A Met Police chief is “flabbergasted” as dangerous knife and gun-wielding suspects have been released back onto Britain’s streets.
Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said far fewer defendants accused of knife are remanded into custody, leading to offenders being repeatedly charged and bailed over the same offences.
Sir Mark’s warning comes as Andy Burnham frees thousands of criminals in an attempt to solve an overcrowding crisis.
But attempts to open up prison spaces has rendered the UK’s toughening laws on knife crime and firearm legislation ineffective.
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The Met Police chief said: “An overloaded justice system is not executing on the back of those laws in the same way, as the government has to make difficult choices based on prison capacity and other areas, and we’re now seeing the consequences of that.
“We are seeing rapidly reducing imprisonment for people sentenced for knife crime offenses, knife crime possession, even repeat knife carriers, so that’s going down.”
Sir Mark shockingly revealed the failure to remand knife-carrying suspects was not a “theoretical risk” and had resulted in “stabbings” and “one or two homicides”.
Last week’s Notting Hill Carnival resulted in the arrests of a record 636 people – although the Met Police praised it as “positive and celebratory“.
One of those arrests was of a man carrying an 18-inch long knife described as “something that looks like a small sword”.
It was the suspect’s fourth knife offence of the year, but despite the repeat charge he has been placed on bail, Sir Mark told the London Policing Board.
A pattern of people being “charged again and again and again” before “being bailed again and again and again” had been seen in gun offences, he added.
“I’m flabbergasted by this,” he said. “Two or three, four years ago, before the criminal justice [system] was struggling, that just would not have happened.”
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Citing research by the London police force’s Trident team which fights gun crimes, he said 34 people charged with firearms offences were on bail pending trial.
In nine of those cases, the accused had fired shots in confrontation, he said.
The Met Police chief also warned the stresses placed on the criminal justice system could prevent the Met Police from continuing to reduce crime rates in the capital.
“This overloaded justice system is getting weaker and weaker in the support of what we’re doing for what I would call ‘offender control’,” he said.
“This isn’t a criticism of individual agencies or individual people. This is a worry about a system that is massively stretched in carrying all this load.”
A Government spokesman said: “Since coming into office, knife crime has fallen by 11 per cent and knife homicides by 26 per cent.
“We have banned more dangerous weapons such as ninja swords, zombie-style knives and machetes and we have taken more than 63,000 knives off our streets.
“Bail decisions are a matter for the independent judiciary.”
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