Now before I go into some aspects of knife crimes and share my humble opinions on some points, let me state one single thing that is of utmost importance when facing anyone with a knife, even if he/she looks like he/she hasn’t got a clue what he/she is doing. Let me use the words of Steve Collins, a man who established PS5 in 1986, now an internationally recognised consultancy, providing training to the law enforcement, defence and the security sectors in countries around the world. Collins once said: “There are a handful of supremely skilled people out there that could disarm you, take your knife and stab you four times with it before you realised you weren’t holding the knife anymore, So, if you are faced with the horror of a real knife attack and, for whatever reason, have forgotten to put on your full medieval battle armour… then don’t be a mug… RUN AWAY!” One got to understand that a hardly noticeable 1” (2.5cm) cut at the wrong place can well lead to rapid blood loss and subsequently be the final curtain in someone’s life, and those ‘wrong places’ are unfortunately, but most likely exposed in a close quarter combat situation… so yes… RUN AWAY if you can! Moving on from that, we do however also need to understand that running away is not always possible. This fact will most likely be dictated by two factors, one being your profession and the other being your environment. The following will highlight the extreme global problem edged weapon represent. I remember the many conversations I had with others many years ago. People used to be of the opinion that only guns kill, and knives don’t play a role in multiple/mass killings. History has proven these people wrong I guess. Let me highlight just a few headlines and dates of some rather horrendous violent incidents involving edged weapons from around the world, helping us to understand that it is a global issue, not limited to a certain belief, language, culture or country (although we have to accept that certain Central American countries have been leading the table of ‘homicide per capita’ for several years now). But let’s start with one country we don’t hear too much about in our local media in terms of knife crime/violence, China!
- 2014 - 33 people were killed and 130 more were injured when a group of men coordinated a terror attack using knives at a train station in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
- 2015 - 50 workers at a Chinese coal mine were killed in a coordinated knife attack. Fifty more workers were injured.
- 2016 - a man killed 15 people and injured 45 in a facility for the disabled, then later surrendered himself to police.
- 2016 - a man in the southern province of Hainan stabbed 10 children before killing himself.
- 2017 - 18 people walking down a city street were injured when a man attacked them with a knife
- 2017 - 13 people were seriously injured by a knife-wielding assailant at a shopping mall in Beijing. One woman died from her injuries.
- In 2016, two soldiers were attacked by a man with a knife in Belgium, and a few months ago, a prisoner on a day holiday stabbed two police officers before taking their guns and shooting them. On the 20th November this year (2018) a police officer attacked by knife-wielding man outside police station in Brussels.
- Germany: Newspapers also reported about a serious increase in knife crime, telling us that “…more than 1,600 knife-related crimes were reported in Germany during just the first five months of 2017, an average of 300 each month, or 10 each day.” On the 20th July this year (2018), at least 14 people have reportedly been wounded, two of them seriously, in a knife attack on a bus in Lubeck, Germany.
- United Kingdom: The 250th fatal stabbing in the UK was recorded on the 7th November when a 16 years young male lost his life. On the 24th November, the day I started to further edit my article, a police officer has been stabbed in an "unprovoked attack" outside a train station in east London. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the 14,987 knife crimes in the year until the end of June was a 15 percent rise compared to the previous 12 months. According to different sources the total number of offences involving a knife or bladed instrument that have been recorded by cops in the year to March 2018 rose to 40,147, a seven-year-high.
- Canada: In 2016 a University professor was stabbed and killed while out for an evening walk. A woman was knifed to death in an underground Shoppers Drug Mart, and two soldiers were slashed and injured at a military recruitment centre. In September 2017 a grandfather was viciously stabbed almost 100 times by a knife-wielding stranger on the street in broad daylight. At least five people took videos of the horrifying sight.
- France: On the 13th May of this year, four people were injured and one was killed when a knife-wielding assailant shouting 'Allahu akbar' attacked them in Paris. Another incident that made the news in France was when seven people were injured, by a man wielding a knife and an iron bar.
- Australia: On the 09 November 2018 a man set a car on fire and stabbed three people in Melbourne, one fatally. He died in hospital after being shot by police.
- Israel: Only a very few days ago, on the 14 November 2018, a terrorist wounds seven police officers in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem.
- Italy: Two US students have admitted stabbing a policeman to death in Rome in July 2019 after an alleged drug deal went wrong.
Why the increase in such violent crime?
In his 2010 book “Knife Crime: The Law of the Blade”, John McShane compiles a catalogue of the UK’s most high-profile knife murders over the last few years. Describing the 1995 murder of Philip Lawrence, McShane declares that it marked “the dawn of an age when the response to a confrontation was no longer verbal or even rough physicality. Instead it was the quick, uncaring thrust of a blade from a feral youth lacking compassion or morality, thinking only of himself and nothing of the havoc caused to those in his way or their loved ones.” Well, there is no question about it, we do live in a society where individuals care far less for each other than they used to, and one can also identify a lack of compassion in parts of today’s world. Every time somebody commits a murder or assault, by making bodily contact, by choking, beating or in these cases by stabbing others to death, it always speaks of a level of rage and sometimes even a personal connection to the victim, but it most certainly also reflects an incredible lack of compassion. When you are stabbing someone, it's close and in your face. The experience is extremely graphic; it somehow tells an emotional story of hate or rage, and I do believe that more and more people are becoming more and more angry and frustrated with life in general (and somehow that brings them that bit closer to the stage of ‘rage’ from the offset)… rightly or wrongly. I look at humans and see them as ‘pressure cookers’. Many people in today’s society are under pressure, financially, emotionally, mentally or physically. A person can however only take x amount of pressure (some can of course take more than others) but ultimately many/most humans can ‘blow up’ if they haven’t learned to ‘let steam off’ in a controlled manner and in an environment where no harm can be done, or by finding a more balanced and satisfying life style in the first place. Many of those individuals have ‘exploded’ and taken action ignited by additional anger, hate, disappointment or frustration. They were unable to control themselves or simply chose not to. This is not an argument about right or wrong. It is just about finding answers to ‘why does it happen?’ Personally, I believe that five things in particular are a massive contributing factor to the increase of violent crimes involving edged weapons.
- Religious/Political Extremism – If you are so totally misguided and so extremely blinded, and truly believe that harming or killing others is the absolute only way you can reach happiness/fulfilment or reach your ultimate goal (whatever that might be)… then you are unlikely to stop from ‘proceeding’ with your action.
- Drugs – the production of, the trafficking of, and the dealing with drugs has always and will always bring violence along. It simply comes as a ‘package’. One cannot produce, transport and deal with drugs without enforcing certain aspects during the process. Guns have been used a lot in the past and are still weapon of choice in some regions, but in more and more countries we can already and will continue to identify a shift moving to the use of edged weapon during above, and I will highlight in a second why that is.
- Poverty & Social Exclusion – Knife crime and the carrying of knives are without any question symptoms of a broad social problem. Knife crime is mostly present in the poorest and most deprived places where violence is a clear sign of deeper problems such as poverty and social exclusion. That subsequent missing ‘sense of belonging’ often leads to the desire of wanting to become a member of a gang, which ultimately leads to the need of carrying and ultimately using a knife.
- Social Media – yes, this has also been blamed for the increase in knife crime, with some experts arguing that social media means everything to these knife carrying criminals. Some even say there might have been situations in the past where someone would have walked away and backed down, but now people are recording these attacks and videos of major knife attacks. These videos are being streamed millions of times, offering each and every one that ‘minutes of fame’ and more ‘followers’, and in their opinion that much craved for ‘respect’ and fear of them.
- Serious Mental Illness – Many of those who have been responsible for multiple killings using edged weapons have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses before or after the killings. I remember the particular case of Ashleigh Ewing very well. Ashleigh was a 22-year-old mental health worker, stabbed 39 times in a frenzied knife attack by a paranoid schizophrenic she visited in Newcastle. I have used this rather shocking example in several training events for ‘lone workers’, especially those working alone and entering the homes of others (health care, utility, housing, estate agencies and social services to name but a few).