Police minister Nick Hurd today told of his personal mission to stop more “broken and shattered” families from being torn apart by knife crime.
The senior Conservative said the fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Nedim Bilgin was unsettling for the whole capital.
He added: “I feel what everyone else feels. Tragic faces staring at me out of the Standard. I meet with the parents of those children. When they talk about the impact on the family they use words like broken families, shattered families, and you can see it in their eyes. They are absolutely broken. [This is] really unsettling.”
Mr Hurd, who has met many bereaved relatives since taking up his role in the Home Office in 2017, said: “When I speak to people working with the young people who are so vulnerable at the centre of this, they very rarely talk about the police.
“They talk about families under pressure, young children growing up with inadequate support in terms of how they make choices and with peer pressure.
“They talk about how easy it is to groom a young person into the drug economy. That’s fundamentally about how young people are brought up.”
He admitted more officers “could” help bring down knife crime but over the long term young people have to know they have more options in life.
“What works is a combination of really robust law enforcement so that young people hear and believe a message that if you get involved, if you use a knife, you’re likely to get caught,” Mr Hurd said. “If we just reduce this to a debate about how many police officers there are, we are missing half of the problem and solution.”
