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Knife crime should be treated as a public health challenge, not a policing problem, our Director, Richard Garside, tells The Guardian newspaper today.
There is renewed concern that knife violence is on the rise following the publication of the latest crime data showing a 22 percent increase in knife crime and an 11 percent rise in gun crime.
Imran Khan, the Lawrence family solicitor, has written an article in response to the BBC's three-part documentary on Stephen Lawrence's murder, 'Stephen: The Murder That Changed a Nation'.
In The Guardian article, Khan questions whether anything has changed within the Metropolitan Police since Stephen Lawrence's murder in 1993 and emphasises how much work is to be done to shape a racially just society and police force.
Our Research Director, Roger Grimshaw, has been quoted by a number of news outlets on knife crime in London.
Today he commented on London's knife violence for NBC News:
The death by shooting of a 17-year-old girl in Tottenham has raised fresh concerns about apparently rising violent crime in London.
According to official data, there were 100 suspected homicides in London in the 12 months to March 2012. The following year, it rose to 109, before falling. In the 12 months to March 2017, there were 108 suspected homicides.
Our Director, Richard Garside, spoke on last night's BBC Newsnight on the dismissal of Nick Hardwick as Chair of the Parole Board.
Richard told the programme:
It’s really important as we look forward that the independence of the Parole Board from political interference is absolutely guaranteed.
It’s really striking in his resignation letter that Nick Hardwick raises the question, effectively, of whether parliament itself should intervene to guarantee the independence of Parole Board decision-making.
Following revelations that undercover police officers infiltrated hundreds of political and justice campaigns in the UK, the government launched an Undercover Policing Inquiry in 2015. Three years later, to cries of ‘no justice, no peace’, dozens of spying victims marched out of the latest Inquiry hearing, denouncing the process and calling for the resignation of presiding judge John Mitting.
After Alex S Vitale's appearance at Conway Hall last week to launch his new book, The End of Policing, our Research Fellow Connor Woodman and Novara's Sam Swann discuss with Alex the role of police in society and ask what the alternatives might be.
Listen to the podcast here.
The Editorial Board of the British Journal of Criminology award the Radzinowicz Prize each year to the person who ‘most contributes to knowledge of criminal justice issues and the development of criminology’.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has been awarded the 2017 prize for her paper The Occupation of the Senses: The Prosthetic and Aesthetic of State Terror.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the unlawful killing of Christopher Alder in a police station in Hull.
His sister, Janet Alder, has spent the subsequent years campaigning to bring the circumstances of his death to light. She has, as a consequence, been the victim of police surveillance by Humberside police. It was only officially confirmed to Janet that she had been under surveillance after the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) (now the Independent Office for Police Conduct) investigated the matter in 2013.
Joint Enterprise was back in the news last week with an article by Harry Stopes, which cites our work on racism, joint enterprise and gangs.