IT WAS announced today that Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) restricting children as young as 12 who are suspected to be carrying knives are being trialled in London by the Met Police.

The orders can be used to impose curfews and restrict travel outside geographical boundaries, limit an individual’s use of social media, and explicitly ban individuals from carrying a knife. They can also be used to impose positive intervention, such as educational courses, sports club referrals, relationship counselling, anger management, mentoring and drug rehabilitation.

However, some experts and campaigners have concerns over how successful KCPOs will be, from the risk of racial profiling to a potential increase in the prison population.

Breaching the order could be a criminal offence

One aspect of KCPOs that concerns Dr Tim Bateman, the chair of the National Association for Youth Justice, is that breaching the order will be a criminal offence punishable by a maximum prison sentence of two years if convicted.

Bateman told The Voice that a KCPO is a civil order which is imposed on “the basis of probability rather than the criminal standard of proof”.

However, given that a breach of the order could result in a criminal offence that can lead to a custodial sentence, this would “thereby increas[e] the prison population”, Bateman said. 

He said that the reasons a child might be carrying a knife are complex: “Where a child is carrying a weapon because of fear for their own safety, and especially if they perceive other forms of protection such as the police to be unavailable to them, punitive orders and the threat of custody will be unlikely to discourage them.”

He said that the KCPO was “remarkably similar in its operation” to an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) which came before it, and that the KCPO – like the ASBO – “is thus likely to increase the number of children subject to criminal proceedings and to expand the number of children in prison”.

Racial Profiling

Individuals whom police have reason to believe are carrying knives or regular knife carriers, or those who have been previously convicted of a knife-related offence can be given the court order.

The orders are designed to complement existing police powers such as stop and search, a tactic which disproportionately impacts the Black community, with young Black men having been 19 times more likely(on a national scale) to be stopped and searched between July and September last year.

It is another concern Bateman raised: KCPOs “will tend to target the usual suspects, and may as a result have a disproportionate impact on children from minority ethnic backgrounds who are already overrepresented in the youth justice system”.

No More Exclusions (NME), an abolitionist grassroots movement in education, is also concerned about this aspect, stating that it does “not believe the Home Office’s claim that KCPOs will be ‘preventative rather than punitive’ or that they will help reduce serious youth violence”.

They said it believes “KCPOs will be yet another tool used by the State to pretend it can police its way out of multiple crises for which it is solely responsible”. 

NME told The Voice that “KCPOs will serve as a distraction and as a tool for racial profiling for children as young as 12 many of whom are already at the margins”, and that children and young people “will not need to have ever even carried a knife to find themselves criminalised and facing life-altering consequences”.

CPOs will be yet another tool used by the State to pretend it can police its way out of multiple crises for which it is solely responsible”.

“The same children and young people are paying the highest price for years of state neglect, educational and social exclusion, austerity, racial capitalism and societal violence, not to mention the effects of a deliberately poorly managed and ongoing global pandemic,” it said.  

Habib Kadiri, the research and policy manager at StopWatch, a coalition promoting accountable and fair policing, said that “the fact that the government’s response admits they cannot rule out the possibility of the police imposing KCPOs in a racially disproportionate way is a shocking – but not surprising – abdication of their responsibility to consider the need to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation in accordance with section 149 of the Equality Act.”

Kadiri added: “Worse still, the orders are painted as some kind of benefit to Black and ethnic minority individuals, when in fact there may be a likelihood of further abuses of police power towards ethnic minorities.”

Since forming in 2010, StopWatch has led a campaign against the disproportionate use of stop and search. Kadiri said that: “Combined with stop and searches, overpoliced communities may view KCPOs as yet another intimidatory tactic of street policing in their local area.”

Pilot must show success

Dr Floyd Millen, a political scientist and a former special adviser to the Metropolitan Police Authority, said that the KCPO pilot must show success before being rolled out across the country. 

Millen welcomed the measures which are “aimed at reducing the rising incidence of knife crime”, but he said “we however need to ensure that the KCPOs are only rolled out across the country when and if the evidence from the pilot shows that it works.”

He said he is “pleased to see that educational courses, life skills programmes, participation in group sports, drug rehabilitation and anger management classes are amongst the suite of interventions”.

However, he also added that he hopes “that the Met police will ensure that the roll out of the pilot does not bring the unintended consequences of increased indiscriminate stop and search of black and ethnic communities”.

Collaborative approach needed

Patrick Green, CEO of knife crime prevention charity the Ben Kinsella Trust, is concerned about the use of a civil order to deal with the problem of knife crime.  

He said: “The challenge with using [a] civil order to stop people offending is that these orders fail to recognise the support that some young people need to change their behaviour.

“If KCPOs are to be successful, then they must be backed by the resources needed to provide specialist support, mentoring and positive activities to divert young people away from crime.”