Sajid Javid has admitted the streets aren't safe enough for his own kids.
Today the Home Secretary made a speech on moving towards a public health model on knife crime - treating violence as a disease in a bid to stop the death toll continuing to rise.
In the highly personal speech, Mr Javid said: “If I don’t feel safe or don’t think the streets are safe enough for my own children then something has gone terribly wrong.”
The Home Secretary, who has four children with his wife Laura King, said he found it "hard to detach the personal from the policy".
He admitted: "Sometimes I cannot help but see the faces of my own children in the pictures of those many victims."
In a speech on tackling crime the Home Secretary, who is understood to be considering running for the Tory leadership, said that the life could have turned out very differently for him were it not for his parents and teachers.
“It’s not too difficult to see how I could have turned out, instead of being in the Cabinet, I could have had a life of crime myself”.
Mr Javid, the son of Pakistani immigrants, acknowledged stepping up stop and search is “not universally popular” and disproportionately affects BAME communities.
But he said that violence also disproportionately affects those communities.
“There are people that are alive today because of stop and search," he told an audience in East London.
And he insisted that "stop and search saves lives".
