Why the Police CAN'T Stop Knife Crime

追加: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Why the police cannot stop knife crime.

[00:00:01]If you're new here, my name is Jay Dartmore and I spent nearly 10 years in the police. Now, nobody's going to lie when we say that in the UK we have a significant issue with knife crime. In fact, I'm playing a clip right now of Idris Ela on a talk show saying that because knife crime is getting so bad, we now need to blunt the ends of knives in order to stop people stabbing each other. Okay? And also Karma in the wake of the Southport incident said the reason why people are committing knife crime is because knives are too readily available. Okay? So, it's Amazon's fault. No, there's plenty of people out there who buy knives for everyday purposes and don't go out and stab each other. The most recent thing what people say, my god, that's a thick pen. Sorry, I've just bought these. There's a thing what people say now where they say a 5-year minimum sentence in relation to these deep dives and topics. My newsletter gets them first. You can sign up by the link in the description or by scanning the QR code on screen right now. So, a lot of people turn around and say a 5year minimum sentence. Okay, so why why do they say that? Well, it's for a deterrent, isn't it? I can understand why people think this. A 5-year automatic sentence straight to prison for carrying a knife. Why people think that will work and why people think that'd be a good idea. And I'm not completely dismissing the idea. But let's just break down why in my opinion I don't think that will work. And we will get into the reason why I believe knife crime is such an epidemic at this moment in time. And it isn't to do with sentencing and it isn't wholly to do with poverty. So let's just have a discussion about this. So fiveyear minimum sentence. Okay. So straight away in order to enforce this we would need the infrastructure as I speak about in my work and in my books. We will need police and we will need prison space. We simply don't have it. And that is the nuts and bolts of it. Prisons are incredibly underfunded. In fact a lot of prisons are now private and private prisons want to strip away resources in order to capitalize on profit because they are businesses. We are losing more police officers than ever. We are getting less people signing up and the police are under more scrutiny than ever when they simply are doing their jobs.

[00:01:58]So that means that police have less incentive and less confidence when it comes to stop searching people. There aren't enough officers to go around to meet current demand anyway. And even if somebody is arrested and is charged, we then don't have the infrastructure to send someone straight to prison. And also currently we do have terms that people go to jail for and the custody and prison sentence guidelines etc. when it comes to knife crime. off the top of my head, but I think it's about four years maximum what someone can get right now if they are found carrying a knife or a bladed article. So, we already have just under the 5year threshold what people are looking for. The average sentence in the bit of research I did in prior to this video, the average sentence what people get are about 18 months, which of course means they're more likely to be out in probably about nine. If they go guilty initially, they'll probably get about 30% knocked off. Call that 6 months. So, they're more likely to be out in maybe three.

[00:02:50]And that's if they get the 18 months, which doesn't often happen. But then what happens is these people come out of jail or come out of prison, they probably go back to reoffending. So then we have to ask the question, what are the reasons why people carry knives? And it isn't necessarily something the police can specifically deal with, which is why I don't believe that the police will be able to fix knife crime in isolation. The police are certainly part of it as well as the courts, but I don't think it's solely just them. [snorts] So then we look at the reasons of what people are doing when they carry knives.

[00:03:20]So what? Okay. So we have the typical things of poverty. We know has an increase in gang culture. There is also when we look at gang culture there are gangs will get younger members of the gang generally people under 18 to carry a weapon on them, carry drugs, carry illegal items because they get reduced sentences. So we then have uh child criminal exploitation. I'm trying to write fast. Okay. I'm trying to write fast. that doesn't necessarily mean um I can write uh like spelling and stuff, you know. [ __ ] it. I'm a writer, believe it or not. So, I'm also left-handed. I was, you know what, it probably better if I did it that way to be honest, wouldn't it? I maybe should have thought about that before I started recording.

[00:04:00]Then we have they talk about media, they say, you know, it's drill artist, it's rap, it's music. But the issue with these when it comes to poverty and it comes to rap music, etc., There are plenty of people they grow up in, you know, impoverished areas, council estates.

[00:04:18]They don't have a lot of money and they don't go around stabbing people. They don't carry knives. And the other thing what people say is it's safety. The reason why I'm carrying a knife is because everyone else is carrying a knife. Therefore, I might get stabbed.

[00:04:29]Okay? But the problem is these are all symptoms. And until we deal with the cause of the problem, which I'm going to get into in a second, we're going to see more of this because we keep throwing people in prison. We keep doing stop and search. We keep trying to educate and scream to people you can't carry knives.

[00:04:44]Like young people know that they're not supposed to carry knives. Gang members know that if I get caught with this knife, I'm going to get in I'm going to get in trouble. There's a maximum four-ear sentence for people that carry knives. We know in relation to public safety and the people's safety that they feel they have to carry a knife for their own protection. And then we've got poverty elements as well. Um, impoverished areas increasing gr increasing gang culture. And then we have rap music etc. glamorizing the life of carrying the weapon. This is the reason what and I want to get into. And of course the police can stop people carrying knives. They can arrest them.

[00:05:15]They can stop search them. And we do see a decrease in the amount of violent attacks when we get an increase in stop and search. But stop and search is a very contentious issue. Certainly in impoverished neighborhoods, there may be one demographic, one racial demographic greater than another. If the police are seen to be stopped searching, for example, a lot of black young black men, for example, uh in impoverished areas, the police may then be accused of being racist, which then gets random by the media, which then means the police then pull away uh of not stopping searching those uh people in that demographic. And then people may then we may then see an increase in in violence as well. And I do have the data in the book and I think 2024 we saw a record of like 54,000 incidents of knife crime and like 261 homicides throughout the country. It is a serious problem and it's a serious problem we need to look at. But we can't fix the issue without first addressing the fundamental reason why I believe young men carry knives. You can't strictly say it's poverty because not everyone in an impoverished area carries a knife. We can't strictly say it's glamorizing gang culture because there's plenty of young young men, young people who carry who don't carry knives who listen to that kind of music and glamorize it. So, we can't say that. We can't say it's the online sale knives because you can just take a kitchen knife out. We all have all these parameters in as well as tough sentences already, but that doesn't solve the problem. So, what is the main issue?

[00:06:34]It's this thing right now which the government are completely ignoring because it's an unpopular contentious topic of fatherlessness. So, in my research and obviously when I've been an officer, [snorts] the amount of young men that I would speak to in care homes who would be arrested for violence, they'd have a weapon on them or they'd be pedalling drugs for somebody. I would often sit there and have conversations with these young men because I wanted to learn. I wanted to understand why they got themselves into that position. I'm sure no person, no young man wakes up one day and says, "I'm going to start carrying a knife. I'm going to start selling drugs and I'm going to be living in a care home." Pretty much all of them from my own anecdotal evidence said that they didn't have a dad around and that there was a lot of poverty and a lot of struggle in their home. I remember speaking to a member of an organized crime group once. He was he got locked up in a in in a hotel somewhere. And I was speaking to this about him cuz he said he started when he was younger because of course dad left and there was his home and he needed to make money and he didn't have one thing he said to me which was quite interesting. He said there was no no male role model and then your family have got nothing. You then go out with friends. You see a bloke turn up in a nice Range Rover, nice clothes, gold watches, he's got money, and he wants to take you under his wing and teach you how to be a man. Because a lot of these kids, they don't go to school. You know, education is it's not for them or they don't like it. They're obviously looking at their future going, "What can I do with my life cuz I don't go to school, so I'm never going to get a job." and they see these people and they look like to them successful masculine. They got the girls, they got the money, they got the jewelry, they got the watches, they got the the material assets which a young man may look at and think, "Oh, I I really want that." But another fundamental thing what they do is they give these young men purpose. So what does a father give to his son? A good father one masculinity and teaches them how to be a man. Teaches them the ways of the world.

[00:08:19]Teaches them how to be stoic. Teaches them how to look after theelves. Teaches them how to be strong. how to be a net positive to society. There is obviously situations where a father can be abusive. This isn't what I'm talking about in this. I'm talking about a good male role model who is there, looks after his children, looks after his kids, and provides. That's another thing. Men provide. And I don't want to have to caveat this entire [ __ ] video and say like, oh, women do this, too, women do that. Can we just can we just part part that now and say yes I'm not saying women don't do any of this but strictly when I'm talking about this situation when it comes to youth crime in particular young men getting into violence carrying weapons and gang culture it strictly he's talking about fatherlessness. So before you jump in the comments and start calling me x y and zed just let's just [ __ ] part that. They're all we're all adults here.

[00:09:09]We don't have to have to include everyone in every conversation.

[00:09:12]Otherwise, it'd be 10 minutes longer than it needs to be. So, let's just get that out the way. Men teach the children how to be masculine. Men teach them how to be how to be a man, how to grow up and be a man, how to look after themselves, and also how to how to provide, how to control their emotions, how to be stoic, how to look after themselves and also other people around them. Now, if there's absence of a father in the home, then where are these young men going to get this from?

[00:09:33]They're going to get it from a gang.

[00:09:34]They're going to feel belonging. They're going to feel value. They're going to feel respect. And they're also going to have purpose things what they're not getting at home. So the reason why policing won't fix knife crime is because in order for a young man to feel looked after, to feel that they belong, to feel that their life has meaning and they have a way out of the poverty which they find themselves in is in a gang.

[00:09:55]That is much more appealing to the young man than not doing that and carrying a weapon. And plus, by carrying a weapon, they're likely to get respect and they're likely going to come up against other gangs, too. So then there's a safety element in there. So the young man is stood there and someone hands him a knife or says, you know, you need to carry this weapon with you. They're thinking, well, if I get caught, I'm going to get a caution. If I get caught a few times, maybe I'll go to jail.

[00:10:17]Okay, that's if that happens. That's that's an if. But if I refuse to carry the knife, I'm going to be ostracized from a group. I'm not going to feel like I belong. I don't have a father. I'm going to lose these father figures.

[00:10:27]They're not going to teach me how to earn money in order for me to provide for myself and my family. They're not going to teach me respect, etc. as well.

[00:10:33]Naturally then these young men for want of a better phrase go off the rails because they get involved in criminality. They get involved with the police. They become frequent missing people from home. The family then can't cope with their behavior. So then they put them into a care into the care system. Now we have a young man who's tried to find meaning from an external um an external agency such as a gang has now been ostracized and abandoned by their own family due to their behavior.

[00:10:55]So that will push them further to it.

[00:10:57]And of course we have social workers who you know they try their best but I mean social workers are massively underfunded and this outstretched and I I spoke to a social worker for me new book uh the systems [ __ ] the unheard voices broken justice link in the bio. Hey cheeky plug there. See how see how I did that. So I spoke to I spoke to a social worker about this and they basically said that so many of the people they deal with have no father. This was a male social worker as well and they said that being a male social worker they found that the young men actually listened to them more because they were that strong male presence in their lives and it was their job to make sure they're okay and they tended to listen to them more rather than the female social workers because if you've got a young man who's grown up not listening to his mom and in education a lot of teachers are women and then a social worker comes in or carer because you know I used to be a carer and there was a lot of women who did it and they were all very very good at it but a lot of young men who were like well I've not listened to that woman I've not listened to that one why am I going to listen to you and then suddenly you have a male role model turning up going you can't do this and they found that they did respect them a bit more but the key part with that is is that this social worker told me that even new social workers are going off your stress and burnout because the amount of case loads they have so if we say well okay the police can't deal with it it's social services that have to deal with it well the social services are in a dire situation just like the police are just like the prisons are just like the entire criminal justice system is okay how do we solve this well we need to find a way of reducing fatherlessness we need to look at a way of keeping families together. We need to look at a way promoting sustainable families, promoting marriages, giving tax breaks for people who want to stay in a in a relationship together. We need to give families more support. We need to look at adverse childhood experiences, which is an entire other video in itself on how to best support people so they don't go into crisis.

[00:12:37]There used to be Shawstart hubs in local communities which was somewhere where families could go and actually speak to people and get support like a like an in-house um social worker hub where there'd be nurses, they'd be healthare practitioners, they'd be social workers, they'd be counselors and these were all cut by the government in order to save money when it was austerity by the uh conservatives. So then you have these deprived communities which do not have the help from the state as it direct as he wanted and it was a community hub as well. people would go and they would speak to each other and they'd grow that community integration between themselves and I dare to think how the crime rates etc have been affected by the reduction and removal of these shortstart communities. So we have a government who wants to say that they want to tack on knife crime but yet I never hear anything to do with this. Yes, we talk about gang culture. We talk about uh toxic masculinity because we have we're now told it's wrong to be a man and want to protect your family and take care of yourself and take care of your children and provide for your family. We're told it's wrong to do that. But what are young men screaming out for? They're screaming out for a male role model.

[00:13:40]This is why young men find these male role models in the form of Andrew Tate or HS Tick-Talkie or these other manosphere influencers online because young men are crying out for that male role model, that male figure. And until we sought out keeping people together either through culture, the resurgence in religion and shared values and family values, attitudes and saying that no men, you don't walk away from your children, you don't walk away from your family. You have had a child with that woman, it is now your duty, responsibility to be in that child's life. Of course, if there's abuse and domestic violence, then we need to obviously look at that. But we should still keep the man, if possible, as long as they're safe with the children in the children's lives. But even outside of having a parental father figure in the home, there are other ways that we can do this. There are media personalities.

[00:14:26]There are people in schools. We need more male social workers. We need to fill this void of fatherlessness because if we don't fill that void, I fear social cohesion is going to continue to break down. More children are going to be left without a father figure. More young men are going to feel dejected and out of sorts, and they're going to seek that male role model in an unhealthy way in the form of a gang. And with a gang comes violence. And with violence comes weapons. Weapons such as knives. And if you enjoyed this and you want to know the reason why I left the police in the first place, the reasons why policing is broken and is soon going to be completely broken beyond repair, things what the media and the government will never admit or explain to you, then make sure you check out this video right here. If you want to check out my newsletter, that is in the link of the description of this video. But make sure you do check out this video right here.

[00:15:14]You will not regret it.