Philip Hammond Tells Police Forces: “Divert Resources To Tackle Knife Crime”
Police forces should divert resources from “lower priority” areas to tackle the recent surge of knife crime, Philip Hammond has told LBC.
The Chancellor said: “If your house is on fire then you stop painting it, you get a bucket and you put out the fire”.
He also said the spate of stabbings was down to a “multiplicity of factors” and falling police numbers was one of the reasons.
Mr Hammond added forces will have access to almost a billion pounds of extra funding from next month.
But, he urged police chiefs to act immediately by reorganising their resources.
He said: “We need police commissioners, chief constables, to look very carefully at what their doing across a range of activities and say to themselves: ‘What I need to do now is take people away from lower priority areas of policing activity and surge them into tackling knife crime on the streets’.”