MARK EASTON – CRIME WARRIOR

Continuing my occasional series on Mark Easton, I happened to catch him being interviewed on Eddie Mair’s PM programme on the topic of knife crime. In essence, Easton was taking the line that new statistics are far from compelling and that “knife crime” itself could include attacks with a broken bottle by drunk young men, bottom line being that it will take generations for any real trend to become discernible. On his blog, he is much more scathing of the stats than he was on-air but again he parrots the notion that change is long-term, indeed transgenerational. In fact, if you read his last sentence on his blog, he endorses this view that our police cannot hope to deal with knife crime in months or years but rather decades. That’s where the line is crossed. There are plenty of us who believe that knife crime COULD be dealt with much more vigorously if there was the will but Easton holds the contrary view. Why is there no one to voice an alternative to him?