Student blog post: London knife crime rises to four-year high

Feed URL: https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/criticalthinking/2017/04/20/student-blog-post-london-knife-crime-rises-to-four-year-high/feed/?withoutcomments=1

The story that I will be looking at was published by the BBC News, and the headline was; “London knife crime rises to four-year high” and can be found on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-37412508. This article was published on 21^st September 2016 and was looking at the rise in knife crimes over the past 4 years, June 2012- August 2016. The article claimed that ‘Knife crime in the city has risen to a four-year high’, however when looking at numbers the truth is being highly exaggerated. It stated that in ‘June 2012 there were 1719 recorded stabbings of people aged under 25’ however, when compared to the number of stabbings that were recorded in 2016, there were only ‘1749 in August 2016, the report found.’ Although the headline is true in regards to the increase, in actuality, the number of knife crime only rose to 30 stabbings over the 4 year period, which is only 1.75% increase. This headline is dramatic in terms of stating that knife crime is at an all-time high because it pushes a narrative that it is a massive problem, whereas it is not as a big of a problem as it causes people to believe because the increase is so small. The article also fails to state how they carried out their research, whether it being they got these numbers from police stations directly or from hospitals that dealt with injuries involving knives.