'People forget how to reason with each other’ – Activist reacts to 22% rise in knife crime (VIDEO)

"We're living in a society today where sadly people forget how to reason with each other.” That’s according to community activist, Desmond Jaddoo, reacting to figures showing a 22-percent rise in knife crime in England and Wales.

Speaking to RT UK’s Nadira Tudor, Jaddoo said that young people nowadays would rather settle scores “in a more violent way,” and that knife crime is “now an epidemic” by which “London is now experiencing a body count.”

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Figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for 2017 show that violent crime is up. Police recorded 39,598 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in 2017, which is a 22-percent increase on the previous year’s figures (32,468), the highest set of figures since comparable records began in 2010.

Asked about the reasons for the rapid rise in knife crime, the community activist from Birmingham identified a problematic approach to tackling the issue saying: “It's all our responsibilities. For far too long, there has been this top-down approach which does not work because it’s not connecting where it needs to, which is at grassroots."

He concluded that the knife-crime epidemic “could have been avoided if the authorities had supported a multi-agency approach to this;” an approach he and his grassroots organisation have been advocating for the past three years.

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