News / knife crime
Mayor asks Bristol Uni to use ‘intellectual firepower’ on knife crime
Marvin Rees said he has asked academics from the University of Bristol to use their “intellectual firepower” and help tackle knife crime.
He added that Bristol City Council takes a public health approach to the growing issue, with a number of initiatives that can be hard to show results for.
The mayor of Bristol also said people running gyms and youth charities take knives off of some young people, which adds to the data collected by the council.
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He faced questions about what the council was doing on knife crime by Green councillor Mohamed Makawi during a meeting of the member forum on Tuesday.
Rees said: “People feed in that knives have been taken off of people. If you look at Mario [Saeed] from Trojan Free Fighters off the bottom of the M32, Mario will send me notes when knives have been taken off young people, same with Des [Brown] at Growing Futures and Empire Fighting Chance. So each of those different organisations will be monitoring it.
“We have a quality of life survey within the city as well for that broader question of how safe do people feel. We’re not just working to prevent knife crime, we’re working to build communities.
“There is a conundrum at the heart of public health approaches as well. It’s very difficult to prove that something didn’t happen because you did something, to prove that negative.
“One of the things we asked the University of Bristol to do is with their policy team and their intellectual firepower, can they put that at the disposal of the city.
“Being more rigorous and insightful and using data better was at the heart of a meeting we had last Friday, with the universities, police, and the voluntary sector all together in City Hall.”
Results from the latest quality of life survey, conducted by the council, suggest 21 per cent of Bristolians feel that fear of crime affects their day-to-day lives. This has risen from 17 per cent in 2022, and 16 per cent in 2021, showing that fear of crime appears to be a growing issue.
The same percentage of people also feel the police and public services successfully tackle crime and anti-social behaviour locally, down from 22 per cent in 2022 and 28 per cent in 2021. Both results were much worse among survey respondents living in the poorest parts of Bristol.
Alex Seabrook is a local democracy reporter for Bristol
Main photo: University of Bristol
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