I suspect it will come to no surprise to most sensible people – only to those who actually believe anything they read in the Daily Mail – but “knife crime”, the current source of tabloid panic in Britain, is no worse than it was ten years ago. Polly Tonybee writes in the Guardian:

In 1995 there were 243 murders with sharp instruments; 10 years later there were slightly fewer, at 236 last year. Over the decade the average weekly number of knife murders has been four and a half – and recently, during this panic, there have been no more than four knife murders a week.

And she’s obtained some interesting figures on the effects of a variety of anti-crime measures:

Unpublished Home Office research assessing the cost-effectiveness of ways to reduce crime has produced astonishing results. Estimating crimes reduced per £1,000 spent, they find (depressingly) that current drug treatment cuts only 1.3 crimes. (There are very few residential drug-treatment places, when addicts need Priory-type intensive help.) Hot-spot policing cuts 1.9 crimes. Reoffending-reduction schemes in prison cut 2.3 crimes. But parenting programmes cut 11 crimes. And Youth Inclusion and Support Panels cut 15 crimes per £1,000 spent. In these a panel of all the local services takes eight- to 13-year-olds at highest risk and gives them intensive support before it’s too late – treating 36,000 of the most precarious children, with these good results.

What they risk to get here …

The boat’s phantom crew was made up of the desiccated corpses of 11 young men, huddled in two separate piles in the small cabin. Dressed in shorts and colourful jerseys, they had been partially petrified by the salt water, sun and sea breezes of the Atlantic Ocean. …
The story of the 11 dead and some 40 other would-be immigrants from Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Gambia starts on Christmas Day last year at Praia, a port in the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde. There, for €1,300 (£890) each, they were promised a trip to the Canary Islands by a mysterious Spaniard.

The other 40 were the “lucky” ones – they seem to have been swept to their death off the boat in Atlantic storms. They died quicker. The death of these men is thought to have taken about a month.

This route, from the west African coast to Cape Verde, opened up late last year. By March Spanish authorities claimed more than 1,000 had drowned.
That has not stopped the flow. Three vessels carrying 188 African migrants reached Tenerife yesterday. The number of immigrants to have reached the Canaries this year is close to 7,000.

Doesn’t such desperation, such courage, such ambition, deserve respect?