Britain has recently witnessed two high-profile stabbing deaths reigniting a debate over whether a nationwide decline in the number of police officers is behind an alarming increase in human butchering.
The clash has divided the Conservative cabinet, with the home secretary, Sajid Javid, demanding millions of pounds in emergency funding for the police, and Prime Minister Theresa May rejecting a linkage between knife crimes and cutbacks in the number of officers.
The latest public furor was prompted by the killings of two teenagers: Jodie Chesney, 17, who is white, and was stabbed by a stranger in an east London park on Friday night; and Yousef Ghaleb Makki, also 17, a private school student who was stabbed near Manchester the next day.
But there is no doubt that knife crime is a growing problem, with such offenses rising for the fourth straight year, to just under 43,000 offenses in the year ending Sept. 30, 2018, the most since the government started recording comparable data in 2011. Still, rates of violent crime in Britain remain low by American standards, and since the mid-1990s Britain has registered a marked decline in such crime.
The police now spend hours answering calls involving mentally ill people and sitting with them in hospitals, work that had been done by agencies that have suffered their own funding cuts or been eliminated entirely.