A Moral Panic: The ‘War on Knife Crime’

The moral panic concerning young people and knives reached a peak in 2007 and 2008 as news media reported a spike in child knife homicides. The culmination of public pressure and politicisation set the scene for a significant expansion of police powers and related enforcement activity, a renewed commitment to stop and search, a major roll-out of Tasers to front-line police, new legislation, new offences, enhanced sentencing, and new criminal orders. The persistent criminalisation and ‘othering’ of Black youth during this moment very much mirrors the response to ‘mugging’ in the 1970s; a politics of law and order used to re-establish political authority in the midst of economic crisis. This chapter considers how the uncertainties following the global banking crisis in the 2000s, and the contrived politics of austerity which followed, established the foundations for a more authoritarian and disciplinary public policy regime. Here we situate the political focus on ‘knife crime’ in this moment as one amongst a number of important political shifts during a temporary rupture in the maintenance of political authority. This chapter follows the ‘knife crime’ chronology and narrative up to the present, including its return to the headlines around 2015, finally drawing attention to the interaction between the extension of police powers and the political uncertainty during and after Britain’s Brexit referendum and the Covid ‘lockdowns’ which followed.