Families of knife victims call for five-year jail terms
Anyone found carrying a knife longer than three inches in a public place should be jailed for five years, the families of knife victims said today.
And they warned that if the Government does not heed their call, they would launch “the largest petition this country has ever seen”.
At a press conference held this morning, the families, led by Norman Brennan of the Victims of Crime Trust, made an emotional appeal to Prime Minister Tony Blair and Lord Chief Justice Woolf.
Among them were Paul Walmsley, the father of Lincolnshire 14-year-old Luke Walmsley, who was stabbed to death at his school earlier this year; and Paul Hegarty, brother of 29-year-old Bernard Hegarty, stabbed to death in Bethnal Green in August.
Mr Brennan said knife attacks now outnumbered shootings by three to one, and a child was murdered with a knife every two weeks.
There was still a perception that knife crime was less serious – a perception reinforced by lenient sentencing – and carrying a knife for self-defence or as a ‘fashion accessory’ was wrongly tolerated.
Carrying a knife on a high street should be treated the same as carrying a loaded gun, Mr Brennan said.
“You can be stabbed and murdered as quickly [with a knife] as with a gun. The pain and trauma is the same.
“Unless we are sending a message that knives destroy lives, then more and more lives are going to be lost each week . Something has to be done.”
The families have written to Mr Blair and Lord Woolf, calling for possession of a knife to be punishable by five years in prison, or a mandatory three-month sentence for juveniles.
Mr Brennan said he was “almost certain” that the prospect of such a heavy sentence would reduce knife crime by 75 per cent.
But if the families’ plea is ignored, on February 20 next year – European Victims Day – they would launch “the largest petition this country has ever seen” to garner support for their cause, he said.
Even the smallest towns would have people whose lives had been blighted by knife attacks, he predicted.
And he added: “We have got to frighten the public not into giving in to crime, but into doing something about crime.”
Mr Brennan also called for police to be given the power to stop and search people for knives randomly or in targeted fashion. Insisting that knife crime affected all communities, he said that in places with large ethnic minority populations, community leaders should be invited along on searches to witness the scale of the problem.
He described Home Secretary David Blunkett’s proposal to limit knife sales to over-18s as “far too little, far too late”.
