Philip Hammond Tells Police Forces: “Divert Resources To Tackle Knife Crime”
7 March 2019, 16:04
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’.”
