introduction to knife crime essay

Knife crime: causes and solutions – editors’ guide to what our academic experts say

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There has been a torrent of media coverage about violent crime among children and young people in the UK. But it seems to offer little consensus on what’s causing this crisis, what the impact of measures taken by government and police are and what should be done to curb the violence.

In a debate often dominated by politicians, celebrities and media commentators, the voices of academics who have spent years researching this issue have not been heard enough.

That’s why we’re bringing you a round up of evidence-based views on the knife crime epidemic – including what action is really needed to prevent more young lives being lost.

Many of the academics featured have worked directly with young people and communities affected by knife crime, or with authorities and organisations working to manage it.

The epidemic in numbers

How many? 285 knife-related homicides recorded in the year ending March 2018 – the highest number since the Home Office Homicide Index began more than 70 years ago.

Who is affected? Young men aged 18 to 24 are the most affected. But there’s also been a 77% increase in homicides committed with knives by under-18s (2016 to 2018). And a 93% increase in the number of under-16s admitted to hospital due to knife attacks (since 2012).

The rate at which men are currently being killed by violence is over double that for women. And while statistics don’t detail the social backgrounds of victims and perpetrators, research indicates there’s a greater chance of being killed by violence the poorer you are.

Read more: Homicide rates are up in young men – austerity and inequality may be to blame

Why is knife crime increasing?

Discussions of violent crime among young people often start and finish with policing. But for academics, investigations begin with the experiences of young people themselves, as they seek to discover the underlying causes of knife crime.

1. Toxic environments for children, created by austerity

Knife crime is a symptom of the toxic environments that adults create around children, who then become both perpetrators and victims. It is created by politicians and by the politics of austerity. Stephen Case, professor of criminology, Loughborough University, and Kevin Haines, professor, University of Trinidad and Tobago

Homes, schools, neighbourhoods or recreational activities can become toxic environments for children, when their relationships and experiences fail to nurture them, protect them and help them to achieve their potential.

These toxic environments can leave children disaffected, fearful and vengeful. They are scared and provoked into carrying knives, joining gangs and committing violent acts.

It is no coincidence that the vast majority of knife crime takes place in neighbourhoods suffering from huge social disadvantage and disinvestment.

Impact of austerity in numbers

£422.3m : reduction in spending on services for young people in last six years

3,500: number of youth service jobs lost (since 2010)

600: number of youth centres closed (since 2010)

130,000: number of places in youth centres eliminated (since 2010)

Read more: Youth services try to mould young people – how about they help young people mould society instead?

2. Children and young people are afraid of becoming victims

Carrying a knife often started as a way to avoid becoming a victim … Most of the people I spoke to who had carried a knife had been threatened, some on multiple occasions. Some had been attacked and a few had been severely injured. Peter Traynor, senior research assistant, Manchester Metropolitan University .

Traynor’s research documented how some young people started carrying knives to avoid being victimised. He also points out that some had gone to the authorities for help, but had largely been ignored.

The one time I went to the police … when I was stabbed … they walked into the house and said how many people done it? I said so and so many people done it from that gang … and they all kind of looked at each other – as if it’s gang affiliated or whatever isn’t it? So they didn’t really care. But if it was just a normal person … they’d have taken it a lot more serious – 17-year-old boy from London.

3. Children and young people don’t trust the authorities to protect them

The link between carrying a weapon and distrusting the police is an important new finding … It’s possible that young people who live in high-crime neighbourhoods or who are already involved in crime may not see the police as being able or willing to protect them from harm. In those situations, it is unsurprising that a young person would see carrying a weapon as justified or necessary. Iain Brennan, research psychologist, University of Hull . If people feel society is unfair, they are less inclined to play by the rules and more likely to lash out violently. James Densley, associate professor, University of Oxford, and Michelle Lyttle Storrod, PhD researcher, Rutgers University.

Many neighbourhoods with high crime are already inclined to distrust police, owing to their experiences of abuse and institutional racism.

As violence has risen, the proportion of offences for which police have identified the culprit has fallen, and this further erodes civilians’ trust in authority.

When police fail to solve or deter crime, people will bypass law enforcement and use violence to resolve disputes or protect themselves from danger.

Growing tensions between police and communities can lead to further criminality, because successful police work depends heavily on cooperation with the public.

Shortage of police investigators has been described as a “national crisis” – even London’s Metropolitan Police Service is short some 700 detectives.

According to Becky Clarke, a criminal justice researcher, and colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University, reintroducing ineffective and discriminatory policing can lead to greater distrust and even cause more young people to carry weapons. Not only are the policing strategies being proposed right now likely to be ineffective, they say, but the strategies will certainly increase the criminalisation of young people and potentially increase weapon carrying.

Read more: Repeating flawed policies to tackle knife crime could put young people in more danger

Gangs, drill music, social media – overstated impact?

Gangs and youth violence are regularly conflated in mainstream media reports and government policy. Yet data from the Metropolitan Police in London has shown that a gang element was identified in only “a relatively small amount of serious youth violence” – under 5% of cases (2011 to 2016)

Drill music has come in for heavy criticism by Metropolitan Police Chief Cressida Dick, who in 2018 called on platforms such as YouTube to remove content which “glamourises” violent crime. It’s only the latest in a long series of panic about music videos. Fifteen years ago, for instance, ministers were concerned about “rap lyrics”. The panic about drill music “is leading to the criminalisation of everyday pursuits”, says academic Joy White, University of Roehampton . She warns that young people from poor backgrounds are now becoming categorised as troublemakers through the mere act of making a music video.

Social media may play some role in normalising the carrying of weapons, as documented by research carried out by James Treadwell, professor in criminology at Staffordshire University . But academics stress that the role of social media has been overstated, or at very least oversimplified by the media and policy makers.

How can the problem be solved?

Just giving police more power is not the solution – academic consensus

So far, government plans to tackle the issue have focused on granting police greater powers to surveil, stop and search, and punish “suspicious” young people. 

As part of the UK government’s decision to enhance police powers, Sajid Javid, the home secretary, will seek to introduce Knife Crime Prevention Orders which:

Can apply to any person aged 12 or over who carries a knife, has been convicted of a knife-related offence, or is suspected by police of carrying one.

Can impose curfews, geographical boundaries or social media restrictions.

Can result in conviction and a prison sentence of up to two years if the order is breached.

Javid’s proposals are flawed, because they are based on the fundamental misunderstanding that you can prevent violence by identifying and punishing those identified as ‘at risk’ of offending. But stigmatising young people as ‘risky’ draws them into conflict with the authorities, as young people become over-policed and over-surveilled. Jo Deakin, criminologist, and Laura Bui, criminologist, both at University of Manchester .

London’s gang matrix

London’s Metropolitan Police has a database that lists individuals as “gang nominals” with each given an automated violence ranking of green, amber or red.

It came under scrutiny by human rights group Amnesty International last year. According to Amnesty’s report, it could affect the lives of 3,806 people, 80% of whom are between 12 and 24 years old.

The gang matrix appears to discriminate against ethnic minorities: 78% of the people listed on the the matrix are black, despite the fact that black people only make up 27% of those people known by police to be responsible for serious youth violence – and only 13% of London’s population is black.

Read more: Police are using big data to profile young people, putting them at risk of discrimination

Solutions need to put children and young people first

Academics consistently advocate solutions that put children and young people first.

Here are some solutions for the UK government that academics have proposed :

Stop stigmatising young people – listen to them instead

Divert children and young people away from toxic environments and into positive, nurturing ones that meet their basic needs

Invest in youth services, social care and extracurricular activities

Provide educational support to reduce school exclusions and improve outcomes

Work with families and communities to support, educate and rehabilitate young people

Invest in community-based policing to restore trusting relations

Create opportunities for training and employment to improve young people’s chances finding work and building professional relationships

More relevant articles written by academics

Knife crime is a health risk for young people – it can’t be solved by policing alone

How former offenders can make great mentors for at-risk teens

An expert (and father) comments

Thanks to James Treadwell, Anthony Ellis, Stephen Case, Kevin Haines, Laura Kelly, Ellie Munro, Becky Clarke, Patrick Williams, James Densley, Michelle Lyttle Storrod, Robert Ralphs, Iain Brennan, Joy White, Jo Deakin, Laura Bui, Daragh Murray, Pete Fussey and other academics who have written for The Conversation.

• Young people
• Youth services
• Sajid Javid
• knife crime
• Youth violence
• Drill music

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An Epidemic of Knife Crime in the UK Essay

Introduction, article summary, course concepts.

Although the crime was always a major problem in the United Kingdom, its subcategory of knife-related crimes has exploded in recent years. This form of crime is not only dangerous but also pervasive because of its impact on British youth. The popularity of such weapons can be partly explained by their availability for many, but they are also highly lethal, which results in many deaths or complications if aid is provided. Therefore, an epidemic of knife crimes in the UK is a result of three most significant and impactful forces, which have roots in a social context, court system, and historical context.

The first article focuses on the recent observations made by Alan Walsh, who is the founder of the ‘Real Men Don’t Carry Knives’ awareness campaign. It is reported that “he said he had seen a boy aged seven who had been slashed with “a machete across his hands”, and knew of children the same age carrying knives” (Foran, 2022, para. 3). The piece highlights the pervasiveness of knife crime as an epidemic among the younger generations of the United Kingdom. It is important to note that “Mr. Walsh runs Anfield and North Liverpool Boxing Club, which he uses to steer youngsters away from gangs and knife culture” (Foran, 2022, para. 8). In other words, so-called ‘gangs and knife culture’ is a major piece of this type of crime problem because children and adolescents exposed to these influences become subjected to carrying knives. The aggression generated by such a culture facilitates the use and carry cold weapons in self-defense against violence. It is also stated that “We were starting to get a handle on [knife crime], but it’s just gone crazy” (Foran, 2022, para. 15). Thus, the rate of knife crimes is increasing and becoming more prevalent among younger individuals.

The second article addresses knife crime in the UK within the context of class inequality. The narrative revolves around Yousef Makki, a 17-year-old boy who was stabbed to death by two other teenagers (Segalov, 2022). The perspective of the reflection is based on Yousef’s sister Jade Akoum, who witnessed first-hand the ineffectiveness of the justice system. Yousef, his sister, and his family are members of the working class (Segalov, 2022). The stabbers were Josh Molnar and Adam Chowdhary, who murdered the teenager (Segalov, 2022). It is reported that “both boys came from wealthy families; they were defended by three senior QCs and a well-respected junior” (Segalov, 2022, para. 13). In other words, it was an attack of two adolescents from the upper class on a lower class underage person. There was an attempt to silence the victims, and these rich families were able to hire better lawyers to direct the blame on the victim, where the trial outcome was unsatisfactory for the family.

Social Context

The nature, content, and context of knife crime in the United Kingdom can be explained by the use of three key course concepts, which include social context, the court system, and historical context. In the case of the former, it is evident that social class plays a key role in the emergence of knife crimes across the UK. It was shown that gang and knife culture plays a critical role in facilitating the use of cold weapons not only as a form of aggression but also as self-defense. Children as young as 7 years old carry knives to be a part of the sociocultural context (Foran, 2022). It is a form of the perpetual self-reinforcing phenomenon, where one’s aggressive behavior manifests in a prevalent use of knives as lethal instruments. The second article also showed how social context could heavily impact the spread of knife culture, which is not exclusive to the lower class only. The upper-class youth can also engage in this form of violence and crime, which further supports the impact of the gang culture on the younger generations.

Therefore, knife crime prevalence in the nation can be explained through the prism of social forces. It is stated that poverty and social perception of a problem can impact how it is addressed and prevented (Jones et al., 2021). The statement is supported by the fact that the Scottish model of response to knife crime was far more effective at reducing the rate than the rest of Britain (Roberts, 2020). Scotland treated knife culture as a public health issue rather than policing one (Roberts, 2020). Violence reduction units “worked with the NHS and social services to nurture those who were likely to join a gang: youths from poorer backgrounds and those who had been left behind by the education system” (Roberts, 2020, para. 3). The result was a substantial reduction in knife crime in Scotland compared to the UK.

Court System

The court system also plays a role in knife crime prevalence in the UK. As stated in the second article, trials are not solely based on justice, and poor families are vulnerable to such crimes (Segalov, 2022). In addition, the policing approach of the UK to knife crime mainly addresses the symptoms of the deeper problem of gang culture (Roberts, 2020). The political influence on underfunded policing in poorer regions of the nation can also be the cause of the problem (Jones et al., 2021). Therefore, the court system is inclined to incarcerate the lower class and leave the upper class unpunished, which explains why knife crime is spreading across all socioeconomic groups.

Historical Context

The historical context of the emergence of knife crime is linked to how it appeared. The regulations around policing structure in disadvantaged regions, alongside a tight regulation of firearms, leave these people vulnerable to gang culture. Cold weapons become prevalent due to their accessibility if other forms of weapons are inaccessible. Decreased police funding and a lack of community-based policing can also be contributing factors to the issue (Jones et al., 2021). In other words, the historic abandonment of the lower class gives rise to knife crime in the UK.

In conclusion, it is important to note that an epidemic of knife crimes in the UK is due to three major influences, which are manifested in the social context, court system, and historical context. It should be noted that the problem mainly impacts the lower social classes and poorer regions, which become a breeding ground for gang and knife culture. However, the latter’s recent spread to the upper class can be explained by the court system, which is tilted to be favorable for wealthier families. The historical context provides insight into how cold weapons became popular, which is tied to the tight regulation of firearms, the lack of support for the poorer communities, and underfunded policing measures.

Foran, K. (2022). Knife crime: Kids aged seven carrying knives, Liverpool campaigner says . BBC News.

Jones, B., Norton, P., & Hertner, I. (2021). Politics UK . Routledge.

Roberts, R. (2020). A history of violence: The story of U.K. knife crime so far . The Organization for World Peace.

Segalov, M. (2022). ‘Some days I really struggle’: Jade Akoum on the killing of her schoolboy brother. The Guardian UK.

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IvyPanda. (2023, March 19). An Epidemic of Knife Crime in the UK. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-epidemic-of-knife-crime-in-the-uk/

"An Epidemic of Knife Crime in the UK." IvyPanda , 19 Mar. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/an-epidemic-of-knife-crime-in-the-uk/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'An Epidemic of Knife Crime in the UK'. 19 March.

IvyPanda . 2023. "An Epidemic of Knife Crime in the UK." March 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-epidemic-of-knife-crime-in-the-uk/.

1. IvyPanda . "An Epidemic of Knife Crime in the UK." March 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-epidemic-of-knife-crime-in-the-uk/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "An Epidemic of Knife Crime in the UK." March 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-epidemic-of-knife-crime-in-the-uk/.

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Victims, offenders and victim-offender overlaps of knife crime: A social network analysis approach using police records

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Visualization

Roles Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected] , [email protected]

Affiliations Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

• Laura Bailey, 
• Vincent Harinam, 
• Barak Ariel

• Published: December 11, 2020
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621
• Reader Comments

Knife crime is a source of concern for the police in England and Wales, however little published research exists on this crime type. Who are the offenders who use knives to commit crime, when and why? Who are their victims, and is there a victim-offender overlap? What is the social network formation for people who are exposed to knife crime? Using a multidimensional approach, our aim is to answer these questions about one of England and Wales’ largest jurisdictions: Thames Valley. We first provide a state-of-the-art narrative review of the knife crime literature, followed by an analysis of population-level data on central tendency and dispersion of knife crimes reported to the police (2015–2019), on offences, offenders, victims, victim-offender overlaps and gang-related assaults. Social network analysis was used to explore the formations of offender-victim networks. Our findings show that knife crime represents a small proportion of crime (1.86%) and is associated largely with violence offenses. 16–34 year-old white males are at greatest risk of being the victims, offenders or victim-offenders of knife crime, with similar relative risks between these three categories. Both knife offenders and victims are likely to have a criminal record. Knife crimes are usually not gang-related (less than 20%), and experienced mostly between strangers, with the altercation often a non-retaliatory ‘one-off event’. Even gang-related knife crimes do not follow ‘tit-for-tat’ relationships—except when the individuals involved have extensive offending histories and then are likely to retaliate instantaneously. We conclude that while rare, an incident of knife crime remains predicable, as a substantial ratio of offenders and victims of future knife crime can be found in police records. Prevention strategies should not be focused on gang-related criminals, but on either prolific violent offenders or repeat victims who are known to the police—and therefore more susceptible to knife crime exposure.

Citation: Bailey L, Harinam V, Ariel B (2020) Victims, offenders and victim-offender overlaps of knife crime: A social network analysis approach using police records. PLoS ONE 15(12): e0242621. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621

Editor: Jonathan Jackson, London School of Economics, UNITED KINGDOM

Received: March 12, 2020; Accepted: November 3, 2020; Published: December 11, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Bailey et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Data cannot be shared publicly because of data sharing restrictions imposed by the data owner - Thames Valley Police. The point of contact for the data is Thames Valley Police Data Protection Unit at https://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/rqo/request/ri .

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

Reports of deaths arising from knife crimes have dominated United Kingdom (UK) headlines for the past half-decade, with U.S. President Donald Trump comparing the UK to a ‘military war zone’ [ 1 ]. British politicians have declared a ‘national emergency’, promising to ‘come down hard’ on the ‘scourge’ of knife crimes [ 2 , 3 ]. Yet, the literature on the topic is, interestingly, scant [ 4 ].

As Eades et al. [ 5 ] contended, in order to curb knife crime we must first understand what it is, who is involved and why certain individuals are attracted to it. Furthermore, while knife armament is seen as a relatively recent crime trend (it is not), the causes cited by those involved bear resemblance to the criminological literature on the victim-offender overlap (V-OO), where victims and offenders, based on shared characteristics and social space, are ‘one-in-the-same’ [ 6 , 7 ]. This suggests that V-OO may be a viable theoretical composition through which we can contextualise, forecast, and potentially prevent knife crime.

While V-OO provides an important assessment of individuals and their risk factors, our understanding of knife crimes can be aided by a more holistic view: explicating all the actors involved in knife crime, and only then reviewing their social ties. In this sense, social network analysis (SNA) provides an opportunity to look at the interdependencies between individuals involved in knife crime [ 8 ]. As noted by Lauritsen and Laub [ 9 ], it is not only an individual’s victimisation that needs to be considered, but also the victimisation within their social network, which can potentially be used to determine risk of both future victimisation and offending. For this, however, we must assume there is an organisational or structural component—i.e. gangs or organised crime—that causes knife-enabled violence to proliferate and spread through networks: violence begets violence, and proximity to violence places an individual at greater risk of victimisation [ 10 ]. This, however, has not been addressed in the violence literature.

By combining V-OO and SNA, this study provides insight into the nature of knife crime and how it spreads, if at all, among individuals and their criminal associations. In particular, SNA allows for the examination of the network structure of knife crimes in Thames Valley. This offers key strategic insight which may inform future law enforcement interventions. Importantly, this study also examines the role of retaliation and inter-gang violence in knife crime. We do this by examining population-level data of all non-domestic knife crimes recorded by the Thames Valley Police (TVP) between 2015 and early 2019.

2. Literature review

2.1 difficulties in quantifying knife crime in the uk.

Based on police records, knife crime occurred in less than 3.3% of all violent and weapon crime in 2019, which makes it a rare event [ 11 ]. Regardless of its statistical rarity, knife crimes are serious events where those involved may be seriously harmed. As such, further research into its occurrence and composition may yield insight into reducing harm. Longitudinally, the Office of National Statistics report that knife crime in the UK has risen by 7% between 2018 and 2019 [ 12 ]. However, the rate of growth is slowing when data are analysed for a more extensive period of time [ 13 ]. As it is often the case with low incidence events, longitudinal analyses can produce dramatic year-on-year fluctuations, though, in relative terms, the variations represent only small changes in incidence counts [ 14 , 15 ]. This may drive the dramatization in the media over the recent reported ‘spike’ in knife crime [ 16 – 19 ].

Another issue is whether police records are representative of ‘true population means’. First, modifications in crime recording practices could be driving these supposed increases in knife crime [ 12 , 20 ]. There are variations between police forces, between police units and over time [ 21 ], which makes both the validity as well as the reliability of ‘official statistics’ suspect at times [ 22 , 23 ]. Second, as observed by Ariel and Bland [ 24 ], police proactivity can be the main driver for reported increases in knife crime, especially when ‘knife crime’ includes possession offences, which are directly affected by targeted police activity such as stop and search [ 25 ]. Indeed, the combination of surge funding, associated stop and searches increases, and the explicit focus on weapons will affect the validity of police-recorded data. Moreover, this distinction between possession offences and violent crimes precipitated with a knife should be separated when we analyse data trends—both longitudinally and cross-sectionally.

2.1.1 Who is more likely to commit a weapon offence?

Just like the definition of what constitutes a knife crime, the antecedents for carrying or using a sharp blade are diverse. However, the literature on the perpetrators of knife crime is scant, with much of the knowledge arising from general studies of violence in which the data on weapon offences are often auxiliary to the main research questions. Still, the available evidence remains informative, and unravels several themes that cut across jurisdictions, contexts and time.

Research shows that young males are substantially more likely to be involved in knife crime [ 26 p7; 7]. The typical age range of those involved is between 13 and 24 years [ 27 ], which mimics the age-crime curve in terms of violence more broadly. If the study’s estimates are valid, then this translates to nearly 18,000 boys in this age group who carry a weapon [ 21 ]. The Serious Violence Strategy [ 21 ] further revealed that primarily underprivileged children, or those with four or more siblings, are more likely to be involved in serious violence, which illustrates the importance of studying familial links in violence.

Knife crime is more likely to take place in and around schools [ 28 ]. A recent ‘Freedom of Information request’ by the BBC News has indicated that out of 27 police forces in England and Wales that provided data, weapon possession (primarily sharp objects) at schools had doubled in four years. However, in absolute figures the rise consists of an increase from fewer than 500 per year to over 950 weapon possession offences in schools. Finally, one report suggests that carrying a weapon in school is associated with underachievement amongst 10 to18-year olds and more profoundly with school exclusions (but not due to weapon possessions) and a higher proportion had been persistently absent from school [ 29 ].

2.2 The victim-offender overlap and its pertinence to knife criminality

The victim-offender overlap (V-OO) is well established within criminological research [ 30 , 31 ]. The V-OO was first presented by Von Hentig [ 32 ] and later put forward by Wolfgang [ 33 ] and Gottfredson [ 8 ]. The authors identified a crossover between victims and offenders, determining three categories of criminally involved individuals: ‘pure victims’, ‘pure offenders’, and those who are ‘one-and-the-same’ (or victim-offenders). These ‘victim-offenders’ often share social characteristics, risk factors and etiological linkages which are different from pure victims and offenders [ 34 ].

Several theories have been proposed to explain the V-OO. These can be grouped into two schools of thought: the dynamic causal perspective and the population heterogeneity perspective [see review in 35 ]. First, the dynamic causal perspective purports that when the likelihood of being victimised increases, there is an immediate elevated risk of committing a violent offence [ 36 ]. In a longitudinal study of Swiss youth, Averdijk et al. [ 37 ] found that following victimisation, individuals are less likely to feel shame or remorse when committing a future offence—which tends to justify subsequent crime. On the other hand, the population heterogeneity perspective argues that victimisation and offending do not cause one another but are instead caused by stable personality characteristics or environmental factors that precipitate both [ 35 ]. The general theory of crime is an example of this view, stipulating that low self-control is the cause of criminality [ 38 ]. Whether this arises from an offender’s prior criminal history [ 39 ] or the history of their peers, the risk of victimisation is more pronounced [ 40 , 41 ]. For example, in a study of victims with low self-control who were subject to a serious assault, Singer [ 42 ] identified that these individuals had the highest probability of having a friend arrested, belonging to a gang, using a weapon and committing a serious assault. Thus, a third factor causes both the likelihood of offending as well as being a victim—but there is no necessarily reciprocal relationship between the two; the end result, however, is the same: a V-OO.

Gangs have received specific attention in the V-OO research. In 2009, Melde et al. [ 43 ] conducted a study of youths aged between 10 and 16 years, identifying that those in gangs report greater levels of actual and perceived risk of victimisation compared to non-gang-members. In a longitudinal study of Chicago youth, Zimmerman et al. [ 44 ] looked at the relationship between victims and offenders, finding that the odds of offending are 76% greater if victimised, and 70% greater if victimised by a gang member. Papachristos et al. [ 10 ] contend that gang membership is associated with a tripled risk of violent victimisation. Similarly, Zavala [ 45 ] found that gang membership increases the risk of victimisation by 447%, and offending risk by 249%. Given this body of evidence, the underlying assumption ought to be that V-OO is ubiquitous, and that knife crime is likely to follow suit, although to the best of our knowledge no published research has looked at this phenomenon specifically in the context of knife crime.

2.3 Social network analysis and violent crime

Criminal conduct is a social behaviour, with most offenders being embedded within networks of delinquent and criminal friends [ 46 ]. The examination of these social networks can also provide insight into crime patterns and structures [ 47 , 48 ]. In recognising the connectivity between individuals, SNA allows for the examination of the connective properties that link these individuals and influence their behaviour [ 49 ].

Haynie [ 50 ] illustrated that the more delinquent peers central to one’s network, the more delinquency will be measured at the level of the individual. The density of a network is also key, whereby a greater number of actors are said to increase the victimisation and offending risk [ 38 ]. In a study looking at juvenile co-offending networks, McGloin and Piquero [ 51 ] found that members of a ‘dense’ network are often specialised in their criminality when offending with others, while sparse networks demonstrated less criminal specialisation. Therefore, those who regularly offend together, such as gang members, will often commit similar offences due to the lack of skills and diversity afforded by group members.

Subsequently, the proliferation of violence is a key focus within SNA, often concluding that violence is infectious and passes through social networks [ 52 – 54 ]. By using dyadic analysis, Papachristos [ 55 ] identified that murders between rival gangs are best understood as social contagion, carried out within organised networks, rather than committed at random [ 56 ]. This is supported by the finding that 70% of victimisations occur within recognisable social networks; even indirect exposure to victimisation increases the likelihood of victimisation [ 10 ].

In relation to knife crime, similar findings were described as a ‘replicative externality’, whereby knife criminality proliferates though a person’s social network [ 57 ]. This highlights the importance of understanding an individual’s network and, in particular, their associations and connections, given the increased likelihood of offending being committed within that network.

Admittedly, most SNA studies on violent networks have been conducted in the US, with an underrepresented crime portfolio from UK gangs [ 58 ]. Therefore, whilst being able to draw conclusions on the potential validity of SNA to examine the proliferation of knife crime within the UK, these results might be limited in their generalisability as to whether knife crime mimics the contagion effect of U.S. gun and gang violence.

3. The present study

Given the literature review, this research aims to address two research questions:

• Who offends and who is victimised by knife crime, and is there evidence of V-OO?
• What is the network structure of knife crimes in Thames Valley, based on these police records?

4. Data and methods

To address the research questions, our study uses a population-level dataset, covering the full cohort of knife crimes and linked individuals across the geographical area serviced by the Thames Valley Police (TVP) of England and Wales. TVP is the largest non-metropolitan police force in England and Wales, with a jurisdiction over 2,200 m 2 , three primary counties (Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire), a diverse population of more than 2.34M residents and approximately 6M visitors who come to the Thames Valley each year. The Thames Valley is located in the southeast region of England, west of London. The police force area is divided into 12 Local Policing Areas, with more than 4,120 frontline officers, 3,400 police staff and more than 500 volunteers.

The dataset used originates from police-recorded information reported and retained in local police records referred to as the Records Management System that is used by the TVP (RMS Niche), which manages information in relation to people, locations, organisations and incidents. The dataset contains all non-domestic knife crime occurrences across the TVP Force Area (covering the entirety of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire) reported to or by the police within a four-year period (01/04/2015 to 31/03/2019). This four-year dataset was selected due to changes in knife crime recording practices prior to this period. Importantly, we define ‘knife crime’ as any event where a knife, sharp instrument or other bladed implement was present or used to assault another person.

For the period of interest, a total of 515,939 unique non-domestic crimes were reported (as an illustration, in 2019 199,772 crimes were recorded, of which 58,752 violent crimes and 1,627 robberies were registered. However, only 10,146 non-domestic knife crime offences were identified based on RMS Niche filters, which recorded the presence or use of a knife during the commission of an offence. Of these 10,146 knife crime offences, 10,099 unique cases can be identified (i.e. 47 duplicate entries were removed). This constitutes 2.2% of all offenses in Thames Valley over the period of study. These offences occurred against 6,896 unique victims and 7,231 unique offenders who were identified. For the purposes of this study, “offender” is defined as an individual who initiates a knife crime while “victim” is defined as an individual who is on the receiving of the knife crime within that specific knife crime incident. These definitions are reflective of how victims and offenders were categorized within the dataset by Thames Valley crime analysts and database managers. With respect to the V-OO, it is important to clarify that an individual can be a victim in one knife crime event and an offender in another separate event.

In terms of data points, we gained access to anonymised information on all the individuals involved, including whether they are affiliated with gangs or organized crime groups (OCGs); their gender, ethnicity, date of birth, prior offences and victimisations; and all the quantifiable information on system. Importantly, 610 unique individuals were identified as both a knife crime victim and offender (V-OO), representing 8.8% of the victim population and 8.4% of the offender population.

4.2 Analysis plan

4.2.1 descriptive statistics..

Measures of central tendency and dispersion were used to summarize the 10,099 knife crimes. These basic descriptors are useful for understanding both the socio-demographic and spatial composition of knife crime, as well as the presence of a V-OO.

4.2.2 Social network analysis.

We employed descriptive network analysis to illustrate how the social networks of knife crime offenders are constructed in Thames Valley. All network statistics and modelling were conducted in R using the igraph [ 59 ] and statnet [ 60 ] packages, while visualizations were conducted in Gephi. Social network analysis offers unique insight into the composition of a criminal network. Moreover, by examining the global structure of knife crimes, we can better diagnose the UK’s perceived knife crime epidemic and offer policy recommendations on how to deal with it. As such, social network analysis represents a novel means by which UK knife crimes can be examined.

From the 10,099 identified knife crime offences, two networks were created: 1) a one-mode ‘actor-to-actor’ network featuring offenders and victims and 2) a one-mode ‘actor-to-actor’ network featuring offending OCGs and victimised OCGs. Given the strict requirement of both an identifiable offender and victim, only knife crime offences with both a known offender and victim were used to construct these networks. Offenders and victims were identified based on their Unique Nominal ID and criminal association. As some offenders and victims could not be linked to a victim or offender, respectively, due to data limitations they were removed from analysis. As such, the offender-victim network consisted of 7,044 pairs, with 5,020 unique offenders and 4,550 unique victims. The OCG-to-OCG network consisted of 208 pairs, with 97 unique offending OCGs and 86 unique victimised OCGs. A link between the nodes was defined as co-offending or involving knife crime [ 61 ].

More formally, our analyses use directed ties, meaning that the tie from i to j is not necessarily reciprocated ( i may attack j with a knife, while j may not do the same to i ). An interaction between an offender and victim is regarded as a tie, y ij , where y ij = 1 if a violent interaction has occurred between offender i and victim j and y ij = 0 if not. As our data are weighted, y ij may be greater than 1 if offender i and victim j have had multiple interactions.

We applied four network measures to assess the structure of these networks: network density, average in/out-degree centrality, reciprocity and modularity. Density measures the overall interconnectedness of a network (e.g. the number of possible interactions between offender i and victim j ). To this extent, network density measures the total number i to j ties divided by the number of possible ties in the network. Represented by a coefficient ranging from 0 to 1, a high density (close to 1) indicates that offenders tend to engage in knife crimes frequently and with different victims. Conversely, a low density (close to 0) indicates that offenders tend to assault a single victim on an infrequent basis.

Average in/out-degree centrality measures the average number of unique ties an actor has within their respective network. For our purposes, it indicates the average number of unique victims an offender has (outdegree centrality) and the average number of unique offenders a victim has (indegree centrality). Reciprocity delineates the proportion of mutual connections in a directed graph [ 62 ]. It is commonly defined as the probability that the opposite counterpart of a directed edge is also included in the graph. That is, the proportion of i to j ties divided by the total number of ties in the network. Reciprocity indicates the extent to which offenders are victimised by their previous victims.

Finally, modularity indicates the extent to which a network decomposes into modular communities [ 63 ]. In the network sciences, a community is comprised of nodes that are more densely connected to each other than to other nodes in the network. For our purposes, modularity reflects the number of knife crime communities within the network. To this extent, the number and connectivity of isolated knife crime communities serves as an indicator of the level of ‘information flow’, and by extension, fragmentation, within the network. Modularity is a chance-corrected statistic ranging from -0.5 to 1. It is defined as the fraction of ties that fall within the given groups minus the expected fraction if ties were distributed at random. A high modularity score (Q) suggests that the network is compartmentalized into distinct subgroups [for further technical details see 64 ].

4.3 Data limitations

Perhaps the foremost limitation of any police data system is the poor validity of the information recorded therein [ 65 ]. Fluctuations in criminality due to police proactivity and the quality of reporting are an open concern [ 24 ]. Therefore, this study only presents data on what TVP know, which likely masks the true population figures: official statistics are unlikely to represent the true scale of knife criminality across Thames Valley.

In terms of data quality, we lack any information on how knives are used. Without knowing this, it is difficult to measure the true harm arising from knife crimes, without manually reviewing all 10,099 knife crime offences—an exercise that was beyond the scope of this inquiry.

Finally, while knife crimes may be underreported, known knife crime offenders may be over-reported. As law enforcement often suspect those already known to them of committing a crime [ 54 ], the number of times that an offender is linked to multiple knife crimes may be inflated.

5.1 Descriptive statistics for knife crime trends, offenders, and victims

5.1.1 knife crimes by year and crime sub-classification..

During the four years under review, the proportion of all non-domestic crime represented by knife crime increased by an average of 1.86%, while the rate of all non-domestic crime increased by an average of 6.52% each year. However, despite the increasing volume of knife crime each year (2015/2016: 1,816; 2016/2017: 2,244; 2017/2018: 2,867; 2018/2019: 3,172), the rate of growth has been inconsistent, with a 27.8% increase from 2016–2017 to 2017–2018 and 10.6% increase in 2018–2019 from the previous year. Importantly, when the data are disaggregated based on offence sub-classifications, we find that violence and weapons possession offences drive year-to-year knife crime increases (see Fig 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.g001

Of the 10,099 knife crime offences, 1,636 offences are linked to police-recognised organized crime groups (OCGs), which represents 16.2% of all knife crimes within the four-year period. To this extent, 236 offences involved both an OCG-affiliated offender and victim, while 1,380 and 492 offences involved only an OCG-affiliated offender and victim, respectively. Notably, of these 1,636 OCG-related knife crimes, 294 were linked to drug activity distributed between county drug lines and by local drug dealers.

5.1.2 Socio-demographic characteristics of knife crimes.

Within the 10,099 knife crime offences, there are 6,896 unique victims and 7,231 unique offenders. The key demographics are presented in Table 1 . In general, we can see that White (Northern European) males between the ages of 16 and 34 constitute the majority of knife crime victims within Thames Valley. This is also the case for offenders, who are 87.6% male, 59.6% White (Northern European), and 59.3% aged 16 to 34.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.t001

Of the 6,896 unique victims and 7,231 unique offenders, 548 (7.8%) and 1,380 (19%) had a link to a recognized OCG, respectively. Furthermore, 38% (130) of OCG-affiliated victims were members of a drug dealing gang, with 87 and 52 of these victims linked to ‘county lines’ (County Line is a term used to describe gangs and organised criminal networks involved in exporting illegal drugs into one or more importing areas within the UK, using dedicated mobile phone lines or other form of “deal line”) and local drug dealers, respectively. Similarly, 34% (469) of OCG-affiliated offenders were linked to a drug gang while 28% (386) were affiliated with a weapons/firearms gang. Notably, 291 victims experienced more than one knife victimisation, accounting for 633 total knife crime offences. Furthermore, the majority of these victims were male (81.6%), White (Northern European) (52.5%), and aged 16 to 34 (55.4%).

5.1.3 Habitual knife crime offenders and repeat victims of knife crime.

Those identified as repeat victims and offenders both experienced, on average, two knife crime incidents. Of the 7,231 unique offenders, 1,564 (21.6%) committed more than one knife crime offence, accounting for 41.4% of all knife crimes within the four years of study. However, this distribution reaches a maximum of five incidents for victims and 13 for offenders. Importantly, incidents experienced by repeat victims (4.2%) represented a small percentage of all knife crimes (6.27%), while 21.6% of repeat offenders committed 41.4% of knife criminality.

Similar to repeat knife crime victims, repeat offenders were primarily male (92.5%), between the ages of 16 and 24 (42.4%), and predominantly White (Northern European) (57.3%), with Blacks and Asians accounting for 25.2% and 11.5%, respectively. To place these statistics in perspective, 8% Oxfordshire’s population are Black, Asian or other ethnic minorities ( http://www.southoxon.gov.uk ).

5.1.4 V-OO.

The data present evidence of a V-OO: 610 individuals can be identified as both a victim and an offender. This cohort accounted for 7.3% (734) of all knife crimes, with 410 offences committed by 145 repeat victim-offenders. Only nine knife crime incidents involved a victim and offender who were both repeat victim-offenders. In terms of gender distribution, 89% were male, comparable to all knife crime offenders within the dataset. White (North European) overrepresented, constituting 65.5% of victim-offenders, followed by Black (18.8%) and Asian (14.24%) victim-offenders. Moreover, the average age for male victim-offenders is 27 years and 29 for females (63.1% (385) are between the ages of 16 and 34).

In terms of repeat involvement in knife crime, victim-offenders are split into two groups: victimised and offending. Eleven per cent of victim-offenders experienced 22.9% of victim knife crime (1.9% of total knife crime), while 23.7% of victim-offenders committed 55.8% of victim-offender associated knife crime (4% of total knife crime). Of the 610 victim-offenders, 30.5% (186) were affiliated with an OCG. Of the 10,099 unique knife crimes, only 236 offences involved victim-offenders with a known affiliation to OCGs and gangs (2.34%). Groups of offenders that deal drugs represent more than 33% of all OCGs and gangs. Within this group of victims-offenders, 47% are linked to country lines, 32.9% linked to local drug dealers, and the rest (20%) to both. Of the 610 unique victim-offenders, they experienced 679 knife-crime offences (6.7% of all knife crime). 156 offences were experienced by 72 repeat victim-offenders. Of the 610 unique victim-offenders, they committed 734 knife-crime offences (7.2% of all knife crime). 410 offences were committed by 145 repeat victim-offenders. Although this represents 4% of all knife crime, this equates to 55.8% of all knife-crime being committed by 23.7% of all victim-offenders.

5.2 The network structure of Thames Valley knife crimes

5.2.1 offender-victim networks..

The offender-victim knife crime network is comprised of 9,261 unique actors spread across 7,044 knife crime incidents, with 5,020 and 4,550 unique offenders and victims, respectively. Moreover, only 22% (1,107) of offenders and 10% (442) of victims were affiliated with an OCG. As such, the network is comprised primarily of non-OCG-affiliated actors. As expected, there are no isolates within the network, as an actor cannot be both an offender and victim within the same dyadic pairing.

As shown in Table 2 , the average indegree and outdegree centrality are proxies for the average number of offenders who have assaulted a victim and the average number of victims harmed by an offender. As such, knife crime victims have been accosted by 1.52 offenders, on average, whereas knife crime offenders have harmed an average of 1.37 victims. Importantly, we observed small but statistically significant differences in the outdegree and indegree centrality among OCG-affiliated and non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.t002

Independent samples t-tests revealed that OCG-affiliated offenders and victims possessed a higher average number of victims (1.62) and offenders (1.76) relative to their non-OCG-affiliated counterparts [( t (1370) = 8.94, p = <0.0001), and ( t (575) = 4.2, p = <0.0001) respectively]. This reveals a key distinction between the frequency and intensity of knife crime offences: while non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims may account for a larger proportion of knife crimes, OCG-affiliated offenders and victims are involved in a higher average number of knife crimes.

The distribution of outdegree and indegree centrality reveals that 78.1% and 72.9% of all offenders and victims had only one victim and offender, respectively (see Table 3 ). Furthermore, 66.6% and 60% of OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender while 81.3% and 74.3% of non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender. This suggests that the overwhelming majority of knife crimes are one-off events between two individuals.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.t003

Like many other criminal networks, the offender-victim knife crime network is markedly diffused, with a network density of 0 (note: the network density was rounded to 0). For the sake of comparison, the density of a dark web opioid distribution market studied by Duxbury and Haynie [ 66 ] was 0.002, while Jihadi networks examined by Krebs [ 67 ] and Morselli, Giguere, and Petit [ 68 ] ranged from 0.2 to 0.4. Furthermore, this network possessed a modularity of 0.997, with 2,923 identifiable communities. This suggests a high level of network fragmentation as nodes within the network exhibited clustering with respect to their given node grouping (see Fig 2 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.g002

In general, the structure of the offender-victim knife crime network is dyadic, as components with two nodes accounted for a majority (65.3%) of all components and a plurality (41.2%) of all nodes within the network. Furthermore, triads accounted for the second largest component group, representing 17.5% and 16.6% of all components and nodes, respectively. Indeed, knife crimes in Thames Valley are dyadic: one-off crime events between two individuals. This, moreover, explains the marked fragmentation as this network is comprised of many two-node subgroups while lacking many large multi-node components ( Fig 2 ).

However, the fragmentation and dyadic composition of the offender-victim knife crime network may be a by-product of the relationship between the individuals involved. Our data show that 34.7% (2,444) and 33.1% (2,330) of knife crime incidents in this network involved strangers and acquaintances, respectively. While many law enforcement databases struggle from missing data, this particularly database was mainly complete with 97% of knife crime incidents possessing the relationship between the victim and offender. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that as stranger violence is more likely to be reported, this finding may nevertheless be subject to a recording bias. Equally important are the criminal and victimisation histories of these offenders and victims (see Table 4 ). While a plurality (25.8%) of offenders had no prior criminal offending, a majority (52.9%) of these offenders had no prior victimisations. Similarly, 60.2% and 51.1% of victims had no prior offending or victimisations. However, knife crime offenders are more likely to have a criminal record, with 74.2% having committed at least one prior offence.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.t004

5.2.2 OCG-to-OCG network.

The OCG-to-OCG knife crime network is comprised of 141 unique OCGs, including 97 unique offending OCGs and 86 unique victimised OCGs (see Table 5 and Fig 3 for more details). These are spread across 209 knife crime incidents. 17.8% of all incidents involved an offender and victim from the same OCG, so we see that that in the majority of cases of when OCG members use knives as an assault weapon, they are directed at rival OCGs.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.g003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242621.t005

As per the average indegree centrality ( Table 5 ), victimised OCGs are harmed by 1.85 OCGs, on average, whereas offending OCGs commit harm against 1.64 OCGs, on average. In short, it does not appear that inter-OCG knife crimes occur at a high frequency among a bevy of OCGs. This is corroborated by the distribution of outdegree and indegree centrality measures, where 62.9% of offending OCGs harmed only one OCG, while 60.5% of victimised OCGs were harmed by a single OCG. Only 22.7% and 22.1% of offending and victimised OCGs harmed or were harmed by two OCGs, respectively. In addition to a low reciprocity of 0.02, it appears that OCG-related knife crimes, like those committed by persons, are one-off events that rarely beget retaliation. To this point, only 2.9% (6) of all cases were tied to retaliation, and this network is not dyadic, as 73% (103) of all nodes are housed within a single component.

5.2.3 Retaliations within the offender-victim network.

Of the 7,044-recorded knife crime incidences in this network, 0.94% (66) were retaliations where actor j harmed actor i following actor i ’s initial attack on actor j . As such, we found 33 retaliatory incidents, representing 33 mutual dyads in the network. This small number of retaliations is ultimately reflected in the low reciprocity of 0.009. This finding supports the established trend regarding the one-off nature of Thames Valley knife crimes.

Based on this small sample, we were able to determine that retaliations occurred within 16.5 days (or 395.15 hours) after the initial knife crime. However, this number should be cautiously considered as 12 of the 33 retaliatory attacks were instantaneous, occurring immediately (within a minute of the initial assault) following the initial attack. Importantly, only 12% of offenders and victims were affiliated with an OCG. As such, knife crime retaliations are not primarily a gang-related phenomenon. Of the 33 recorded retaliations, only three involved both an OCG-affiliated offender and victim. However, offenders who engaged in the initial and retaliatory knife crime were more likely to have an extensive criminal history relative to the rest of the offenders within the network. That is, 38% and 29% of the initial and retaliatory offenders had committed nine or more prior offences, respectively.

6. Discussion

6.1 knife crime is male-dominated, with young adults between 16–34 and a criminal background—but not gang-related. the same can be said about victims of knife crime.

Our data provide information on the nature and structural composition of knife crimes in the TVP Force Area. If our results are generalizable, then UK knife crime networks typically involve strangers, both of whom have a criminal history or prior victimisation, but are not gang affiliated, as over 81% of offenders and 92.2% of victims were found to be unaffiliated with any organised crime groups. We contextualise these findings more broadly within two distinct layers: individuals and networks.

The characteristics of victims and offenders bear marked similarities. That is, the age range, gender and ethnicities of these two groups are more similar than they are different, with males between the ages of 16 and 34 constituting the majority of victims and offenders. In terms of ethnicity, we found little difference between victims and offenders, with White (Northern Europeans) representing 72% and 66% respectively. Asian and Black ethnicities, however, are over-represented in the data, compared to their overall population trends in the TVP area. In general, the demographic similarities between victims and offenders provide some support for the existence of a victim-offender overlap in knife crimes [ 9 ], although with some variation in frequency and scope.

While a plurality (25.8%) of offenders had no prior criminal offending, a majority (52.9%) of these offenders have no prior victimisations. Similarly, 60.2% and 51.1% of victims had no prior offending or victimisations. The preponderance of first-time victims points to the peculiar nature of knife crimes in Thames Valley as most victims are generally not involved in crime of any sort. However, the offender-victim network indicated that the majority of offenders were known to the police from prior offences (74.2%). Nearly half of those victimised were repeat victims (47.1%). If these police records represent true population means of knife crime offenders and victims, then knife crime is correlated with criminal behaviour more broadly. This deviates from common assaults and less severe forms of violence, which is more likely to be a result of contextual factors (e.g. alcohol) rather than a crime committed by a seasoned offender. Knife crime is different: those who carry knives, and those who use them to commit crimes (and get caught), are known offenders. Even the victims are usually known to the police, with 39.8% having a criminal record, and 38.9% having been injured in the past. These trends are not very different from those reported in earlier studies [ 5 , 31 , 33 ].

Finally, the literature points to gang involvement as one of the main correlates of violent crime. However, the TVP data suggest otherwise, with under 19% of offenders and 7.8% of victims marked by an association with a recognized gang or organized crime. These figures support Massey et al. [ 69 ] who found that only 21% of knife homicides in London were gang related. More broadly, these findings debunk much of what is portrayed in the media: drug gangs escalating the risk of knife crime by using violence to exploit and obtain territory [ 70 ]. Indeed, it appears that TVP knife crimes are not usually gang related, and in fact experienced mostly by young and non-criminals.

6.2 Social networks of knife crime are usually dyadic and non-reiterative

The construction of both an offender-victim and OCG-to-OCG network offers unique insight into the structural composition of Thames Valley knife crimes on both an individual and organizational level. The offender-victim network was constructed from 7,044 of the 10,099 knife crimes, representing 69.7% of all incidents, including 5,020 (69.4%) unique offenders and 4,550 (65.9%) unique victims. Despite their involvement in the majority of knife incidents, non-OCG affiliated offenders and victims have fewer unique victims and offenders than their OCG-affiliated counterparts. This small but statistically significant difference reveals a key distinction in terms of the frequency and intensity of knife crimes: while non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims account for a greater proportion of police-recorded knife criminality, OCG-affiliated victims and offenders are more frequently involved in these offences.

Moreover, 78% of all offenders and 73% of all victims had only one victim and offender, but when broken down into OCG and non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims, 67% and 60% of OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender, while 81.3% and 74.3% of non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender. This indicates that an overwhelming majority of knife crimes are one-off events between two individuals. This is also reflected in the distribution of component sizes. Indeed, the victim-offender network is predominantly dyadic, where 65.3% of all components, comprising 41.2% of all nodes, are dyads. There is a distinct absence of many large multi-node components.

These findings seemingly run contrary to much of the co-offending network literature in the United States, which often reports that violent crime across high-crime communities occurs within small, identifiable networks of individuals actively engaged in criminal and delinquent behaviour [ 10 , 53 , 71 ]. Papachristos et al. [ 72 ] found in a high-crime neighbourhood in Boston that 85% of all gunshot injuries occurred within a single network containing only 763 individuals, two-thirds of whom were either gang members or had been arrested in the months leading up to their victimisation. These differences may be explained by cultural distinctions between gangs across the Atlantic, but they can also be the product of structural differences in geographic locales [ 73 ]. Studies by Papachristos et al. [ 10 , 74 ] presented results from densely populated U.S. cities with well-established gang and gun violence. The knife crime study presents data arising from three UK diverse counties, which provide heterogeneity in landscape (rural and urban), culture and crime trends. As such, findings from studies of criminal networks in the U.S. [ 75 , 76 ] cannot be duplicated for criminal networks in the UK; additional research is required to expound these disparities.

However, an equally likely explanation for this discrepancy may lie in the nature of the co-offending network examined. In general, U.S.-based studies deal predominantly with broader co-offending networks that are larger and subject to greater network density. For example, studies by Papachristo et. al [ 10 , 55 ] and Papachristos and Wildeman [ 71 ] which examined gun violence networks in the U.S. included all arrest and co-arrests. Being more broadly defined, these networks are much larger, with more connections between victims and offenders relative to the network examined in this study. Furthermore, as this network is defined only by victims and offenders involved in knife crimes, it is unlikely to have a network density like in the aforementioned studies.

It is, however, arguable that the idiosyncrasies of the Thames Valley knife crime network are a consequence of the attributes of the individuals involved. To this extent, 34.7% and 33.1% of all knife crime incidents involved strangers and acquaintances, respectively. As the offenders and victims are strangers and acquaintances who have rarely or never associated with one another, it is unlikely that they will meet again following their altercation.

6.3 Tit-for-tat is uncommon

Finally, we find little evidence for retaliatory knife crime. We assumed that retaliatory assaults are common. Yet the SNA indicated otherwise: given the dyadic relationships in terms of knife crime that takes place primarily between unfamiliar strangers, the likelihood of a repeated transgression between the same parties is low: only 33 retaliatory incidents were identified. The overwhelming majority of knife crimes (99.61%) begin and end with the initial knife crime event. This finding can be explained by the criminal involvement of the offenders and the victims: the majority of them are not gang-affiliates, who are more likely to retaliate.

The literature is mixed on this issue of retaliation. Some find support for tit-for-tat [ 77 – 79 ], while others do not, finding no evidence of retaliation when the incident was perpetrated by a stranger or someone the victim barely knew [ 10 ]. Our findings support the latter perspective, given the rarity of this recording. The number of incidents is too low for valid forecasts, at least in the context of the Thames Valley. Nevertheless, offenders who participated in retaliatory knife incidents were more likely to have an extensive criminal history relative to the rest of the offenders within the network. That is, 38% and 29% of the initial and retaliatory offenders had committed nine or more prior offences, respectively. This, in part, suggests that retaliatory knife crimes are between actors with extensive criminal histories. This finding provides an important opportunity for proactive policing, whereby preventative tactics can be employed to deter high-risk retaliators from committing an offence following knife crime victimisation [ 80 ].

6.4 OCGs and gangs play a limited role in knife crime

The OCG-to-OCG network is comprised of 208 knife crime incidents, 82.2% of which involved different groups. Moreover, victimised OCGs were harmed by 1.85 OCGs while offending OCGs harmed 1.64 rivals. The majority of OCGS—62.9% and 60.5% of offending and victimised OCGS—harmed and were harmed by only one OCG, respectively. In addition to a low reciprocity of 0.02, it appears that OCG-related knife crimes, like those in the offender-victim network, remain one-off events that rarely beget retaliation. These findings contradict popular claims of OCGs driving UK knife crimes.

However, unlike the offender-victim network, the OCG-to-OCG network is not dyadic, with 73% of all nodes being housed within a single component. This is particularly telling as it indicates that OCG-related knife crimes are not densely reciprocated incidents between a small contingent of rival OCGs, but crime events that sparsely tie together an assortment of OCGs. Taken together, these results indicate that knife crimes perpetrated by TVP OCGs are not only rare, but also generally unreflective of the violent turf wars that characterise North American OCG and gang activities [ 77 , 81 ].

6.5 Policy implications: Pre-emptive prevention measures with known offenders

From a practical perspective, dramatically limiting the number of potential offenders and victims—or both—from the overall population of people who live or visit a jurisdiction creates a finite pool of individuals for law enforcement agencies to control. Indeed, the relative contribution of each offender to overall knife crime is not shaped in a ‘power few’ formation [ 82 ], with a relatively small number of individuals responsible for a disproportionate number of incidents [ 83 ]. Still, some clustering does take place. Our analyses suggest that about one-fifth of repeat offenders committed about 42% of all the knife crime [ 84 ]. Nevertheless, they are known to the police (by virtue of being repeatedly arrested), and there are still some violent offenders who engage more regularly in crime than others. These data distributions present targeting opportunities—for example through focused deterrence approaches [ 85 , 86 ].

The most immediate policy implication, however, concerns data and recording practices. As discussed by Massey et al. [ 69 ], we have also experienced data issues that hinder both forecasting as well as prevention of knife crime: the forced localisation of the data to the spatial boundaries of individual police forces; the ‘free text’ nature of many data points (for instance, the very recording of a knife); or the accuracy of data—all equally remain a source of concern in this line of research. Crime recording systems that do not allow for reasonable retrieval of historic data pose challenges. Equally, the feedback of data on the whereabouts of suspects, persons of interest and potential victims of knife crime (or violence more broadly) to field officers is sporadic and limited. Thus, more valid, reliable and available data can assist in understanding the phenomenon, as well as guide us toward effective preventative or suppressive initiatives.

As it relates to policy and law enforcement intervention, there is a need to separate gangs from knife crimes in order to tackle both problems more effectively. Whilst most policing approaches deal with the problem of gangs and knives as one-in-the-same, these findings suggest their independence from one another. Moreover, given the low density of the knife crime network, it is evident that knife crimes are one-on-one events. As the network is fragmented, it may be difficult for law enforcement to craft a targeting strategy which focuses on key actors within the network. However, this insight may prove useful as law enforcement should pivot away from interventions which target gangs to a generalized approach which discourages carrying knives in public. With that said, in order to identify those at greatest risk of high-harm knife crimes, police data recording systems must reduce duplicated entries and include options to record how a knife was used. With these improvements, a more valid assessment of knife crime harm could be conducted.

6.6 Future research implications

Overall, the characteristics of habitual knife crime offenders or repeat knife crime victims are not different from ‘one-off’ knife offenders and victims. We sense that our data are limited and therefore we are unable to trace discrete features of these subgroups. With additional information, classification of violent offenders is more likely. For example, we know that differences between offenders are often explained by situational, psychosocial or ecological factors—however these data points were beyond our reach. Future research should consider richer data and more fit actuarial models to forecast involvement of repeated knife crime. Such analysis may debunk one possible explanation for the habitualness we find in our data: a disproportionate attention on ‘likely suspects’ on the part of law enforcement [ 51 ]. While it may not be possible to use the current data to accurately forecast likely offenders, future research should consider how network-level data can be applied for the purposes of identifying knife crime risk. Such risk factors can be further developed to form the foundation of an actuarial forecasting tool for knife crimes. To this extent, this study has demonstrated the utility of social network analysis in determining the underlying structure of a knife crime network. Future research should consider utilizing social network analysis in order to replicate the findings of this study (e.g. network density, modularity, etc.).

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Policing the Crisis in the 21 st Century; the making of “knife crime youths” in Britain

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• Elaine Williams   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3175-4641 1  

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The terms ‘knife crime’ and ‘knife culture’ were first established in British crime discourse at the turn of 21 st century and represent a particular re-making of youth in post-industrial Britain. The generational impacts of advanced neoliberalism have intensified conflict between marginalised young people in the UK as they compete for success in high-risk informal economies and navigate the normalised brutalities of everyday violence. However, the impact of extreme inequality and structural violence on children has not been central in the response to youth-on-youth knife homicides in the 2000s and 2010s. Instead, these decades have been characterised by punitiveness and surveillance, increasing discriminatory stop and search practices and extending powers that target and control young people. Through conjunctural analysis of the making of ‘knife crime youths’ in the UK, this paper considers how shifting forms of cultural racism have been able to rearticulate child violence as cultural deficit, using race once again to work through the contradictions of late capitalism. Applying a radical criminological understanding of deviance labelling as a specific response to crime, this paper asks: To what extent is the construction of ‘knife crime’ a continuation of Policing the Crisis in the 21st century? And why has this process been relatively uncritiqued by practitioners and academics that contribute to ‘knife crime’ discourse? Using document, archive and discourse analysis this paper presents a social history of ‘knife crime youths’, depicting the formative interactions that have so far been obscured by the matter-of-fact dominance of the label and its practices.

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Introduction; rethinking ‘knife crime youths’

The term ‘knife crime’ is selectively used in British media to refer to a particular type of criminality. When used by the press, politicians, police and other authorised spokespeople, the label infers a particular context and demographic that has now become common knowledge in public discourse. As such, when ‘knife crime’ is mentioned in Britain, it will likely be assumed that we are talking about a type of crime that is distinctly youthful, that this is a problem located in the inner-city (particularly London), and that this crime type is characterised by youth culture disproportionately represented by Black or Asian young people. This article will retrace the interactions and communications that gradually assigned these associated meanings through the 2000s, arguing that the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ has performed a crucial hegemonic function by both facilitating cohesive social outrage and justifying the extension of police powers in post-industrial Britain.

The utility of ‘youth crime’ in political and social management has previously been detailed by sociologists and criminologists, recognising the cross-party commitment to ‘law and order’ political strategies from the 1970s onwards (Cohen, 1972 ; Gilroy, 1987 ; Hall et al., 1978 ; Muncie, 2009 ; Pitts, 2001 ). The discourse of ‘youth crime’ has been described as ‘electoral glue’ (Pitts, 2001 , p. 2) due to its capacity to construct consensus through fear, binding together the priority interests of different social classes, as well as presenting party unity through a clear common cause (ibid.). Existing research demonstrates how this cohesive collective anxiety requires routine renewal, through the emergence of novel moral panics (Cohen, 1972 ; Hall et al., 1978 ). Some of the most effective and enduring of these, are those that concern the eroding morality of today’s youth.

The concept of ‘youth’ is itself a social construct. Its meaning has evolved and adapted over time, reflecting the cultural, political and social context of its use (Jones, 2009 ). Anthropological studies of ‘youth’ have found it to be a shifting cultural category depending on socio-political circumstances, often telling us more about the society in question than about the youths themselves (Bucholtz, 2002 ). Whilst the term usually denotes a period of development that is between childhood and adulthood, there is no universal definition or age parameter for this distinction. Unlike ‘child’ and ‘adult’ the terms ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ tend to carry negative connotations; ‘‘Youth' and ‘adolescence’ usually conjure up a number of emotive and troubling images… notions of uncontrolled freedom, violence, irresponsibility, vulgarity, rebellion and dangerousness to those of deficiency, vulnerability, neglect, deprivation or immaturity' (Muncie, 2009 , p. 4).

There is certainly no legal definition of ‘youth’; in England and Wales a child legally becomes an adult when they turn 18 years old (Family Law Reform Act, 1969 ) with no intermediary terminology. In statutory youth services however, a ‘young person’ is defined as between the ages of 11 and 25 (Goddard, 2021 ). Whilst in healthcare, the label is used to imply knowledge and decision-making capacity, with practitioners advised by the General Medical Council that for those aged under 18, ‘ use the term ‘young people’ to refer to older or more experienced children who are more likely to be able to make these decisions for themselves ’ (GMC, 2013 , Appendix 2). Somewhat ironically, the ‘Youth Justice Board’ of England and Wales, has distanced itself from the language of ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ in recent years, advocating a ‘child first’ approach that reinforces the legal ‘child’ status through language, and highlights the reduced risk assessment skills of those aged under 18 (Goddard, 2021 ). Reflecting this same imperative of recognising developmental and social vulnerabilities, this article uses the term ‘young people’ to denote a broad category of individuals aged between 11 and 25, and ‘child’ or ‘children’ is used when referring specifically to those aged under 18.

For a category of criminality so closely attached to ‘youth’, available data on ‘knife crime’ offences differentiated by age is surprisingly limited (Williams & Squires, 2021 , p. 6). If we were to use a legal definition of adulthood beginning at age 18, statistics would suggest sharp instrument assault is predominantly an adult problem. Available recorded crime rates show that 10–17 year olds represent around one in five of knife crime perpetrators (Allen & Audickas, 2018 ) with the majority of knife possession offences recorded and those admitted to hospital for assault by sharp instrument being over the age of 18; 82% and 83% respectively (Allen & Harding, 2021 ). If we apply a broader definition of ‘youth’ to include those aged between 10 and 24 Footnote 1 we find that young people admitted to hospital with sharp instrument assault injury in 2020/21 make up 41% of all admissions (NHS Digital, 2021 ). This figure is not significantly different to the 38% of admissions for the comparable age range of 25 to 39 (ibid.), suggesting that sharp instrument injuries are by no means limited to ‘youth’.

Meanwhile, the highest rates of offences involving a sharp instrument in 2020/2021 were in the West Midlands, not London, with the highest proportional increase in Surrey (Allen & Harding, 2021 ). In the UK, Black and Asian families are twice as likely to live in disadvantaged areas than their white counterparts (Gov.uk, 2018 ) and are therefore disproportionately exposed to violence and crime in impoverished environments (Eades et al., 2007 ). However, once economic factors are accounted for, there is no correlation between ethnicity and knife offending (Eades et al., 2007 ; Williams & Squires, 2021 ; Smith,  2005 ; Haylock et al., 2020 ).

It is true however, that a minority of young people carry and use knives in conflict and the death of young people and children through interpersonal violence is a devastating reality in contemporary Britain. Each young life cut short is a tragedy that sends shockwaves of trauma and harm through families and communities that are impacted. To be clear, it is not the intention of this paper to deny this reality, but rather to acknowledge that the framing of this violence through a constructed idea of ‘knife crime youths’ has had deliberate and harmful consequences. For all the talk of ‘tackling knife crime’ we’ve seen very little change in rates of violence and homicide amongst young people. Recorded knife offences were reported as reaching a record high in 2019 with the Office of National Statistics recording 45,627 offences, an increase of 7% from the year before and a 49% increase from 2011 (ONS, 2019 ). In 2021, London recorded its highest ever level of ‘teenage homicides’ in a single year (Slawson, 2021 ).

Over a decade ago, in 2008, the Met police declared ‘war on knife crime’ (Edwards et al., 2008 ), forming a specialist taskforce of one hundred and fifty uniformed officers targeting ten boroughs to conduct unlimited stop and search operations. Within a year, the use of controversial ‘Sect. 60’ searches, that do not require police to have ‘reasonable grounds’ for suspicion, underwent a six-fold increase to over 121,000 searches, whilst Sect. 1 searches (in which officers must have reasonable grounds for the search) doubled (Williams & Squires, 2021 , pp. 207, 208). The total number of searches in London increased by 292% in 2008 with the proportion of Sect. 60 searches increasing from 26 to 59% of weapon related searches (Williams & Squires, 2021 , p. 208). Racial disproportionality in stop and search more than doubled during this period. In 2007 Black people were 4.1 times more likely to be searched in London than white people, by 2008 they were 9.7 times more likely to be stopped (EHRC, 2012 , pp. 24, 25). Whilst arrest rates, that are often seen as a measure of stop and search success, halved from 4 to 2% throughout this period (McCandless et al., 2016 ).

The strategy of extending police powers and targeting young Black people has been operational since 2008, and yet the recent figures of knife offences suggest this previous approach has been ineffective. Nevertheless, during the 2019 general election campaign Boris Johnson reiterates the same law and order response as 2008, promising a ‘ majority Conservative government would come down hard on the scourge of knife crime ’(‘Boris Johnson: We will…’,  2019 ), through more stop and search powers, faster processing through the courts and harsher sentencing (ibid.). After success at the polls, the subsequent Conservative government introduced Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPO) as part of The Offence Weapons Act 2019. Described as providing an ‘additional preventive tool’ for use by police, critics have argued that KCPOs ‘ explicitly target children, unduly affect Black children, and are disproportionate, stigmatizing, and restrictive ’ (Hendry, 2022 , p. 382). In 2022 there was a recommitment to Sect. 60 searches, despite their impact on disproportionality and community relations, with the Home Office extending the powers to search without the need for grounds to a greater number of officers for longer periods of time (Home Office, 2022 ). With no evidence of its effectiveness (McCandless et al., 2016 ; Tiratelli et al., 2018 ) this persistent commitment to a policing solution and the cyclical extension and retreat of policing powers in response to ‘knife crime youths’ requires further interrogation.

In summary, there is no statistical justification for the framing of ‘knife crime’ as a youth phenomenon and yet the construction of knife crime youths has been largely unchallenged and increasingly racialised in public discourse. This paper will consider significant events in the making of ‘knife crime youths’, first retracing the events that defined knife crime through age, and secondly through race. Applying a radical criminological understanding of deviance labelling as a specific response to crime (Becker, 1963 ; Hall et al., 1978 ; Cohen, 1972 ) this paper asks: To what extent is the construction of ‘knife crime’ a continuation of Policing the Crisis in the 21st century? And why has this process been relatively uncritiqued by practitioners and academics that contribute to ‘knife crime’ discourse?

Research methods

This paper presents the results of document and archive, case studies and content analysis, depicting key moments in the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ in Britain. Secondary documents of news articles were identified for content analysis using the online database ProQuest, with the initial search criteria of news containing the exact phrase ‘knife crime’. Significant events in the construction of knife crime identified through content analysis were then more closely analysed as case studies, searching for all related reports. The specific cases that will be considered in depth in this paper are the death of Luke Walmsley in 2003, a 14 year old boy stabbed while at school in Lincolnshire, and the murder of Tom Rhys Pryce, a 31 year old lawyer killed in North London during a robbery. The analysis uses methods of discourse analysis (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002 ) to look closely at how meaning is constructed through language during these key moments in the history of knife crime. Using a framework of conjunctural analysis, as set out by Hall et al. ( 1978 ) these events are then contextualised in their political moment. Applying an interactionist approach (Becker, 1963 ) that sees all parties fit for investigation, this paper considers the actions and interests of the state, police and the media in the making of knife crime youths. Aspects of the analysis presented here formed part of the author’s PhD research and is expanded on in the author’s contribution to  ‘Rethinking Knife Crime; policing, violence and moral panic?’ (Williams & Squires, 2021 ).

A brief history of knife crime in the UK

Although rarely acknowledged within its discourse, the label ‘knife crime’ as a crime category in England and Wales has a relatively recent history. Originally a descriptor of particular forms of violence in Scotland in the 1990s, the term was first publicly used in the early 2000s to refer to a perceived new crime phenomenon emerging in England. Since then, its authority of reference has grown in such magnitude that the history of the label has been obscured. It has become such a matter-of-fact term in contemporary use that it functions as both a collective noun for knife related offences and an adjective denoting a criminal culture. British news headlines commonly reference ‘knife crime thugs’, ‘knife crime youths’ or ‘knife crime gangs’ without justification of the label’s meaning or the criteria of its attachment.

Meanwhile, government institutions, police, the justice system, and scholars, all consistently acknowledge difficulty in establishing a workable, evidence-based definition of ‘knife crime’ (Silvestri et al., 2009 ; Gliga 2009 ; Eades et al., 2007 ; Squires et al., 2008 ; Squires, 2011 ; Williams & Squires, 2021 ). It was made clear in the Home Office Select Committee report on Knife Crime in 2009, that not only was there no legal definition of knife crime, but the phrase has been constructed by the press as a specific youth issue. They write, ‘ [t]here is no Home Office definition of 'knife crime'. The phrase was adopted by the media and is now popularly used to refer primarily to stabbings but also to the illegal carrying of knives by young people in a public place or on school premises’ (HASC 2009 , para. 4). It is somewhat surprising then, that the phrase continues to be used with great influence and authority in popular discourse, policing strategy, legislation, academic literature, and public policy.

The introduction of the ‘knife enabled’ police crime code by London’s Met Police in 2001 was an instrumental shift in the way offences with knives are recorded. This new ‘tick box’ in police crime recording systems became the statistical foundation for the crime category ‘knife crime’ that emerges in the early 2000s and begins a process of understanding youth violence through the weapon used for the first time in England and Wales. Along with blades, the definition of ‘knife enabled’ by the Home Office includes all sharp instruments such as screw drivers, broken bottles or glass and the data generated often makes no distinction between incidences of domestic violence, bar brawls, theft, sexual assault, or the age of the offender (Eades et al., 2007 ; HASC 2009 ).

The lack of a clear definition of ‘knife crime’, couple with the increased attention and proactive policing responses towards the phenomenon, have no doubt impacted on the data that is used to measure the problem. The police themselves have acknowledged that increases in stop and search can inflate official knife offence figures (Squires et al., 2008 , p. 20) and the toughening and extension of possession laws targeting knife carrying has been found to increase the likelihood of knife offences being committed by expanding the range of behaviours and actions considered criminal (Eades et al., 2007 ).

It is a fact that across all ages, knives continue to be the most frequently employed murder weapon in England and Wales (Brookman, 2005 ). They were employed in just over a third of all recorded homicides, involving both male and female victims, throughout the ten years to 2019. The ONS data showed that knives were also the most frequently employed weapon in cases of domestic violence (ONS, 2019 ). On overage two women are killed by a partner or former partner every week in England and Wales (ONS, 2015 ), and statistically children are far more likely to be killed by a parent than another young person (Silvestri et al., 2009 ). But despite adult violence in the home (where knives and sharp instruments are readily available) producing a large amount of ‘knife crime’ data, it is not considered a dominant context for knife crime research or a policy priority (Cook & Walklate, 2020 , p. 4).

It is also notable that homicide rates have steadily increased year on year since the 1950’s. However, within these figures, killing with a sharp instrument has remained a relatively constant proportion of all homicides including during the decade in which the panic over ‘knife crime’ first emerged (Eades et al., 2007 ). Looking at offensive knife use as a percentage of all violent offences from 1997 to 2007 it remained between 5 and 8% throughout the first alleged ‘knife crime epidemic’ (Eades et al., 2007 , p. 18). And examining the figures covering later phases of concern over ‘knife crime’ the same picture is revealed – between 2007–2017, knife use also remained between 5 and 8% of all violent offences (Allen & Audickas, 2018 ). Describing knife homicide and violent crime figures in isolation from their proportion of the total or rates of violent crime and domestic violence, is one way in which ‘knife crime’ data is commonly misrepresented as a growing youth problem.

Whilst the data included in the ‘knife crime’ category is broad, its application has increasingly narrowed. From 2006 onwards ‘knife crime’ became a crime label predominantly attached to the actions of a particular demographic; young, Black, inner-city males. Nowhere is this clearer than when then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, stated during a speech in 2007; ‘ In respect of knife and gun gangs… we won’t stop this by pretending it isn’t young black kids doing it ’ (UKPOL, 2007 ). With more violent overtones, in 2018 the BBC broadcast a Question Time audience member calling knife perpetrators ‘ a particular breed of human who… should be dealt with like the cancer they are and exterminated’ (Evans, 2018 ). The use of the label has become racially selective in the press, with analysis of ‘knife crime’ reports during the year of 2017 finding that in all national press other than The Guardian , the phrase ‘knife crime’ was only used to describe incidents when the victim was a ‘Black teen’ or child located in a city (Younge, 2018 ). If the label ‘knife crime’ is only applied to cases of knife enabled violence when the victim is young, Black and living in a city, it is not surprising that the category has come to be understood as a problem distinctly young, Black and urban – despite all evidence to the contrary.

Policing the crisis in the 1970s; ‘mugging’ revisited.

It is the argument of this paper that the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ since 2001 has combined existing social anxieties surrounding age and race to produce an enduring ‘criminal Other’ upon which state violence can be enacted and social order maintained. The construction of ‘Black youths’ as ‘criminal Other’ is a process that has been extensively researched elsewhere (White, 2020 ; Alexander, 2008 , Elliot-Cooper 2021 ; Jefferson, 1993 ; Pearson 1983; Gilroy, 1987 ; Williams, 2015 ). With attention to police crime-work in particular, Jefferson ( 1993 ) argues that all available evidence, historical and contemporary, is only compatible with the notion that policing ‘ consists, essentially, of reproducing a criminal Other utilising a discourse of criminality rooted in notions of differential crime proneness’ (Jefferson, 1993 , p. 27), in order to prevent oppressed groups become ‘dangerous classes’. Moving through various groups since the birth of modern policing in 1829, the ‘criminal Other’ has been periodically defined and redefined through class, ethnicity, age and gender with the most recent of these groups being young Black males (Jefferson, 1993 ; Pearson 1983).

Nowhere has this process and its function been more meticulously documented than in the seminal work of Hall et al. ( 1978 ) in ‘ Policing the Crisis ; Mugging, the state, and Law and Order’ . Here, Hall et al. ( 1978 ) unravel the construction of ‘mugging’ in the 1970s within the context of maintaining social order through moral consensus and public consent, despite the paradoxical inequality of social classes. The state’s powerful innovation of the ‘mugger’ as folk devil takes place at a crucial historic moment at which a national crisis in hegemony occurs. Hegemony, or ‘cultural hegemony’ is a political theory developed by Gramsci ( 2005 ) that refers to the way in which the contradictions of class inequality are maintained through a dominant culture that presents the interests of the powerful as inevitable social norms. By ‘winning them over’ hegemony exerts control over citizens without the need for direct force (Gramsci, 2005 ). However, the fragility of this coercion is prone to crisis and the management of hegemony requires constant adjustment.

The political decision made in the 1960s to commit Britain to prosperity through corporate neoliberal capitalism would guarantee the economic demise of the working class. Developing a Marxist and Gramscian analysis of hegemonic crisis in the 1960s, Hall et al. ( 1978 ) identify a major structural shift in the mechanisms of state intervention; ‘ the shift from a ‘consensual’ to a more ‘coercive’ management of the class struggle by the capitalist state ’ (ibid.). Increasing the rate of exploitation and extending the existing inequality would threaten the stability of class relations. To manage this challenge to hegemony the state had two main strategies. The first was to subsume ‘everyone into the ‘higher’ ideological unity of the national interest’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 236). This would combine the interests of labour and capital together as the interests of the state, making a social contract for ‘the national good’, thus the corporate strategy could be seen as in the interests of everyone (ibid.).

The second strategy involved the mobilisation of law and order into the spheres of civil society as the state of ‘exception’; a transition ‘from the ‘moment of consent’ through to the ‘moment of force’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 239). The exceptional form of state intervention is the open recruitment of the law in the defence of class interests for the benefit of the bourgeoisie class. However, this involves a great deal of risk for hegemony. By ‘ making the “invisible” inequality of the real relationship between workers and capitalists manifestly apparent… it risks exposing the central ideological mystification of the system, on which the consent of the masses to the reign of capital rests ’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 303). Hall et al. ( 1978 ) argue that it is only by thinking within this historical moment that we can begin to understand the emergence of ‘mugging’ as a particular interaction between crime and control. Applying this same method of conjunctural analysis to the events that defined ‘knife crime’ reveal significant similarities which will be explored later in this article.

It is the argument of Policing the Crisis (1978) that the crucial aspect of the response that enables this social function to be performed through ‘mugging’ is that it came to be ‘unambiguously assigned as a black crime’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 328). The construction of ‘mugging’ as a ‘Black crime’ happens through the amplification of incidents that fit this criteria and through targeted police mobilisation that geographically and ethnically locates the crime as ‘peculiar to black youth in the inner-city ‘ghettos’’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 329). Once assigned as a ‘Black crime’ the police maintain consent whilst using increasingly authoritative policing to preserve the class relations amid crisis.

Whilst the work of Hall et al. ( 1978 ) is widely lauded in criminology and beyond, their constructionist approach is crucially missing from our current understanding of ‘knife crime’. With exception of a few notable contributions (Squires,  2009 , 2011 ; Williams & Squires, 2021 ), existing academic literature on ‘knife crime’ assume the category as fact, paying little attention to the policing mobilisation that defines the emergence of the phrase (Williams & Squires, 2021 ). For example, when Eades et al. ( 2007 ) identify the non-existence of compiled ‘knife crime’ data prior to 2003 this is seen as an obstruction to quantifying the extent of the problem, rather than evidence of the temporality and subjectivity of the category itself. To understand the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ the inquiry must move from the persons and behaviours labelled as deviant, to the political actions, media communication and enforcement activities that defined the response to the act. What are the preconditions and social context in which the label ‘knife crime’ was first used and by whom? The conjuncture of interest in this analysis begins with the election of New Labour in Britain in 1997.

New Labour and the contradictions of a socially democratic authoritarianism.

Replicating the successes of Clinton’s Democratic Party in the 1993 US election, ‘ Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime ’ was one of New Labour’s election sound bites in 1997. Often referred to as ‘the third way’, New Labour offered a centralist political strategy that combined elements of the political left and right. Once elected, New Labour soon published their ‘ No More Excuses’ White Paper (Home Office, 1997 ), a policy reform that epitomised the party’s dual ethos of individual responsibility and government intervention. In this, the government detailed a complete youth crime policy and policing overhaul; radical and systemic changes to the youth justice system and policing all with the core aim of ‘tackling youth violence’ with tough measures.

In a preface to the white paper the then home secretary Jack Straw described the changes thus:

Today's young offenders can too easily become tomorrow's hardened criminals. As a society we do ourselves no favours by failing to break the link between juvenile crime and disorder and the serial burglar of the future… An excuse culture has developed within the youth justice system… implying that they cannot help their behaviour because of their social circumstances… we will refocus resources and the talents of professionals on nipping offending in the bud, to prevent crime from becoming a way of life for so many young people (Home Office, 1997 ).

The mobilisation towards youth surveillance and control, from the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) through to the Police Reform Act (2002), extended the capacity of the state to intervene and increased the range of behaviours considered criminal during this period. The emphasis on ‘pre-criminal’ behaviour and the increasing ease of issue and proliferation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) during this period shifts the direction of policing, the justice system and youth services towards a younger and broader sample of children. In addition to this, the devolution of power to local authorities, youth offending services and housing associations increases the number of institutions involved in the management of youth behaviours and movement.

Concern over youth delinquency and the construction of particular sub-groups of youths as ‘criminal Other’ has been a consistent feature of modern society; ‘ there has been a marked and recurring tendency to demonise certain categories of young people… This is especially so in respect of the working class youth and of ethnic minorities’ (Squires & Stephen, 2005 , p. 29). But the introduction of ASBOs and referral orders, along with the removal of Doli Incapax for very young adolescents , reflects a political shift in the conceptualisation of the transient status of young delinquency. Unlike the home office report of 1988 that found; ‘[m]ost young offenders grow out of crime as they become more mature and responsible’ (Home Office 1988, p 6, para. 2.15 quoted in Squires & Stephen, 2005 , p. 31), the New Labour of 1997 claimed ‘todays young offenders can easily become tomorrow’s hardened criminals’ (Home Office, 1997 quoted in Squires & Stephen, 2005 , p. 32).

This intensification of youth crime policy can be seen to reconcile the contradictions of New Labour’s dual strategy, an arena in which societal anxieties over youth provide a popular individualistic authoritarianism combined with proactive state interventions. At a pragmatic level, children are an advantageous subject group to be acted upon; they can’t vote, are a relatively voiceless group politically, and remain a reliable source of emotive concern amongst the electorate (Pitts, 2001 ). But the symbolic potential of ‘youth crime’ in the hegemonic management of neoliberalism is exemplified in the ‘no excuses’ reform.

On the one hand, the hardening of state response to disorder in the streets appeals to a colonial nationalism of the past; an imperialist imagination of ‘Britishness’ as a civilising force (Gilroy, 1987 ). On the other, it appeals to the ideology of modernisation; a youth justice reform that increases efficiency and coordinates services in a more productive way. Beyond this, the devolution of youth justice to local authorities and YOTs acted to distance government from economic accountability whilst increasing the capacity for localised authoritarianism and prolonged institutionalised intervention.

It is significant to note however, that at no point in the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), The MacPherson Inquiry ( 1999 ), the ‘Blueprint for Reform’ White Paper (2001), the first National Policing Plan (2002), The Policing Reform Act (2002) or any of the parliamentary acts of this period do the words ‘knife crime’ appear. But behind the scenes there are early signs of a mobilisation specifically towards knives (e.g., the 1997 Knives Act that outlawed the marketing of knives for combat and authorised the use Sect. 60 ‘no grounds’ searches when ‘knife enabled violence’ was anticipated). Perhaps the most significant change occurs in 2001 when a new policing ‘feature code’ is introduced to the police system of the Met Police to specifically register ‘knife enabled offences’ (KEO) on computerised crime records.

Prior to the feature code of ‘knife enabled offence’ being added, crimes that had included or intimated a knife would have been recorded and prioritised base on the intent referenced in the ‘opening code’. For example; Burglary, theft, sexual assault, drugs or criminal damage would be the defining category of the offence. But after the feature code of KEO is added data analysts and police supervisors are able to extract crime figures from across different opening codes to prioritise those with a feature code for ‘knife enabled’. For the first time it is possible to redact crime data based on whether a ‘knife’ was present, used or intimated during various different crime contexts.

The data collected from this new crime code is immediately put to use and is reported on by police and the press as early as 2002 (Alleyne, 2002 ; Bamber, 2002 ). By the end of 2003 there is a discourse emerging that identifies ‘knife crime’ as a distinct category for concern in England and Wales. The analysis of the label’s first uses suggests that three combined factors are influential in this development. Firstly, the rural school setting of a teen murder in November 2003 will secure national interest and invigorate coverage of knife-related crimes within particular contexts. Secondly, high news value is sustained and cultivated for this emerging category by the focus on younger children and a broad range of authorised spokespeople. Thirdly, the narrative that links crime through the knife insinuates or openly identifies a criminogenic ‘knife culture’ amongst young people that becomes an argument for proactive interventions at that time. A significant case in the early public use of the phrase ‘knife crime’ is the murder of Luke Walmsley in 2003, a close analysis of the evolving reports of this incident demonstrates how the label came to be defined through ‘youth’.

Making of knife crime youth; the case of Luke Walmsley

On 4 th November 2003, the murder of 14-year-old Luke Walmsley in a school corridor in rural Lincolnshire becomes a catalyst for a co-ordinated response to a perceived culture rising amongst young people across the country. The day following his death, the case is given high news status in both national and regional papers. Headlines include:

‘BOY, 14, KILLED IN SCHOOL ATTACK: He ran .. then he fell ; PUPILS FLEE IN TERROR AS LUKE KNIFED ON HIS WAY TO LESSON’ (McComish et al., 2003 ) in The Daily Mirror ‘A scuffle, then panic grips children and staff at village school; Chief constable pledges support for community in shock’ (Laville, 2003 ) in The Daily Telegraph . ‘Youngsters Caught in Tide of Horror’ (Barker, 2003 ) in The Sun.

The tabloid language used to describe the incident, ‘terror’, ‘panic’ and ‘horror’, are embellishments that significantly sensationalise the coverage. Early reporting focuses heavily on school safety, seeking teachers’ opinions on pupil violence and their powers to prevent another event like this. In an effort to include the ‘teachers’ perspective’ and with no official statement from Luke Walmsley’s school yet, the coverage the day after the murder widely quotes a response made by David Hart, General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. The full quote reads:

My reaction is one of utter horror. To think a youngster can be stabbed to death in a school in a relatively quiet part of the country will send shockwaves through the school system. It does demonstrate very clearly the fact that although this level of violence is very rare, there are an incredible number of youngsters who are willing to sign up to the knife culture and bring an offensive weapon into school (David Hart quoted in ‘Classmates See…’ 2003 ).

As the only official statement available, this immediate anecdotal connection made by Hart between the isolated incident of Luke Walmsley and a ‘knife culture’ with ‘incredible numbers’ or young people willingly ‘signing up’, instigates a public debate on what the national response to Luke’s death should be. Within two days of Luke’s murder the conversation shifts from the incident at a school in Lincolnshire to include knives and schools in general. On the 6 th of November, The Guardian reports ‘Unions call for review of security’ with representatives of teachers split on what the course of action should be.

The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) warned that crime involving weapons was ‘spilling over from the streets into schools’ and that a working party on school security should be assembled. Parent-teacher associations were equally pro-active, suggesting the installation of metal detectors in schools to stop students ‘attempting to smuggle in knives and guns’. Police demonstrate their position with action, deploying 100 extra officers to ‘ patrol the playgrounds of British schools identified as breeding grounds for young offenders ’ (Goodchild, 2003 ).

The evocative and metaphoric language used by reliable spokespeople at this time is widely reported and is indicative of a developing narrative—In which the knife is seen as an outside threat, based in the street, but ‘spilling into’ or being ‘smuggled’ in to the safe spaces of schools. The police describing schools as ‘breeding grounds’ for criminality is an early indication that the perceived threat of contagious influence from one type of young person will be formative in the response that will come to define ‘knife crime’.

Other public voices presented disagreement with the proactive measures taken and feared that the frequency of violence in schools was being exaggerated in the hastiness of the response. The then Schools Secretary Minister, David Miliband, was reported as cautioning against ‘knee-jerk reactions’ to the school-time incident, stating; ‘ the death of Luke Walmsley at his Lincolnshire school was not evidence of rising violence throughout the education system’ (‘Call for Caution…’ 2003 ). The general secretary of the National Union of Teachers concurred, saying ‘This is an absolutely tragic incident, but there are 7.5 million children in our schools 190 days a year and our surveys show the number of weapons being brought into our schools is absolutely minuscule’ (ibid . ). The chairman of the Youth Justice Board warned that over-reacting could exasperate the issue saying; ‘it's a great tragedy when you start making schools into fortresses. It creates a fear culture and this can beget even more problems’ (Goodchild, 2003 ).

What is significantly absent in these debates on the urgency of the problem, is supporting data. Although plenty of anecdotal evidence is offered, the early reports lack any statistics that present knives as specifically a ‘youth’ or ‘school’ problem. There is concerted effort by journalists across the country to produce valid evidence of the scale of the problem whilst public concern is still high. Birmingham city council announces their investigation to find out if violence is increasing in schools (‘Call for Caution…’ 2003 ). The Sunday Mirror runs their own experiments in Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool; Sending children to buy knives at high-street shops and publishing the results (Ellam, 2003 ). The BBC online publishes the article; ‘Is knife crime really getting worse’ (Lane & Wheeler, 2003 ) in an attempt to collate available data. Meanwhile, The Observer is conducting its own investigation and publishes its findings on the 23 rd of November 2003 (Townsend & Barnett, 2003 ). This is the first news article reporting on Luke Walmsley that uses the phrase ‘knife crime’.

Opting for the sensationalist headline; ‘ Scandal of pupils aged five carrying knives ’ the findings of the Observer investigation consolidate the idea that Luke wasn’t the victim of an isolated attack, but the latest casualty in a national ‘epidemic’ in which ‘nowhere is safe’ (Townsend & Barnett, 2003 ). Amongst other shocking statistics the Observer lists four other young people involved in knife related news since Luke’s death, two stabbings, one knife carrying in school and one court case currently at trial. The specific circumstances of these incidents are not described, the cases are not viewed in isolation but as one collective crime; ‘knife crime’.

In the chain of events from Luke Walmsley’s death to the collective grouping of incidents as ‘knife crime’, what is striking is the constitutive power of ‘youth’ in the making of the label. It is the school setting and the notion of a threat to children that provides the initial momentum that will eventually link crimes together by virtue of age and type of weapon. Rather than acts of ‘knife crime’ being a phenomenon exclusive to youths, they are actions only defined as phenomenal when connected to young people.

Exploring this aspect further it has been evidenced through media studies that violence continues to hold a dominant news value but not as much as it used to;

…violence has become so ubiquitous that – although still considered newsworthy it is frequently reported in a routine, mundane manner with little follow-up or analysis. Unless a story involving violence conforms to several other news values or provides a suitable threshold to keep alive an existing set of stories, even the most serious acts of violence may be used as ‘fillers’ consigned to the inside pages of a newspaper (Jewkes, 2015 , pp. 63,64).

Many instances of non-fatal stabbings, threatening with knives, knife carrying and knife homicides were not considered to have news value before the emergence of ‘knife crime’. However, in the early stages of the phenomenon building, the age of the victims and perpetrators seems to get younger and younger and with this added value the breadth of actions considered newsworthy increases. Luke Walmsley was 14 and this was an alarming fact, but by the end of the same month headlines are connecting the case with 5 year olds carrying knives (Townsend & Barnett, 2003 ). This pursuit of youth in the making of ‘knife crime’ reflects the evolving priorities, sensitivities and interests of media audiences and news reporting techniques as much as it does any changes in youth crime.

In the days following the stabbing, news headlines of national newspapers, in response to Luke Walmsley, focus on ‘kids’, ‘children’ and ‘school’ as they extrapolate from one case to a national crisis. Within one week the headlines included:

‘Kids carry knives and hammers: they have to look after themselves’ (Johnson, 2003a ) ‘ Is your kid taking a knife to school ?’ (Johnson, 2003b ). ‘ Shops, stalls and web illegally sell knives to children’ ( Woolcock, 2003 ). ‘ SOLD.. TO A 12-YR-OLD; Shop charges £25 for this 12in blade. Boy of 14 is stabbed to death but stores still flout law on children buying knives.’ (Ellam, 2003 ). ‘ Not even your school is safe ’ (‘Not Even…’ 2003 ).

The case of Luke Walmsley in 2003 triggers a media response that brings together authorized spokespeople, such as high-ranking police officers and heads of teaching associations, providing a public definition of ‘knife crime’ for the first time. Sustaining news value, the media utilizes photographic imagery and newly available crime data, propelled by proactive policing operations, to ‘keep the story alive’. At this stage in the history of the label it is predominantly young age and a public setting that defines the parameters of the category, but this begins to change over the following years as ‘knife crime youths’ are increasingly constructed as Black and located within inner cities. A significant turning point identified in this research, is the reporting of the murder of Tom Rhys-Pryce – a white lawyer killed in north London by two young Black men in 2006.

Making knife crime a ‘Black crime’; the case of Tom Rhys-Pryce

It is widely recognised that the syntax of British racism is complex and ever changing (Gilroy, 1987 ; Solomos & Back, 1996 ), producing symbolic representations of difference that evade scrutiny through everyday use and sensibility. ‘Race’ itself has no ontological or biological meaning, only that which is continually assigned and reassigned through processes of racialisation or ‘race making’ (Murji & Solomos, 2005 ). In other words, racial difference exists only so long as it is produced and reproduced in daily encounters, language, and interactions. The analysis presented here will suggest that ‘knife crime’ became a vessel for contemporary racism through a veiled and discreet language of cultural deficit—an adapted form of ‘slippery racism’ (Solomos & Back, 1996 ) equipped for policing the crisis in the 21 st century.

It is not until 2006 that ‘knife crime’ is frequently and openly defined through ethnicity and begins to be understood as a ‘Black crime’. Earlier mentions of race were more likely to insinuate a racial dynamic such as; a think piece that centers on a youth project that specializes in working with Black adolescents (Lane & Wheeler, 2003 ), describing a victim as a ‘Somali boy’ despite not including the nationality or ethnicity of others in the article (Johnston, 2001 ), or criticizing Black music genres for promoting ‘gangster’ culture and glamourizing knives (Weathers, 2005 ). But at the end of 2006 there are increasing discussions of ‘knife crime’ in relation to ‘Black communities’ within arguments for the reinstatement of stop and search to its pre-Macpherson freedoms.

The analysis of the articulation of ‘knife crime’ during 2006 suggests that one catalyst for this narrative shift is a growing social anxiety amongst suburban middle classes. This increasing concern is exemplified in the intensification of ‘knife crime’ news in response to a particular murder in London in January 2006. Tom Rhys Pryce was a wealthy white lawyer killed by two working class Black teenagers near his home in north London. The disproportionate amount of coverage given to this case is so extreme at the time that the new police commissioner Ian Blair, evoking the language of the MacPherson inquiry (MacPherson, 1999 ), accuses the media press of ‘institutional racism’. He cites the deaths of several victims from ethnic minorities that happened on the same day that only ‘got a paragraph on page 97’ in comparison (Gibson & Dodd, 2006 ).

In attempt to find witnesses, the police release a statement to the press describing the suspects as two Black males. Below are the headlines that were published within 24 hours of the incident, followed by how the article included the ethnicity of the suspects.

The Evening Standard 13 th January 2006:

‘CITY LAWYER IS MURDERED BY MUGGERS; Call to fiancée, then attack on way home’ …

‘Police said members of the public witnessed the struggle between two black men and the victim’ (‘City lawyer…’ 2006 )

Birmingham Post 14 th January 2006:

‘Muggers Brutally Murder Lawyer… ’.

‘Detectives believe he had been trying to defend himself when the two young black men launched their "ferocious" assault. They stabbed him in the head, torso and hands and left him dying on the pavement’ (Dean and Marsden, 2006 )

The Daily Mail 14 th January 2006:

‘NO MERCY; Highflying young lawyer knifed to death outside his flat AFTER handing everything to muggers…’

‘Police said the lawyer was ambushed by two black men as he walked home from a local station after attending a social event with colleagues on Thursday night’ (Wright & Koster, 2006 )

The Daily Mirror 14 th January 2006:

‘HIS LIFE; He gave muggers all his possessions but they wanted more…’

‘Officers were yesterday retrieving CCTV footage from several cameras in the area in a bid to trace the killers - two black men thought to be in their 20s’ (Edwards and Parry, 2006 )

The Sun 14 th January 2006:

‘Mugged… and then stabbed to death…’

‘Smartly-dressed Tom had been stabbed in the head, body and hands. He had been robbed of his wallet by two young black men as he walked to his home in Kensal Green, North West London, from the local Tube station. Police say the killing was unprovoked’ (Sullivan, 2006 )

Only one of the papers references the ethnicity of the perpetrators in connection with the police investigation to find the killers (Edwards and Parry, 2006 ) The others use ‘Black’ as part of the description of the incident – none of them mention the ethnicity of the victim, his whiteness is assumed. Unlike the death of Luke Walmsley, where news value was increased by the young age of the victim and school setting, Tom Rhys Pryce is front-page worthy because of the contrast between his social class and the setting of his death. It is more shocking (and thus more newsworthy) for a ‘smartly-dressed’, ‘highflying’, ‘city lawyer’ to die in a public rupture of violence given that the privileges of his class should protect from such scenarios (Gekowski et al., 2012 ). However, the middle classes in London were increasingly finding themselves confronted with the conditions of disadvantage on their doorstep. This murder is symbolic of a particular anxiety and sociological dilemma during this moment.

At the time of Tom Rhys-Pryce’s murder, London is experiencing a period of fast-paced gentrification across many prime commuter areas of the city that were previously dominated by publicly owned housing stock. The mass movement of affluent middle-class families to working-class areas of the city was facilitated by the ‘right to buy’ initiatives, started by the Conservative government in the 1980s, but extended under New Labour ‘regeneration’ housing policies of the late 1990s and 2000s. Giving council tenants the ‘right to buy’ council houses transferred housing stock to private ownership or private sector management.

Once locations were targeted for regeneration the number of council owned properties rapidly decreased. Between the 1981 and 2001 census the number of households in council owned properties in the Borough of Tower Hamlets reduced from 82 to 37.4%, whilst Lambeth dropped from 43.2 to 28.5% (Watt, 2009 ). Gentrification was actively encouraged by New Labour, depicted as a solution to the ‘social ills’ of previously ‘hard-to-reach’, deprived urban neighbourhoods, especially public housing estates (Watt, 2009 ). This state led ‘affluent drift’ into deprived urban areas in conditions of ‘managed decline’ (Beaumont, 2006 ), was also racially distinct. The areas typified by ‘intense and extensive deprivation’ were also areas of London with a ‘large black African/Caribbean population’ (Watt, 2009 ).

The murder of Tom Rhys Pryce takes please in Kensal Green within the Borough of Brent, a district selected for state-led gentrification in 1999 under the New Deal for Communities (NDC) funded development scheme. Within this scheme, the reduction of crime rates in the gentrified area is considered a key indicator of success (Batty et al.,  2010 , p. 24). The privately and publicly funded project boasts ‘an enhanced police service and neighbourhood warden scheme’ (Batty et al., 2010 , p. 15) in its districts. Implementing a partnership with local police the NDC ‘ supplemented mainstream police budgets in order to fund more police and police community support officers, and to provide a flexible additional resource through which the police can respond to trouble ‘hotspots’’ (ibid . ).

There are two articles in the Evening Standard on 16 th January 2006 that recognise the gentrification context of the murder in Kensal Green but to different effect. In language that conjures images of gentrifying as brave new settlers on the London’s uncivilised frontiers, Gilligan writes:

As the middle classes have pressed ever westward, the onward march into new territory has brought prosperous, professional London hard up against the toughest areas in the capital. For all the political flannel about inclusiveness and multiculturalism, London has some of Europe's most savage inequalities of status and wealth. Sandwiched between North Kensington and Harlesden, Kensal Green puts those inequalities side by side (Gilligan, 2006 ).

Gilligan goes on to point out that the area has always had violent stabbings, but without the ‘men in suits [they] did not attract the attention of the media’ (ibid.). In contrast Paul Barker, writing in the same paper, suggests the presence of men in suits increases the frequency of jealous violent crime:

Some social changes make confrontations more likely. Entire swathes of London - where once you'd have to scour around to find a single middleclass achiever - are busily being gentrified. This puts the well-off bang next door to the envious poor or the wholly criminal (Barker, 2006 ).

However, as Gilligan pointed out violent confrontations were not ‘more likely’, only more likely to involve the middle classes – and therefore more likely to be reported; both to the police and in the press. Barker goes further in this article, proposing the best solution for supressing the poor from attacking the wealthy is to ‘[s]tep up stop-and-search’, on the basis that ‘ [a]fter the stabbing by muggers of lawyer Tom Rhys Pryce, we shouldn't be afraid to extend controversial police powers on our streets’ (Barker, 2006 ). It is this latter response to crimes within areas in the process of gentrification that will gain momentum by the end of 2006, endorsing and expanding policing operations and search powers in identified ‘knife crime hot spots’.

This is a significantly different moment in London’s social history then that which Hall et al. described in Policing the Crisis (1978), and yet here the continuations between ‘mugging’ and ‘knife crime’ are apparent. It is these same inner rings of London that are in contestation. These are the previously ‘sub-standard and decaying’ areas, the only spaces made available to the newly arrived Caribbean workforce invited to rebuild post-war Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 342). Treated with such hostility and racism by the English these areas were transformed into enclosed safe spaces for Black families and communities; ‘for a ‘ West Indian Culture’ to take root and survive in Britain, it required a solid framework and a material base: the construction of a West Indian enclave community – the birth of colony society’ (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 344). The ‘colonisation’ of streets, neighbourhoods, markets and cafes in the 1960s suburbs were features of a community defending itself from the public racism on the outside.

In the story of ‘mugging’ this collective capacity for a Black social and cultural existence is considered by the powerful to be a dangerous consolidation of class and race, geographically facilitated by ‘colony life’ into a revolutionary ‘militant consciousness’ (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 326). It is this anxiety for which the label ‘mugging’ became a means of justification, proving a reason to enter, supervise and brutalise young Black people in these communities (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 351). Thirty years later these culturally rich urban areas, with colourful markets and lively high-streets, now become attractive to the commuter-class looking for large family homes within a short train ride from the city centre. Under the new label ‘knife crime’, police re-enter the former-Black colonies on behalf of the new white settlers, facilitating the occupation through interrupting and hassling young Black men in the street and searching their bodies in ritual humiliation. To some extent ‘knife crime’ has always represented an anxiety about the control of public spaces, but the resurgence of stop and search in these areas at this time is a clear performance of who is welcome and who is not, who is citizen and who is ‘ Other’ .

The reporting of the case of Tom Rhys Pryce is a pivotal moment in ‘knife crime’s social history, in which the ethnicity of the assailant becomes formative in the explanation of the crime in the press. This crucial shift towards ‘knife crime’ as a racialised crime category becomes embedded in the rhetoric of a ‘knife culture’ in following years (Sveinsson, 2008 ). By insinuating race in discussions of ‘knife crime youths’ and ‘knife culture’ from 2006 onwards, the label becomes a mechanism for communicating racial difference in more ‘politically correct’ language – a form of ‘new racism’ (Barker, 1981 ) or ‘cultural racism’ (Gilroy, 1987 ) where inferiority is inferred as cultural deficit rather than biology or genetics.

Conclusion; policing the crisis in the 21 st century

Using a radical criminological understanding of ‘knife crime’ as a particular response to criminality, this paper has analysed the significant events that constructed ‘knife crime youths’ in Britain. In many ways, ‘knife crime’ can be seen as a continuation of Policing the Crisis as detailed by Hall et al. ( 1978 ), renewed for the 21st century. As with ‘mugging’, ‘knife crime’ is presented as a new crime category on the rise, despite sharp instrument offences making up a consistent proportion of violent crime for the past two decades. As in the 1970s, the gradual construction of ‘knife crime’ as a racialised crime type works to justify the extension of police powers and maintains hegemonic consent, even as the generational harm of neoliberal social policies become increasingly apparent.

The explicit racialisation of knife crime from 2006 onwards makes the application of the label even more narrow, with knife crime now overtly considered a ‘Black youth crime’. The abstraction of race from other factors such as poverty, geographical location, social environment and marginalisation, reinforce a sense of racial neoliberalism (Kapoor, 2013 ). In which disadvantaged young Black people are considered the cause of their own misfortune and perceptions of cultural deficit are used to justify the structural violence of extreme inequality. This is particularly significant considering the deepening inequality in the UK over past decades (Berry,  2016 ) and demonstrates how constructs of ‘Black criminality’ can be ‘put to work’ yet again, to manage the contradictions and crises of neoliberal capitalism.

However, there are also distinct differences between the 1970s and the 2000s. More so than ‘mugging’, the conceptualisation of ‘knife crime’ relies on its association with younger aged youths. It is the sustained news value achieved by combining youth and knife violence that established this crime label in the first instance. Knife crimes committed by adults, even when they are against children or young people, do not qualify for the same attention as those between ‘youths’. Also, unlike ‘mugging’ in the 1970s, ‘knife crime’ can be seen to navigate the new terrains of acceptable racisms through a language of difference attributed to ‘culture’.

The distinct change in political direction heralded by New Labour in the 1990s may have continued the same underlying neoliberal conjuncture that preceded it, but the re-articulation of consensus through the ‘third way’ presented new challenges for hegemonic management. New Labour’s ‘tough on crime’ youth policy reforms worked through many of the contradictions of a social democratic authoritarianism. However, it is through race, yet again, that consent for exceptional policing can be found. Excessive and disproportionate policing powers, justified through fear of ‘knife crime youths’, continue to be mobilised against working class communities. Thus, the widely unchallenged racialisation of ‘knife crime’ remains vital in hegemonic management of 21 st Century Britain.

The analysis of the formation of the ‘knife crime’ label depicted here suggests several reasons why this construction has received relatively little critique by practitioners and academics since its conception. The gradually narrowing definition of the label from a ‘youth problem’ in 2003 to a ‘young, Black, inner-city problem’ by 2006, made the construction less noticeable and appear more common-sensical. In addition to this, the analysis has retraced the mobilisation towards ‘knife crime’ within the broader political context of vast youth policy reform by New Labour, that centred ‘nearly criminal’ or ‘pre-criminal’ youths. Within this discourse ‘something had to be done’ and proactive policing strategies targeting young people had become normalised with cross-party consensus. Finally, it has been argued here that overtly racist language around ‘Black criminality’ had evolved into more discreet forms at the start of the 21 st century. In the new terrains of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘political correctness’, ‘knife crime youths’ became a synonym for ‘Black youths’ without the need to explicitly mention race.

As the neoliberal conjuncture extends uninterrupted into the 21 st century, the deepening inequality and the increased suffering of the working classes in Britain requires ongoing ideological management. The construction of ‘knife crime youths’, first through age and then through urban location and race, has been a highly effective means of social management; providing consent for police occupation of newly gentrified areas of the neoliberal city and continuing public support for the state of exception through times of economic instability. The introduction of KCPOs in 2019 and the extension of Sect. 60 search powers in 2022 suggest we have not seen the end of ‘knife crime youths’ as a mechanism for policing the crisis .

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

This the closest comparison to the 11 to 25 age category of ‘youth’ that available NHS data allows.

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Williams, E. Policing the Crisis in the 21 st Century; the making of “knife crime youths” in Britain. Crime Law Soc Change (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-023-10089-8

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Article Contents

Introduction, contextualizing knife crime prevention orders, the usual suspects, from the punishable subject to the regulatory subject, compliance and punishment, status criminalization as ‘othering’, hybrid proceduralism as a regulatory technique, acknowledgements.

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‘The Usual Suspects’: Knife Crime Prevention Orders and the ‘Difficult’ Regulatory Subject

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Jennifer Hendry, ‘The Usual Suspects’: Knife Crime Prevention Orders and the ‘Difficult’ Regulatory Subject, The British Journal of Criminology , Volume 62, Issue 2, March 2022, Pages 378–395, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azab063

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Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) were introduced by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 with the stated aim of providing additional tools for police to use in combatting increasing rates of knife crime in England and Wales. This article situates KCPOs within a continuous policy trend of procedural hybridization, and highlights the worrying manner in which such criminalization, underpinned by a preventive logic and facilitated by this hybrid procedure, enables new forms of ‘othering’. Drawing a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject—the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other—it argues that preventive hybrids generate a self-fulfilling category of ‘difficult’ subjects, while simultaneously denying them the procedural protections normally afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law.

‘Punish the children of the poor, and prevent the wrongdoer..’. Misquote of the inscription on the Old Bailey

The Knife Crime Prevention Order (KCPO) was introduced in January 2019, ostensibly in response to the high and rising 1 rates of knife crime in England and Wales. 2 Intended as an ‘additional preventive tool’ for use by police, KCPOs will — according to published Home Office guidance — ‘help to divert those who may be carrying knives, or who are at greatest risk of being drawn into serious violence, away from being involved in knife crime’ ( Home Office 2019 ). Already being referred to as the ‘knife ASBO’, 3 the KCPO is the latest in an increasingly long line of hybridized civil/criminal procedures 4 aimed at preventing ‘deviant’ or undesirable activity in circumstances where existing criminal justice provisions are seen as insufficient to do so. It is — as this paper will argue — a paradigmatic case within the broader category of pre-emptive hybrid measures known as civil preventive orders (CPOs); paradigmatic in the sense that it is one of the latest in an iterative progression of this regulatory technique and the criminology of the self ( Garland 2001 ). The hybridity of such procedures lies in how, and despite their purportedly civil character, such orders carry criminal sanctions if violated. They proceed in stages: the court first identifies the objectionable behaviour, imposes restrictions aimed at its prevention and accompanies these with a warning of punishment in the event of a breach ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 175).

This article critically analyses the introduction of KCPOs in England and Wales, considering the motivations behind their 11th-hour addition to the Offensive Weapons Bill, and the goals underlying the use of this particular hybrid procedure. It highlights KCPOs as a classic iteration of civil/criminal hybrid procedures and presents the argument that KCPOs represent an ideologically driven policy ( Garland 2001 : 135) that is instrumentally and disproportionately employed to regulate the behaviour of ‘difficult’ populations — in this instance, predominantly Black children in urban environments who carry knives. The article further argues that KCPOs explicitly target these ‘usual suspect’ regulatory actors ( Lacey 2012 ), denying them the procedural protections of the criminal law with a view to controlling their behaviour and fast-tracking their criminalization. It concludes by placing KCPOs within the broader trend of Westminster governmental reliance on explicitly preventative procedurally hybrid forms, arguing that not only are they illiberal but also contrary to the rule of law.

This argument proceeds in four parts. The article will first contextualize KCPOs, charting the grounds for their development and introduction and outlining core criticisms from civil society actors. It will then situate KCPOs within criminal law’s preventive turn, connecting the use of such measures with the pre-emptive logic of security ( Cohen 2005 ) and the worrying legislative tendency to employ so-called regulatory offences ( Picinali 2016 ) to circumvent the procedural protections of the criminal law. 5 It will also draw attention to the manner in which KCPOs enable the anticipatory regulation of individuals whose wrongdoing is merely potential. Third, it will introduce, contra John Braithwaite’s archetypal ‘virtuous’ and ‘rational’ regulatory subjects ( 2002 ), the ‘difficult’ regulatory suspect that is both created and designated by offences like KCPOs. It will lead to the argument that KCPOs are a form of status criminalization that facilitates differential treatment of individuals under the law, contrary to the liberal tenets of classic criminal law, liberal criminology ( Loader 2007 ), and the egalitarian values of the rule of law. Finally, this article will argue that it is the very hybridity of KCPOs that facilitates the operation of these problematic features, which gives good reason to interrogate other instances of preventive civil/criminal procedural hybridity whenever they are introduced and implemented. In terms of the iterative progression of this regulatory technique, therefore, my focus on KCPOs presents them not as a novelty but rather an illustration of this approach’s recursiveness.

There is a serious knife crime problem in England and Wales; in 2019 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published the worst knife crime statistics in a decade ( ONS 2019 ). 6 Indeed, although this article criticizes the ‘sacrifice of values resulting from [the KCPO’s] particular legal form’ ( Ashworth and Zedner 2011 : 299, in respect of the ASBO), it is still possible to concede that it has been devised to combat ‘a genuine and significant social problem’ ( Ashworth and Zedner 2011 : 299). ONS figures for 2019 put the number of offences involving knives or sharp instruments recorded by police at 45,627, up 7% from the year before and 49% from 2011 when comparable records began. Even controlling for relative population density, the problem is most intense in cities, with London alone accounting for a third of recorded offences; this appears to be the justification for London’s selection as the location of the 14-month long KCPO pilot trial, initially scheduled to commence on 6 April 2020 but delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the Government, police, activists, charities and communities are united in recognizing the need to tackle these continual increases in knife crime, KCPOs are far from being a well-received measure. Indeed, civil society actors such as the Standing Committee for Youth Justice (SCYJ), although welcoming the Government’s commitment to tackling knife violence, have expressed disappointment that its response ‘falls short of constituting a public health approach’ ( SCYJ Submission to Consultation 2019 ); UK Parliamentary debates on the Offensive Weapons Bill had specifically acknowledged the importance of a holistic public health approach to knife crime ( Hansard 2018 , 2019 a , b ). 7

In spite of the opposition from activists and charities over both the form and approach of KCPOs to this problem of knife crime, their introduction has been generally welcomed by the police. The Head of Crime at the College of Policing, David Tucker, has remarked that the London pilot is ‘a positive step towards understanding how police can divert those who may be carrying knives, or who are at greatest risk of being drawn into serious violence, without having an adverse effect on their lives’ ( College of Policing 2020 ). The additional powers that KCPOs give to the police were, in fact, a core motivation for both their design and introduction. As the then-Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, Victoria Atkins MP, explained during the Parliamentary debate on the Bill that introduced these orders, the Government

wanted to give the police the power, through the Bill, to seek an order from the court, on a civil standard of proof, so that the state can wrap its arms around children if schools and local police officers think they are at risk of carrying knives frequently’ ( Hansard 2019 b : 5/29).

For anyone sceptical as to what such ‘arm-wrapping’ on the part of the state might involve, Atkins MP clarified that KCPOs mirror similar prevention orders already in existence, by ‘placing negative and positive requirements on children who do not necessarily have a criminal conviction’ ( Hansard 2019 b : 5/29).

Section 14 of Part 2 of the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 provides that courts can make such orders in respect of a person aged 12 or over without a conviction if that court is satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that this person has ‘had a bladed article with them without good reason or lawful authority’ in a public place, school, or college on at least two occasions within the preceding two years. 8 An additional condition is that the court thinks that such an order is necessary to protect the public, or specific members of the public, from the risk of harm involving a bladed article, or to prevent the defendant from committing a crime with a said bladed article. The positive and negative requirements to which Atkins MP refers are found in section 21 of the Act, and include geographical, associational and online restrictions, a curfew (the negative requirements), and attendance at educational courses and/or counselling (the positive requirements), for a time period ranging from 6 to 24 months. Punitive criminal sanctions, such as a custodial sentence of up to two years, a fine, or both, can be imposed on breach. 9

KCPOs are a clear point of continuity in an established policy trend of using preventive hybrid procedures to control undesirable potential behaviour — a policy trend, it should be emphasized, that has exhibited no sign of learning from past experience and has, instead, appeared to proceed counterfactually. While similar in form to other civil preventive orders (CPOs) (see, inter alia , Simester and von Hirsch 2006 ; Ashworth and Zedner 2010 ; Shute 2018 ), KCPOs are specifically concerning for several interconnected contextual, procedural and principled reasons. First, as the quote from Atkins MP highlights, these orders are largely intended to marshal the behaviour of children . Patrick Green, Chief Executive of knife crime prevention charity the Ben Kinsella Trust, has commented that, while his organization supports ‘all approaches that aim to lead to a reduction in knife crime … we are concerned that young people as young as 12 may well be criminalized for breaching these orders’. 10 Moreover, and although the stated aim of KCPOs is prevention, the likely age of individuals subject to them and the comparative ease of inadvertent breach can only contribute to the stealth criminalization of disadvantaged children.

A second issue with KCPOs is that the personalized positive and negative requirements they impose upon an individual combine to comprise severe and lengthy restrictions upon that individual’s movements and activity, both online and offline. These pre-conviction restrictions sit uncomfortably alongside the civil standard of proof being employed by the court, neatly severing the classic criminal law connection between criminal activity and responsibility, and undermining certain fundamental criminal law principles such as the presumption of innocence. Furthermore, with no specification in the legislation as to the evidence base required for the triggering offence, it is unclear, for example, the extent to which contextual considerations can be employed, or how some evidence could underpin a KCPO application while other evidence could constitute a criminal offence ( SCYJ 2019 : para 2.3).

Third, Atkins MP’s ‘arm-wrapping’ metaphor itself begs some additional attention. Coming as it does from a Government largely responsible for austerity measures and cuts that impact directly upon the very category of children and young people likely to be made subject to KCPOs, such an emphasis on ‘wraparound care’ 11 and services seems palpably insincere. Unease with this was voiced in the very same Commons debate, no less, with Louise Haigh MP (Labour) telling the House of her concern that, ‘in trying to establish so-called wraparound care for young people, these orders will inevitably end up focusing on the restrictive elements such as curfews, social media bans and prohibitions, rather than the potential for positive, rehabilitative action’ ( Hansard 2019 a : 239). What, then, are the reasons for this specific emphasis on care and services? It is submitted that there are two clear animating motivations: not only did it allow the Government to cleave to the ‘public health approach’ spin that accompanied the legislation, despite being barely evident within it, but it also provides an additional shield against those who would point out that there are already in existence criminal justice measures applicable to knife crime offences where there is reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, notably the conditional caution (importantly, available only to person ages 18 or over) 12 or the reintroduced youth caution (ages 10–17). 13

Finally, and as has been demonstrated by the controversy surrounding the Home Office’s 2019 chicken shop food box anti-knife campaign 14 — represented on social media by the hashtag #knifefree — there are significant issues of race introduced by KCPOs. Linda Logan, chair of the Magistrates Association’s Youth Court Committee, has voiced specific unease in this regard, noting that her organization is ‘particularly concerned that [the] use [of these orders] may worsen existing overrepresentation of black, Asian and minority ethnic young people in the justice system and [that] this issue must therefore be at the heart of the evaluation of the pilot’ ( Logan 2020 ). Not only are KCPOs likely to contribute further to the over-policing of Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities through, for example, the use of alleged compliance-ensuring techniques such as surveillance and heightened stop and search, but such measures are also liable to result in more Black children subject to a KCPO being disproportionately found to be in breach. While the ill-judged #knifefree chicken shop box campaign was rightly met with outrage and opprobrium on social media and beyond, with many commentators expressing incredulity at what appeared to be blatant racial profiling, such allegedly precautionary behaviour on the part of law enforcement officials feeds into a public consciousness in which ‘non-white people are disproportionately engaged with and predisposed to criminality’ ( Gilroy 1982 ; Williams and Clarke 2018 : 235). As Alpa Parmar notes ( 2016 : 64), ‘there is now greater awareness that what we see in the court setting are the cumulative consequence of the intersection of various forms of disadvantage that disproportionately impact on black and minority ethnic groups’, and so considerations of intersectionality should also be borne in mind here (see also Crenshaw 1989 ): age, gender, class and poverty can all combine with race to create a clear picture of social disadvantage.

The specific issues with KCPOs outlined here — that they explicitly target children, unduly affect Black children, and are disproportionate, stigmatizing, and restrictive — can be situated more broadly within what has come to be known as criminal law’s ‘preventive turn’ ( Carvalho 2017 ). Two further critical points are worth noting in this regard. First, the preventive nature of KCPOs means they operate proactively, anticipatorily and in advance of activity or behaviour that would usually attract the label ‘criminal’. This pre-emptive logic of security ( Zedner 2009 : 73; also generally Ramsay 2012 ) is what paves the way for earlier and earlier intervention on the part of the state in the name of the greater good, insofar as that means for the benefit of the ‘virtuous’ majority. In their orientation towards first anticipating and then pre-emptively combatting risky behaviour, therefore, KCPOs — like ASBOs before them — can be said to represent a blatant form of criminalization, albeit ‘an ex ante criminal prohibition, not an ex post facto criminal verdict’ ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 178). The semantic mislabelling as a ‘civil process’ here should leave us in no doubt of the ultimate destination at the sharp end of this particular regulatory pyramid ( Ayers and Braithwaite 2002 ; Braithwaite 2002 ). 15

Continuing in the vein of security’s pre-emptive logic, the second point of note here is that the justification for the use of KCPOs comes in the form of normatively motivated political expediency, often in impatient or reflex response to ‘mass-mediated, emotionally charged and urgently pressed public concerns about crime and disorder’ ( Loader 2006 : 581). The difficulty with this, however, is that in real or perceived situations of crisis or uncertainty, the precautionary approach facilitated by the aforementioned impetus of prevention prompts ‘decision-makers…to err on the side of caution’ ( Crawford 2009 : 819), and caution invites prejudice: ‘any individual who is potentially dangerous has to be contained before s/he can put the community at risk’ ( Carvalho 2017 : 182). Accompanying this ‘reassurance rhetoric’ ( Erikson 2007 : 213) of ‘tough on crime’ and ‘restoring public confidence’, therefore, comes a counterfactual focus on an ‘archaic criminology of the criminal type, the alien other’ ( Garland 2001 : 135; Lacey 2011 ; Neocleous 2016 : 7), commonly for an overtly political end — as in this example, the preventive reduction of youth knife crime. But prejudice is even more insidious in this particular context as, layered upon this ‘criminology of the other’ ( Garland 1996 ), is the ‘myth of black criminality’ ( Gilroy 1982 ). Without needing to be told, without needing proof, the public already believes that in the context of knife crime the offenders are young Black men, benefit dependent, and involved in drugs, other anti-social behaviour, and low-level criminality ( Williams and Clarke 2018 ). So the refrain goes: these ‘deviants’ are found in that part of town, they dress in those clothes, they hang around in an intimidating manner… And well, if normal criminal justice processes are insufficient in tackling these issues, then more powers are simply necessary so that something can be done (about Them ).

While the reactionary aspects of this inherent procedural instrumentality are troubling in themselves, this is even more so in light of the fact that such expediency on questionable grounds of security is de facto privileged over considerations of human rights, civil liberties and due process ( Hendry and King 2017 : 733). The important pivot to note here is that KCPOs allow for the regulation, not just of undesirable behaviour, but of the (categories of) individuals suspected of such behaviour. The next section will explore this point in more depth.

It is generally accepted that reliance on both the language and techniques of regulation has underpinned an instrumentalized interventionism on the part of the state. Indeed, Adam Crawford (2009 : 811) has noted that ‘ideas of “better regulation” [have been] used to circumvent and undermine established criminal justice principles, notably those of due process, proportionality and special protections traditionally afforded to young people’. KCPOs certainly fit within this description, with the then-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Knife Crime and Violence Reduction, Sarah Jones MP, commenting on these very considerations: ‘imprisoning a young person — as young as 12 years old — for two years for breaching this order is completely disproportionate’ ( Grierson 2019 ). In effect, what are presented as regulatory offences are backed up by ‘real crime’ measures ( Lacey 2011 ; Norrie 2014 ) and justified by a preventive logic.

While KCPOs are a paradigmatic example in this regard, they are far from unique. In relation to the problem of rough sleeping, for example, Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) 16 provide local councils with a purportedly civil law alternative to criminalization under the controversial Vagrancy Act 1824, but breach of such an order will result in a fine which, if left unpaid, can result in a summary conviction and a £1,000 penalty. Similarly, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 has just this April introduced the Domestic Abuse Protection Order (DAPO), which continues the trend away from victim-led civil measures addressing domestic abuse and towards more explicit civil/criminal hybridization. Similar in structure and operation to the prior Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) 17 — also a hybrid procedure — the DAPO is of broader application, more flexible duration, and includes alongside negative requirements positive requirements such as electronic monitoring. Similar in structure to the KCPOS, violation of DAPO requirements constitutes a breach, a criminal offence subject to a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. In terms of regulating undesirable behaviour, therefore, such hybrid procedures, namely civil orders with criminal consequences, appear — increasingly — to be the first port of call.

So far, this article has argued that KCPOs are not only targeted towards preventing particular anti-social or undesirable behaviours but also employed instrumentally to control ‘difficult’ regulatory subjects, that is to say, the dangerous other introduced by criminal law’s preventive turn. 18 This section will pursue this point further. It will argue that instead of being treated either as the responsible ‘punishable subject’ of classical criminal law ( Farmer 2016 : 188–92; Garland 2001 : 124–7) or either the ‘virtuous’ or ‘rational’ subjects of responsive regulation ( Braithwaite 2002 : 32, ch2 generally), individuals made subject to KCPOs are pre-emptively designated as deviant or difficult to control . It makes the case that this categorization as a ‘difficult’ regulatory subject is enabled by ‘status criminalization’ ( Lacey 2016 : 148–60), which is not premised upon actual behaviour — at the point a KCPO is issued, any wrongdoing remains merely potential— but rather ‘bad character’ ( Redmayne 2002 , 2015 ), itself underwritten by a combination of ‘populist punitivism’ ( Loader 2006 : 578–1) and racialized othering.

Criminal law gives ‘institutional form to…the underlying moral structure of responsibility practices’, which in turn provides the community with the means of responding to ‘properly recognized public wrongs’ ( Farmer 2016 : 188–92; Garland 2001 : 190). By holding an individual responsible for their actions, criminal law demonstrates an innate respect for that individual as a rational agent, that is, as a reasonable person. In this sense, the punishable individual is ‘both the source and the subject of the criminal law’ ( Farmer 2016 : 190) insofar as criminalization results from this congruence of wrongful behaviour and responsibility for that behaviour. Criminal law is an instrument used to govern subjects, and it does this by means of responsibilization .

The yoking of individual rationality to individual responsibility thus performs an important legitimizing function for the criminal law, which derives considerable authority from the premise that limitations have been adequately communicated by the state to its citizens, and that each recognizes the boundaries of reasonable behaviour ( Naffine 2009 : 71–2). In addition to a citizen knowing these parameters, however, they must possess the capacity to act in accordance with them: as Nicola Lacey notes, ‘a legitimate contemporary criminal justice system criminalises only when “an offender’s capacities of understanding and self-control were properly engaged at the time of the alleged offence’ ( 2010 : 117). This relationship is complicated, however, by its embeddedness within civil society: social life is managed, and civil order maintained, by not just the criminal law but also other forms of social control. Situated within social networks, therefore, the individual becomes subject to what Farmer calls a ‘systematization of responsibility’ — not only are they accountable for specific actions as the punishable subject, but they are also subject to control in the form of general societal expectations ( Farmer 2016 : 193–4). Responsibility, according to this understanding, is a mechanism of standard-setting for the purpose of maintaining social order ( Farmer 2016 50–2 and 193–4; Brown and Baker 2012 : 9–26).

Contemporary techniques of control draw on regulatory ideas as much as on classic criminal justice ones, particularly in terms of managing individual behaviour ( Crawford 2009 : 812). Indeed, in terms of controlling people’s behaviour, the developing regimes of regulation exist in parallel — sometimes connected, sometimes separate — with criminal justice. Whether criminal law and regulation are viewed as separate regimes or as points on a continuum of behavioural governance, individual responsibility plays a different role in each. Relevant here is the responsive regulation regime, which ‘responds’ to non-compliance with the established rule or standard with an escalation of sanctions. The (dis)incentive structure within the ‘dynamic model’ regulatory pyramid is intended to ‘solve the puzzle of when to punish and when to persuade’ ( Braithwaite 2002 : 30), with the idea being that, as progress is made up the pyramid, so the interventions increase in their punitiveness. The subject of responsive regulation is trifurcated correspondent to three different stages of responsive regulation: there is the virtuous actor — for whom techniques of restorative justice will be employed; there is the rational actor, whose behaviour will be met with techniques of deterrence; and there is the incompetent or irrational actor, for whom the remaining strategy is incapacitation or removal, (and who does not feature relative to criminal justice applications for similar capacity reasons as those discussed for the punishable subject of criminal justice) ( Braithwaite 2002 : 32).

In terms of controlling a subject’s behaviour, however, the respective regimes of criminal justice and responsive regulation operate according to fundamentally different values: ‘criminal justice is founded on principles of independence and impartiality, while regulation promotes pluralistic and flexible pragmatism’ ( Quirk et al. 2010 : 20). Prominent in terms of responsive regulation’s efficient and dynamic-model pragmatism, 19 therefore, is its ability to pivot from the maintenance of an established, publicly promulgated, general standard into differential — often individualized — treatment of a regulatory subject. As Crawford has observed with reference to anti-social behaviour provisions,

many (though not all) of the powers seek to individualize control by tailoring the response and regulatory regime … to the circumstances of those who are the subjects of regulation. […] They permit the micro-regulation of individual lifestyles, governing the intimacies of personal activities, dress and behaviour. These orders that do not ‘personalize control’ focus instead on regulating places… or premises ’ ( 2009 : 820, emphasis in original).

This personalized control option facilitates targeted interventions by the state into the life of the regulated subject, with their behaviour subject to bespoke restrictions. Indeed, the KCPO, with its individualized positive and negative requirements, is a paradigmatic example of this ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 181–2).

While the contrast here with the abstract, universal, moral, punishable subject of the criminal law could not be starker, that is not to say that this disjunction is necessarily problematic. Were the distinction between compliance and punitive approaches within crime control to be robustly maintained then there would arguably be no issue: ‘real crime’ would receive punishment, while those committing ‘victimless’ regulatory offences would be held to account through compliance mechanisms. The difficulty here is that the very dynamism of the regulatory pyramid precludes this separation, with each approach instead of being seen to comprise part of a crime control ‘toolkit’ ( Sanders 2010 : 57). Andrew Sanders has observed that this is integral to Braithwaite’s 2002 argument:

At a normative level … we should integrate compliance and punitive approaches in respect of all crime, both in our theoretical thinking and in policy-making. ‘Neither compliance nor punishment’ should, in themselves, be seen as goals of criminal justice; rather, they should both be seen as means of achieving broader crime control goals. Further, this thinking should be applied to all crimes, without an artificial separation of ‘normal’ from ‘regulatory’ crime’ ( Sanders 2010 : 57).

The next section will lead the argument that KCPOs — and other civil/criminal hybrid procedural forms requiring (two-step) escalation from compliance to sanction — similarly and deliberately short-circuit this distinction.

Unlike the punishable subject, as discussed, an individual targeted by or made subject to a KCPO is not afforded the respect of the criminal law in its recognition of their wrongdoing and rationality, and thus their responsibility; such recognition necessarily fails without (evidence of) wrongdoing. Similarly, as a regulatory subject, an individual exposed to ad hominem or differential treatment (without reason) under the law is not afforded the respect of equal consideration as a citizen. A core element of the rule of law is that it does not permit fundamental differentiations in status amongst members of the relevant polity. Indeed, the rule of law can be understood as ‘equality before the law’, in the sense that:

government must govern under a set of principles in principle applicable to all . Arbitrary coercion or punishment violates that crucial dimension of political equality, even if, from time to time, it does make government more efficient’ ( Dworkin 2004 : 29, my emphasis).

Society is not only reliant on citizens respecting the authority of the government to set the rules, as demonstrated by behaviour compliant with these rules; rather, this needs to be a relationship of reciprocal respect ( Finnis 2011 : 272–3, my emphasis). Governments are reciprocally required to respect their citizens as self-determining rational agents, capable of comprehending and conforming to rules. This right to respectful consideration is compromized in the event that the basic equal status of citizens is differentiated without sufficient and provable justification ( Green and Hendry 2019 : 275–6), whether that differentiation concerns either an individual or a (sub)group.

This section leads the argument that KCPOs, via the very form of the two-step civil/criminal hybrid procedure, violate this basic egalitarian precept by eliding the classic distinction between compliance and punishment. The problematic result of this elision is that the regulatory subject is here escalated into becoming the punishable subject without having committed a crime for which another citizen would be held similarly liable. Here the much-vaunted flexibility of responsive regulation becomes more of a concern than a boon, as the dynamic relationship between prevention and sanction, understood as existing within a toolkit of crime control measures, fast-tracks the ‘difficult’ regulatory subject into this self-fulfilling category.

At this juncture, there are no citable cases that can be drawn from the delayed April 2020 London pilot study, but a hypothetical instance of a KCPO is a useful illustration:

Damon’s Case: On two occasions within one academic year, Damon was suspected of having a knife on his person while at school, ‘without good reason or lawful authority’. In a Magistrates’ Youth Court, he is made subject to a KCPO under OWA 2019 s14, that is, without a conviction. A negative requirement of this order is to be at his place of residence between the hours of 8 pm and 8 am every night of the week (i.e. a curfew, under s21(2)(a)), while a positive requirement is to attend a counselling appointment once per week (under s21(2)(d)). The curfew and the counselling appointment thereby constitute two separate micro-regulations particular to Damon and his circumstances. Damon returns home one Friday evening at 9 pm, and is subsequently held to be in breach of the order. The excuse provided for this breach is deemed not to be a reasonable one, and so Damon is held summarily to be guilty of an offence under s29(1) and, under s29(2), is liable to imprisonment for six months. 20

Several issues are raised by Damon’s case, not least that of due process, whereby a child under the age of 18 is imprisoned on the strength of — to be clear — what could be police surmisal of routine knife possession, accepted by the Youth Court on the balance of probabilities; and proportionality, whereby Damon’s punishment — potentially in the form of a six-month custodial sentence — is out of kilter with the infraction of breaching the order. Importantly, here, the triggering event of the order’s breach is the curfew violation, itself an ex ante prohibition and an individualized behavioural control to which Damon and Damon alone is subject ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 178–80). This non-compliance with the order serves to propel Damon expeditiously and directly from suspected knife carrier and potential knife crime offender to ex post criminalization, where the triggering activity is not only itself legitimate but also very remote from the potential offence targeted by the order. It should also be noted here that, while the ‘Damon’s case’ hypothetical has concerned KCPOs, this argument is generally applicable to two-step prohibitions, notably CPOs (for example, Public Space Prevention Orders (PSPOs), Domestic Violence Protection Orders (DVPOs), and Super Football Banning Orders (SFBOs)).

So far, this section has raised three core points. To reiterate: first, KCPOs facilitate the pre-emptive regulation of the behaviour of individuals whose wrongdoing remains merely potential . Second, whilst prima facie geared towards the prevention of undesirable behaviour — that is, the carrying of a knife — KCPOs instrumentally and disproportionately target specific categories of individual, the ‘usual suspects’ of knife crime. Third, and whilst it is acknowledged that future governance requires the making of risk calculations, the problematic inclusion of subjective perceptions within such calculations ( Crawford 2009 : 819, in the context of anti-social behaviour measures) opens the door to othering within the holistic operation (within which is included the targeting, application, making, enforcing and prosecuting in the event of a breach) of KCPOs. The final part of this section will lead to two further connected points: this othering is both obscured and justified by means of reliance on, not actual individualized conduct but, rather, perceived and taxonomical ‘bad character’, 21 and that this reliance is, in itself, unjustifiable.

Nicola Lacey has argued that the contemporary criminal law in England and Wales has been moving steadily towards a renewed — or rather, a more overt — reliance on character -based attribution of criminal responsibility ( 2011 : 12–3; also Redmayne 2015 ; Lacey 2016 ). She observes that character-based principles are (re-)emerging in terms of both the substantive and the procedural law, and warns that ‘character-facilitated criminal responsibility-attribution’ is most likely to be employed against those members of society ‘who form easily identifiable objects of anger, fear or resentment’ — that is, where the usual suspects are today’s ‘ symbols of “otherness” relative to contemporary anxieties and technologies’ ( Lacey 2011 : 39). These usual suspects, these ‘new others’, include, according to Barbara Hudson, ‘[f]undamentalists, false asylum seekers, promiscuous women, indigenous persons with pre-modern lives, [and] migrants who do not subscribe to the values of the host country’ ( 2008 : 277).

Much like the reliance on the character, such criminalization of status is not a new legal development; at least, not in the sense that status offences targeted at dangerous categories — the vagrant, the prostitute, the inebriate — existed in the past ( Lacey 2016 : 157). Nevertheless, the recent reappearance of this type of assumed-criminality status criminalization is a real concern, not least because of the manner in which it is being operationalized via civil/criminal hybrid procedures, of which KCPOs are a paradigmatic example of a pathologizing mechanism. Lacey articulates these ‘doctrinally explicit character shortcuts to responsibility’ as emblematic of ‘enemy criminal law’, that is, ‘essentially a police power which treats its objects as dangers to be managed, as distinct from citizen criminal law, which responds to subjects invested with rights’ ( 2016 : 158).

These points are thrown into particularly sharp relief when the focus is shifted back to the concrete issue of KCPOs. Here the juxtaposition between the professed public health motivations and ‘wraparound care’ assurances, with the marginalizing and stigmatizing operation of a preventive measure so aggressive as to have picked up the moniker of enemy criminal law ( Ohan 2010 ), is a particularly stark one. To be clear on this point: in England and Wales in 2019, under a stated public health banner, under-scrutinized legislation was passed that not only perpetuated the problematic idea that either being a particular sort of person or having a particular status in itself can ground criminal responsibility, but which also targeted this instrumentally at the country’s disadvantaged children. This is made yet extra sinister when viewed through the prism of race: as Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke note, ‘there has long existed a “special” social category attributed to young black men, which serves to legitimize the development and application of increasingly complex and punishing penal apparatus’ ( 2018 : 235).

Status criminalization trades on abstractions and stereotypes, more ‘projected image than […] individuated person’ ( Garland 2001 : 179), and as such contributes to insidious generalizations concerning (sub)cultures — the injudicious #knifefree chicken shop box campaign mentioned earlier being a classic case in point ( Baker 2019 ). This vicious cycle is driven by the fiction of ‘official crime figures’ ( Parmar 2016 : 57; on the fiction of official statistics production processes, see Merry 2016 ), where processes of status criminalization combined with general community over-policing serve to perpetuate ‘folk devil’ type ideas of, for example, Black violence and criminality. Indeed, ‘the stereotyping of young black men as “dangerous, violent and volatile” is a longstanding trope that is ingrained in the minds of many in our society’ ( Williams and Clarke 2018 : 235).

While this broad-brush othering approach of status criminalization appears, on the face of it, to sit at odds with the heavily personalized ad hominem control experienced by an individual made subject to a KCPO, these can arguably be understood merely as escalating steps of the same preventive control mechanism. Risky or undesirable behaviour is presumed to be undertaken by risky or undesirable people, and so these difficult regulatory subjects — difficult because of their status as the potentially dangerous other— need to be controlled before they commit crime. 22 Indeed, the two-step progression of the KCPO is premised upon this presumed inevitability of criminal behaviour, which needs to be controlled pre-emptively by means of individualized restrictions and requirements. Moreover, while status criminalization involves the differential treatment of a group of citizens, and the requirements of a KCPO constitute the personalized micro-regulation of individual behaviour, both are — as argued above — evidently contrary to the egalitarian foundations of the rule of law by virtue of each comprising a fundamental differentiation in status amongst citizens. Ongoing intersectionality considerations, as mentioned above, should also be borne in mind here: while the race is disproportionately influential in designating the potentially dangerous other, other stigma-attracting factors such as disrupted education or truancy, unemployment, benefit dependency, and general poverty — themselves not race-neutral — all generate compounding effects.

By designating both individuals and whole groups of people as potentially deviant on grounds of risk mitigation and crime prevention they are reduced to being mere means to that securitized end ( Korsgard 1998 : xxi; Kant 1785). The wrongness of this move pertains on two counts. First, whereby the ends in question are improved public security and reduced crime rates, the regulatory differentiation on the basis of group membership serves to treat members of that group (or groups) as lesser in status qua citizen than members of the ‘virtuous’ or non-difficult majority. Second, and through these pre-emptive techniques of control, certain individuals and groups are deliberately exploited as means towards the stated ends of public security, with the result that these other rational beings are — both practically and symbolically — placed outwith. That is to say, outwith the (rest of) the society allegedly being protected by such securitized measures, and outwith the number of individuals aggregated to form ‘the public’, whose safety and ‘right to security’ are apparently paramount (see Ramsay 2012 ).

Our concern here should be in the deliberateness of this social division, and the manner in which the rights and procedural protections of one part of society are jettisoned to privilege the security of another. 23 Moreover, it should be a source of genuine worry in our society that the terminology of ‘enemy criminal law’ discussed earlier is more fitting than that of civil prevention. The next section will rely on the insights gleaned from the foregoing analysis of the paradigmatic case of KCPOs to argue that the politicized and instrumentalized use of civil/criminal procedural hybrids as a ‘pragmatic’ alternative to existing criminal law measures constitutes a problematic new regulatory technique used to control the behaviour of socially demonized ‘usual suspects’.

As Hendry and King have argued ( 2017 : 734), civil/criminal procedural hybrids are those ‘blended processes in either civil or criminal law that rely upon mechanisms normally associated with the other type, or those that omit procedural dimensions normally required by their own sort’. They blur the lines between the civil law and the criminal law, both in terms of their stated purposes — compensation or punishment — and the processes to be followed and standards to be met. Known alternatively as inter alia ‘middleground sanctions’ ( Mann 1992 ), ‘two-step prohibitions’ ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 ), ‘civil penalties’ ( White 2010 ), ‘quasi-criminal measures’ and ‘civil for criminal processes’ ( Young 2017 ), the use of hybrid procedures is driven by two recognized prosecutorial inconveniences with traditional criminal law. First, the procedural and evidential requirements of the criminal law are stricter than for civil processes, with certain procedural safeguards — such as the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof resting with the prosecution, and the heightened standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt ( Langbein 2003 ; Jackson and Summers 2012 ; Roberts and Hunter 2012 ) — in place for the specific protection of a suspect or an accused. These enhanced procedural safeguards operate against abuses of the power asymmetry inherent to the relationship between the individual and the state, not least the imbalance of their respective resources, and in acknowledgement of the potentially deleterious consequences of a guilty verdict ( Hendry and King 2015 ). Second, where the behaviour is merely undesirable but not criminal, the criminal law is inapplicable, even if such behaviour were to occur repeatedly or on an ongoing basis, such as, for example, recurring knife possession. Civil/criminal hybrid procedures thus provide means by which not only can elevated safeguards be circumvented, but undesirable conduct — whatever that may comprise — can be regulated. As Simester and Hirsch have noted in terms of what they call ‘two-step prohibitions’, procedural hybrids have been employed as a technique that effectively extends the criminal law to encompass behaviour that is minor wrongful activity, conduct adjacent to wrongful activity, or conduct sufficient to constitute wrongful activity only when done repeatedly ( Simester and Hirsch 2006 : 176–7).

This can clearly be seen in the types of activity regulated by such hybrid procedures: although this article has focused on the comparatively recent example of KCPOs, there was the first Football Banning Order back in 1987, 24 1998’s controversial and now-defunct ASBO, 25 Domestic Abuse Protection Order in 2021 26 and Public Space Protection Orders in 2014, 27 to mention but a few. Such measures are ostensibly intended to curtail or otherwise restrict behaviour deemed contrary to public safety and security ( Zedner 2009 ), but they do so by privileging ideologically driven expediency over considerations of due process ( Hendry and King 2017 ) and facilitating differential treatment that serves to escalate the individual from regulatory subject to punishable subject. While KCPOs are arguably an extreme iteration of this regulatory technique, they are neither the latest hybrid order nor do they show any sign of being among the last.

In these legislative moves towards the proactive forestalling of potential harms, the pre-emptive logic of security underpinning these orders is, once more, clearly evident. Also evident, as Ashworth and Zedner have noted, is ‘the fact is that the British Government [… has] seized on the civil preventive order as a model for increasing social control without the need to abide by the protections accorded to defendants in criminal cases’ ( Ashworth and Zedner 2011 : 302). To these observations can be added a third: under the guise of flexibility and pragmatism, the British Government relies on hybridized civil/criminal procedures to manage and control 28 undesirable populations, who are subjected to marginalization, stigmatization, denigration and experimentation. This article contends that this observable pattern introduces hybrid proceduralism as a distinct regulatory technique, one deployed disproportionately and speculatively against so-called ‘risk communities’ ( Rose 1996 : 331).

Thus far this article has led to the argument that the ‘usual suspects’ of knife crime, and those likely to be made subject to KCPOs, are children drawn disproportionately from minority ethnic groups. In terms of the procedurally hybrid preventive orders just mentioned, football hooligans ( James and Pearson 2018 : 44), domestic abusers, the homeless 29 and immigrants 30 can all be added to the list of undesirable or ‘deviant’ groups targeted. Just as with the foregoing example of suspected knife crime offenders, such ‘risk communities’ are pre-emptively identified as potentially deviant for the purpose of mitigating that risk to the rest of society. This is classic risk management: the potential danger is identified, and steps are taken to contain it before that risk either increases or manifests. What is noticeable here, however, is the slippage between risk assessment premised upon individual conduct and that premised upon a group or population membership. While the earlier discussion of status criminalization has already highlighted this catch-all form of othering, it is worth reiterating here that what this facilitates is the establishment of allegedly ‘dangerous’ subjectivity premised not upon individual agency but, rather, on association or categorization. In this regard, preventive strategies fail to uphold the premise that ‘assessments of risk [are] based on individual agency, and not on any political prejudice towards any specific population’ ( Carvalho 2017 : 183, my emphasis). Indeed, it is easy to doubt the plausibility of broad and general applicability when actual application is narrow and targeted, and correspond to the ease by which an individual can be categorized as belonging to one or more risk communities.

While this inherently discriminatory dimension of preventive measures is concerning in itself, it is in its combination with the procedurally hybrid form — which, to reiterate, specifically enables the evasion of criminal law’s fundamental protections — that it becomes troubling. For these are not measures that maintain the initial distinction between ‘real crime’ and ‘regulatory offences where the latter historically constitutes, as Alan Norrie has explained, a method of regulation free of moral implications ( Norrie 2014 , chapter 5 generally). On the contrary, and as has been argued throughout this article in terms of the paradigmatic case of KCPOs: civil/criminal procedural hybrids can be disproportionate, restrictive, stigmatizing and criminalizing ( Squires and Stephen 2005 : 525). The operative elision of civil and criminal procedure for the achievement of, if not explicitly criminal law objectives, then certainly security ones, is exposed here.

This is not merely ‘criminalization creep’, however, although the fact that hybridized procedures regulate some of the most commonplace interactions between the legal system and the public makes these deserving of greater scrutiny, notably where the interface between allegedly pragmatic risk management and increased local discretion ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 180) on the part of, for example, magistrates, is liable to be problematic. More than mere creeping criminalization, hybrid proceduralism can be identified by, among other things: its experimental quality, its imaginative use of the different levers of control and compliance, the manner in which it fast-tracks criminality via an escalatory process, the insidious way it targets populations perceived as ‘other’ or in some other way undeserving of the protections of the rule of law, and its reliance on the mechanics of responsive regulation, namely efficiency, flexibility and pragmatism.

Having already argued that both ad hominem regulation and status criminalization are contrary to the egalitarian foundations of the rule of law, this article will conclude by similarly rejecting commonly vaunted appeals to pragmatism — often presented alongside flexibility as an advantage of responsive regulation — as insufficient to justify hybrid procedures in this respect. As discussed in relation to KCPOs, while such preventive hybrids may prima facie appear advantageous, they have been deliberately designed to ‘dodge’ both evidentiary and procedural requirements and, as such, to privilege ideologically-motivated political expediency over procedural legitimacy ( Hendry and King 2017 ). This instrumentalized use of the regulatory technique of hybrid proceduralism is underpinned by a fundamentally pragmatic understanding of the law, which can be broadly understood as one where decisions are taken with a view towards best serving the community’s future. In elevating the interests of the community or collective over the rights of the individual, however, a pragmatist will find ‘the necessary justification for coercion in the justice or efficiency or some other contemporary virtue of the coercive decision itself’ ( Dworkin 1986 :151). In the context of preventive hybrid orders, the obvious justification would be security , a logic that inevitably results in the protection of the ‘virtuous’ majority coming at the expense of the allegedly dangerous other. On this reasoning, pragmatism, as grounds for any diminution of due process protections, should be viewed with disquiet.

It is with this sense of disquiet over the preventive hybrid form that this critique will conclude. This article has undertaken an in-depth analysis of the civil/criminal procedural hybrid KCPO, with a view to providing the first comprehensive theoretical engagement with this particular preventive hybrid, as well as situating it within both the broader context of criminal law’s preventive turn and the debate on procedurally hybrid forms. KCPOs have been presented as one of the latest such hybrids, and the latest in an iterative progression of this regulatory technique, one that can be characterized by its recursiveness. Having drawn a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject — the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other — this article has made the case that preventive hybrids not only generate a category of ‘difficult’ subjects but also operate instrumentally to bypass the elevated procedural safeguards usually afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law. Importantly, this is the outcome even when, within the framework of a responsive regulatory cycle, KCPOs and other preventive hybrids purport to treat individuals subject to them as rational or virtuous. Such is the dynamic relationship between prevention and sanction — between compliance and punishment — that the preventive hybrid form facilitates slippage between difficult and thus potentially dangerous, and criminal. As this article has argued, in their combination of ad hominem regulation with the operative elision of the civil/criminal distinction aimed specifically at circumventing the elevated procedural protections of the criminal law, KCPOs have the potential for devastating effects upon disadvantaged children and young people, and for these effects to be borne disproportionately by minority ethnic children.

By presenting KCPOs as a paradigmatic example of civil/criminal procedural hybridity, and the latest in a continuous and problematic policy trend, this article has furthermore argued that it is this very hybridity that lies at the heart of its most problematic features. It has made the case that these insights provide the grounds for a fuller, broader interrogation of other instances of procedural hybridity, and the regulatory approach of hybrid proceduralism, and argued that such an interrogation is both timely and important in light of the manner in which such procedures are employed to target populations who are already othered within society more broadly. For the reasons already outlined, there is good cause to be wary of such developments. As a regulatory technique hybrid proceduralism arguably moves beyond mere criminalization creep by virtue of encompassing both the status of the individual and the potential behaviour in a quite deliberate manner. This is perhaps best illustrated by the proposed Serious Violence Reduction Order (SVRO) in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 currently being debated in Parliament. Already controversial for its proposed restrictions on protest rights, this Bill contains a less well-publicized but no less worrying SVRO, a civil order that purports to extend ‘stop and search’ police powers to allow their exercise without reasonable suspicion against offenders previously convicted of carrying a knife. Public consultation on this Bill has brought condemnation from civil society actors, on the grounds that SVROs allow police arbitrarily to detain and to search individuals, are likely to be used disproportionately against members of Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, and create conditions where individuals subject to them could be treated as perpetual criminals. In spite of these problems, the use of such hybrid orders appears, quite evidently, to be on the rise.

This legislative intentionality begs attention: within a responsive regulatory cycle, such procedurally hybrid forms in effect both create the difficult regulatory subject and reduce their procedural safeguards. An optimistic reading of this situation — where the allegedly ‘softer’ regulatory regime has ended up being harsher for certain differentiated populations than the existing criminal law alternatives — could be that the balance between securitization and due process has been inadvertently disturbed by a well-intentioned yet overblown interventionalism. A more sceptical reading, however, would point to regular and repeated use of this regulatory technique as clear evidence of a continuous and dysfunctional pattern. In this regard, those practices of othering, which this article has argued are inherent to such preventive hybrids, are exposed less as unanticipated and unintentional consequences of hybrid proceduralism and more as its ideological goals.

The Office for National Statistics has published the following rates of recorded knife crime offences for the past two years: 2019 — 45,627 (not including Greater Manchester); 2018 — 44,443.

Offensive Weapons Act 2019, chapter 7 part 2.

The Guardian 2019 (February 1). The Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) was available between 1998–2014 in England and Wales to anyone aged 10 or over; they were imposed by courts who deemed them necessary to achieve the stated goal of protecting the public from conduct ‘which caused or was likely to cause further harm, harassment, alarm, or distress’, employing the criminal standard of proof, and stipulating negative prohibitions only. As will become apparent, KCPOs differ, notably in their use of the civil standard and in their capacity to impose positive as well as negative requirements, although they are also applicable to children (in the case of KCPOs, individuals aged 12 and over).

Examples of preventive hybrids include inter alia the aforementioned ASBO, Football Banning Orders, Domestic Violence Protection Orders and Public Space Protection Orders.

Regulatory offences can be understood as a quasi-criminal offence employed to deter actors from dangerous or undesirable behaviour, and where no fault ( mens rea ) element is required.

BBC website 2020 (23 April).

In line with the World Health Organization position that ‘violence acts and spreads like a disease’, ( WHO 1996 : 24), a public health approach employs multisectoral cooperation to address the social, structural and environmental causes of violence with a view to breaking the cycle and thus improving both health and safety.

A KCPO can be made on conviction under section 19 OWA 2019 where the prosecution applies for one in addition to either the sentence imposed in respect of the offence (7a) or a conditional discharge order (7b). This is barely less problematic, however, as under sub-section 9 there is no admissibility requirement for the relevant evidence; according to the published Home Office Guidance on Knife Crime Prevention Orders, ‘That evidence does not need to be provided according to the strict rules of criminal evidence and the application may rely on the facts of the case for which the defendant has been convicted’ (2019: 6).

S29(2) OWA 2019.

BBC website (2020) .

Atkins MP: ‘We do not pretend that [KCPOs] will solve all knife crime, but they are about preventing young people from getting ensnared in criminal gangs or getting into a situation where they think that carrying a knife will protect them. This is about trying to wrap services around those children before they become criminalized ’ ( Hansard 2019 a : 231, emphasis added).

Criminal Justice Act 2003 s22–27.

Crime and Disorder Act 1998 s66A, as inserted by Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

BBC website (2019 , Baker).

Adam Crawford has observed that ‘Government interpretation of the “regulatory pyramid” [… is] an incremental tiered approach [that] conforms more closely to a ladder (or escalator!), where each subsequent intervention is more serious than the first’ ( 2009 : 825).

Antisocial Behaviour Act 2014, s59–75.

Crime and Security Act 2010 s24–33.

This article employs Michal Krumer-Nevo and Mirit Sidi’s sociological definition of othering, which indicates ‘the process of attaching moral codes of inferiority to difference’ ( 2012 : 300).

See the final section of this paper for a rejection of a pragmatism-based justification of preventive hybrids.

According to Home Office Guidance on KCPOs (2019: 18), the alternative options to a custodial sentence for those convicted of a breach include: unpaid work (community payback), rehabilitation activity requirements, undertaking particular programme/s geared towards behavioural changes, mental health treatment (with the defendant’s consent), drug rehabilitation and/or a drug testing order (with consent), drug and/or alcohol treatment (with consent) and alcohol abstinence and monitoring (again, with consent).

‘“His guilt and his descent appear by your account to be the same”, said Elizabeth angrily’ ( Austen 1813 : 66).

Garland’s (2001 : 185) discussion of the overlap between the two new criminologies — of, respectively, ‘everyday life’ and ‘the other’ — notes this as being ‘a shared focus on control [and] an acknowledgement that crime has become a normal social fact ’.

The connected issues of privilege and complicity lies outwith the scope of this article, but preventive orders are certainly reliant upon this social division. As Daniel Ohan notes, ‘the preventive order acts to bolster the trust of the public in the power of the criminal law to command authority by manifesting distrust in members of the polity whose conduct is suggestive of a deficient capacity and commitment to conform to its norms’ ( 2010 : 723).

Public Order Act 1986 s30, in force 1 April 1987.

Crime and Disorder Act 1998 s1.

Domestic Abuse Act 2021 ss27-49.

Anti-Social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014 ss59-61.

For more on the distinctions between the inclination to manage, the urge to punish and further fundamental ambiguities around control, see D. Garland, The Culture of Control (OUP 2001 ).

Although PSPOs have a disproportionate effect upon homeless people, it should be noted that, unlike other individualized CPOs, these orders are spatial in nature.

As Ana Aliverti notes, ‘The “foreign criminal” has come to embody the nation’s most derided individual who combines racialized fears about the stranger and the criminal, and is the precursor of the recent foreign national agenda in criminal justice’ ( Aliverti 2020 : 12).

This work was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Leadership Fellowship award (Early Career) 2019–21 (grant number AH/S006680/1).

I would like to thank Alexander Maltsev for his assistance with the initial research for this article. Thanks are also due to Tahir Abass, Adam Crawford, Lindsay Farmer, Alex Green, Colin King, Sam Lewis, Jess Mant, Mitchell Travis, Elies van Sliedregt and Neil Walker for their considered comments on earlier drafts. The usual disclaimer applies.

Aliverti , A . ( 2020 ), ‘Patrolling the “Thin Blue Line” in a World in Motion: An Exploration of the Crime-Migration Nexus in UK Policing’ , Theoretical Criminology , 24 : 8 – 27 .

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