Sara Thornton pulled no punches today in identifying the Conservative's huge failures to tackle knife crime, instead cutting funding to services that could help to prevent the problem escalating:
“When you have an emergency, you get all the key people around the table to solve the problem, setting up Cobra with a senior minister holding people to account, because it is not just about policing, it’s about all the other agencies and organisation. It’s an emergency and it needs some emergency funding,”
“We think we need much stronger leadership from government,” she said. “The difficulty is that it is not being properly funded and it doesn’t appear that anybody is really being held to account for that broad strategy.”
Thornton, a former chief constable of Thames Valley police, said there was no doubt the rise in violence was linked to cuts in police numbers, despite Theresa May’s claims to the contrary.
“Just look at the facts. There are fewer police officers doing less policing and there is more crime. We know that we are taking longer to get to emergencies, we are arresting fewer people, we are charging fewer people, so I think there is a link and we need to really look at what we can do in terms of policing to stop the violence and the killings now,” she told BBC Breakfast.
“We need to have more officer hours on the streets. We know what tactics work about targeting hotspots, about using stop and search, about tackling county lines gangs, but we just haven’t got the capacity. We just haven’t got the officers at the moment, so we need some money now to pay for overtime, to pay for mutual aid between forces.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...onal-emergency
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