Stop telling us not to worry about knife crime

In the mayoral elections, Ken Livingstone ran as a crime-cutting leader. "Londoners wanted it and I have delivered it," he declared, and was promptly thrown out.

Just after Boris Johnson took over, Sir David Normington, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, told the Commons Public Affairs Committee that violent crime was just a small proportion of overall crime, and only seven per cent of violent criminals used knives. MPs muttered their support and blamed the press for inciting a moral panic. Yet if Sir David had to stand for election, he wouldn't fare any better than Livingstone.

It is not as if the politicians and civil servants are lying. All sides twist the statistics, but no serious person doubts that crime has been falling since the early Nineties. The trouble is that the last people voters want to appear pleased about the fall are those in charge of the criminal justice system.

Put it like this, if you were in a hospital ward you wouldn't be reassured if an NHS manager told you to be grateful that deaths from MRSA were well down on last year. You wouldn't congratulate him and dismiss the nervous patient in the next bed as being in the grip of an irrational "moral panic".

Above all, you would hope he would regard one MRSA death as one too many and see the existence of the infection on his wards as an insult to his professionalism.

Whenever I hear senior officers from the Met shake their heads at the public unwillingness to recognise that crime is going down I always think: "Well, journalists can go on about irrational fears as much as we want, but you're a copper. You ought to have an irrational aversion to serious criminals. People want you to be thoroughly unreasonable about them."

In any case, Londoners' fears may not be as irrational as the authorities imagine. Buried in the testimony to the Commons was the news that knife crime has doubled since the Millennium.

Meanwhile, friends who work in A&E departments say that coping with random stabbings is becoming the worst part of their job. Young men attack other young men for next to no reason. "People haven't begun to get their heads around the scale of the problem," an A&E administrator told me.

In other words, the authorities should be careful of claiming there is an irrational fear of crime at large. Londoners may not be needlessly terrifying themselves. They may be responding rationally to the routine carrying of knives by young men and be panicking most about the failure of the authorities to deal with them.