According to the latest recorded crime figures in England and Wales, there has been a steep rise in violence. Knife offences are up by 21 per cent in the year to September 2017; in London alone the increase is 30.2 per cent — that’s 13,715 incidents. How should police deal with this disturbing trend? One view is that they need to target likely offenders, especially through an increase in the use of stop and search. However, this has been resisted by human-rights and anti-racism campaigners, who regard the use of such powers as heavy-handed and intrusive. Tottenham MP David Lammy has been particularly vocal, calling stop and search ‘inherently unfair’ because it is used disproportionately to target BME people. These campaigners claim there is a better way and that we have much to learn from Scotland, where violent crime has been falling for more than a decade.