By Holly Bird, Jodie Bradshaw, Roger Grimshaw, Habib Kadiri and Helen Mills

The Labour government came into office earlier this year, with an ambitious ‘aim to halve knife crime in a decade’. Early moves have included, in September, the launch of a ‘Coalition to Tackle Knife Crime’, aiming, as the press release put it, to ‘bring together campaign groups, families of people who have tragically lost their lives to knife crime, young people who have been impacted and community leaders, united in their mission to save lives and make Britain a safer place for the next generation’. This was followed, in November, with proposals to fine senior executives of online companies if they market illegal weapons, along with moves to ban the sale of so-called ninja swords. The government is also proposing both ‘rapid intervention and tough consequences’ for those caught in possession of a knife and a network of ‘Young Futures hubs’, to improve access to support for young people at risk of criminalisation. The second of these proposals, which prioritise prevention and support for young people at risk, has a strong evidence-based underpinning it. ‘Decades of research and evidence gathering’, this briefing points out, ‘has shown that the drivers of serious violence are insecure employment prospects, poverty, substance misuse, mental health issues, volatile drug markets, experience of violence’. The same cannot be said of the ‘rapid intervention and tough consequences’ proposals, which tend to prioritise often short-term enforcement over longer-term prevention. One recent example of such action, the subject of this briefing, is the Serious Violence Reduction Order (SVRO), currently being piloted in four police areas in England. At its simplest, the imposition of an SVRO on an individual in effect gives the police carte blanche to stop and search them, at any time and in any place, and without the police having to demonstrate ‘reasonable suspicion’. Previous research on so-called suspicion-less stops and searches, cited in this briefing, found no evidence that they had any impact on the levels of violent crime. Indeed, there is scant evidence that stop and search in general has much of an impact on underlying crime levels (Bradford and Tiratelli, 2019). This is not an argument for no police enforcement. The police clearly perform important public order functions. But it is an argument for the importance of effective, evidenced-based policing. The roll-out of the SVRO pilots are shrouded in secrecy, with information hard to come by. While they are subject of an evaluation, there are some questions over whether it will provide the rigorous evidence of impact (or not) required, or, indeed, whether it will ever be published.

London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies , 2024. 18p.