely to be both suspects and victims, but that police were afraid to use “stop and frisk” tactics because officers didn’t want to be called racist.

There is now a new crime-control campaign: food boxes at fried-chicken shops with #KnifeFree messages. There has been much shrieking.

Black MP David Lammy tweeted:

Is this some kind of joke?! Why have you chosen chicken shops? What’s next, #KnifeFree watermelons? https://t.co/34DwwxSmCN

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) August 14, 2019

YouTube star Elijah Quashi, a chicken-shop reviewer known as “The Chicken Connoisseur,” also could “see the racist connotation. . . . There should be someone who has a deeper train of thought than: ‘Black people, they eat chicken we can intersect the black people who kill each other at a chicken shop, with the chicken boxes’.”

Another black MP:

Instead of investing in a public health approach to violent crime, the Home Office have opted for yet another crude, offensive and probably expensive campaign. They would do better to invest in our communities not demonise them. https://t.co/dGZBo3IypV

— Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) August 14, 2019

Whether messages on chicken boxes help or not, some blacks realize that the problem is black people. Actor Idris Elba recently begged blacks to drop their knives. He said knife crime was “between blacks and whites” when he grew up, but “now it’s definitely between young black men . . . .” “This is happening to black young kids/men doing it to ourselves,” he wrote on Instagram. “We wear the same skin but yet we act like we hate that skin, our identity.”

In London, the racial disproportions in violent crime are not has high as they are in New York City, where in 2014, a black was 31 times more likely than a white to be arrested for murder. But as the number of blacks in Britain grows, Enoch Powell’s predictions will increasingly come true.