Nottinghamshire Police get £1m cash injection to tackle knife crime

The Home Office confirmed that Nottinghamshire Police will receive an additional £1,003,730 worth of funding in 2020-21 to give front-line officers more resources to tackle the area’s knife crime.

The £1m boost will pay for prevention and enforcement in violent crime and knife crime hotspots, intelligence development to target violent groups and individuals and investigations.

This additional money comes after Nottinghamshire’s multi-agency Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) was launched last year and it secured £880,000 to tackle dangerous crime.

The VRU has been given an additional £880,000 to continue its work for the next 12 months while the force received a £1.54m sum from the government to reduce violence last year.

There has been a 13.5 per cent reduction in knife crime in Nottinghamshire, before the COVID-19 lockdown, over the last year, according to Nottinghamshire Police.

Violent crimes recorded by the force fell from 882 to 763 between April 2019 and March 2020 compared to the same period for the previous year.

Police maintain that reintroducing schools and early intervention officers, who work with children across the country, alongside the VRU have helped lower the number of offences.

The VRU has combined police and partner organisations to tackle violent crime to preventing young people becoming involved in violent behaviour.

Superintendent Ted Antill, Nottinghamshire Police’s lead for knife crime, integrated offender management and youth justice, said: “This extra funding is a welcome boost to our ongoing work to tackle and further reduce knife crime through a combination of education and enforcement.

"The force has invested heavily in a programme of recruitment of officers to the front line over the last year and this is now paying off as our crime reduction rates have shown.

“We have a very robust approach to dealing with knife crime offenders, including youth offenders, to ensure that no opportunity is missed to divert them away from this kind of offending.

“The reduction we’ve seen in violent knife crime offences is also testament to the continued support from our communities and community groups, who play a vital role in helping us to tackle the issue.”