With a surge in media coverage on knife crime throughout 2019 we investigated what do the public think and why?

Extra money being promised to Police Forces is much needed after a 19% decrease in funding alongside a loss of 20, 000 officers since 2010. Extra money being promised to help reduce knife crime is much needed after the number of incidents involving knives being the highest in a decade. We went to speak to people because we wanted to hear what other people had to say about knife and what they thought about it.

The public, on a whole, said that they wanted knife crime to stop however they only knew what was happening through the news. Something that they said was that a lot of the knife crime is related to gangs, but those also acknowledged they had heard that through the media only. One person had been affected by knife crime & argued that people, and the media, should be careful when referring to knife crime and ‘gangs’ as a lot of the time, the ‘gangs’ are just groups of young friends.

This is part one of our investigation. Keep following this story to hear the podcast episodes made with Haggerston Police.

This story was written by Jake England & Joshua Comyn 

This video was produced by Jake England, Adam Hollingsworth, Joshua Comyn, Marco Ronchetti Pietro, Alexandra Grant, Ty Brooks-O'Reilly & Sebastian Odikasigbue of ELATT.

#Unfiltered project is funded by Young Londoners Fund and supported by The Mayor of London.