To Scotland Yard – with its rotating sign, its untold number of CCTV cameras
and its copper on the door who squints at you as if you’ve come to bomb the
place. Through two security checks, up to the penthouse floor and into a
corner office where the grey light of London is doing its best to penetrate
the bulletproof glass.
A door to a second office is thrown open. “Hullo lad, come in, come in!” cries
a northern fellow in a Debenhams suit. “Cup of tea?”
This is Britain’s new knife czar? It’s as though I’ve stepped from the set of
Spooks onto the set of Heartbeat. He seems so – how can I put this? – cosy.
“Actually, I prefer you use my full title: His Imperial Majesty the Knife
Czar,” says Alfred Hitchcock, laughing. Yes, that’s his real name – though
he prefers Alf.
Your parents must fancy themselves as comedians, I say. “It was my dad and my
grandad’s name,” he replies, good-naturedly. “I had two girls so they’ve
escaped.” You wouldn’t seriously have called your son Alfred, too? “Oh yes,
for certain.”
Anyway, enough of this foolery. Hitchcock, 49, has an important job to do.
Last week he was ennobled by Jacqui Smith, home secretary, as the man who
will save us from the knives. He’s been drafted in to head a committee at
the Association of Chief Police Officers that will, in the course of the
next 12 months, deliver a plan of good practice to all 43 police forces in
the country on how to disarm the hoodies, scooter bandits and skunkheads.
Last week Home Office statistics revealed that a crime involving a knife is
committed every four minutes. With six knife murders in one day earlier this
month, and an 18-year-old student stabbed to death 200 yards from his front
door late last week, we’ve clearly got a big problem. The most robust
research, which Hitchcock endorses, shows that 200,000 young people carry a
knife at some point in a year. Which adds up to a daunting battle for a man
who also has the day job of deputy assistant commissioner for the Met.
Why knives? After all, they’ve been in everyone’s kitchen drawers for
centuries. “Yes, they’ve always been the thing that’s available,” Hitchcock
says. “Around a third of homicides are committed with knives, and that
figure has been virtually unchanged for decades. What has changed is the age
of the people willing to carry a knife, and who might get stabbed with one.
It’s come down from 19-25 into this mid-teens group, and that’s the worrying
trend.
“They say they carry [knives] for three reasons: for crime; because they have
to do it to belong to a gang; or for protection. Mostly, it’s the protection
thing. Nearly 85% say that.”
Okay, what would you say to me if I were 14, on my way to school with a knife,
and told you: “I gotta watch me back.”
“You are more likely to get involved in an incident if you carry that knife.
Or you’ll end up having it used against you.” I shrug. Not a very sexy
argument. “Yeah, it’s a difficult message to get across,” he concedes. “I
could also say, if you get caught it will go on your record and it will be
harder to get a job. You want to go to America? Well, you can’t. They won’t
let you in the country with that on your record. You won’t get a visa.”
In his previous work on knife crime, Hitchcock has been tackling the
communication issue for the past 18 months, trying a lot of those methods so
loved by public servants: promo films that look like video games, an
anonymous text service so that you can grass your mates up in secret and
campaigns on urban-music radio stations such as Kiss and Choice.
“And viral marketing, of course,” he says. I throw him a sceptical glance.
“Well, they are not going to listen to a man of 49 preaching at them.” Maybe
you should try wearing your trackies to seem more approachable? “You must’ve
seen me coming to work in the mornings,” he cracks. “I think you should know
the knife czar comes into his office from the gym with his hoodie up.”
This is all nice window-dressing, but shouldn’t we be doing a little less
marketing and a little more sentencing? Hitchcock isn’t convinced. “When
people say, ‘Lock them all up’, I say, ‘What are we going to do? Put
200,0000 kids in detention centres?’ It’s not realistic.” That said,
Hitchcock is alarmed by what he views as lax sentencing guidelines. “I wrote
to the sentencing advisory panel a year ago, saying we need to toughen up,
that we need to get a grip. They said, ‘We’re going to keep our guidelines
the way they are, but thanks for the letter.’
“But there’s a new lord chief justice now,” he adds, “so I think, undoubtedly,
there will be a different approach – especially with the magistrates, who
see a lot of the lower-level incidents.”
He clearly wants us to feel safe on the streets, but you can tell that he has
limited patience for middle-class hysterics. For one thing, the victims of
knife crime are almost entirely other disadvantaged youths – and we have far
fewer victims than our international peers.
“We need to put this in context. Britain, as a nation, is remarkably safe
compared with nearly all major countries in the world. London would have to
triple its homicide rate to equal New York, yet New York is always held up
as this beacon of safety.”
There’s a bouquet of liberalism – dare I say, hoodie-hugging? – about this
law-and-order man. Born in Manchester in 1958, Hitchcock says he grew up in
a Coronation Street-type terrace. Was there much knife crime? “I didn’t feel
it was crime-ridden, but it probably wasn’t great.” His dad was an engineer
and his mother a housewife, but it was his elder brother who had the
greatest impact on his job choice. He was a young beat sergeant, but died in
his early thirties of a cerebral haemorrhage.
Hitchcock left school at 17 and joined Lancashire police a year later, keen to
pick up where his brother had left off. Less good cop than ridiculously nice
cop, he had planned to be a 30-year constable, but instead rose through the
force.
After he was unveiled as the knife czar, a member of the public e-mailed to
say that he knew nothing about real crime-fighting because he had so many
degrees. The accusation stung. While Hitchcock does indeed have a lot of
degrees (a bachelor’s, two masters’ and a postgraduate diploma) it took him
15 years of studying part-time between shifts to get them.
His studies in criminology and psychology must come in handy now that he has
to negotiate the snake pit of Whitehall. “What the media did in 24 hours
from the home secretary’s announcement [of my appointment] was to build me
into the saviour,” he reflects. That’s just what Smith wanted, I say. “Well
. . . I’m going to play my part, but that ain’t gonna solve this problem.”
Hitchcock’s job now is to come up with proposals for what the police can do.
However, as he sees it, all they can do is pick up the pieces. He points to
a huge whiteboard behind him. In a tiny corner of it, there is a list of
what positive impacts the police can have – visible presence, education,
consistent response – while the rest of the board is full of notes on
government and judicial responsibility.
Not that he’s scared of getting involved across the board. I’m not at all sure
how this falls in his remit, but he has a rather radical plan to halt youth
crime: national service. Before the rightwingers among you get too excited,
I should point out Hitchcock’s version is rather modern.
“It’s the Neets [not in education, employment or training] you have to worry
about with knives, so I went to look at what other countries, like Sweden or
Germany, do with them,” he explains. “Of course, they have military national
service, but I’m not very keen on that. These young people need life skills
and are the last people we should be teaching how to use a gun.” He laughs
at the thought. “We’ve got enough problems without that.
“But if you live in Germany and are a conscientious objector, you still go
into conscription, but it would be public service. You get structure,
discipline, a set of objectives, teamwork – all things that will lead to future
employment. “[Conscripts] would get paid, get supported, get educated . . .”
Yes, but how are you going to fund this? “Well, put it this way. All these
people who keep telling me we should arrest 200,000 kids and put them in
detention centres – instead of that, let’s spend the money to put them in
these kinds of programmes.” But you said yourself that was unrealistic.
“Change isn’t cheap or easy,” he counters. “We spend billions going to war.
Why can’t we spend billions supporting our young people?”
I start to get a feeling I haven’t had since I interviewed Nick Clegg when he
was suiting up to take the Liberal Democrat leadership, and – of course –
denying it all the way. I think Hitchcock wants to be head of the Met. Or
maybe an MP? “I don’t know . . . I’ve never thought about it,” he says coyly.
“What I want to do is help to start shaping the authorities’ view of what can
be done. To broaden the debate from policing and enforcement to what we can
do to improve the lot for young people, to make young people’s teen life
safer and with more opportunity.”
In a year, he says, he’ll have made a positive impact with the good practice
plan; in three, he hopes to lower the percentage of young people carrying
knives and the terrifying number of crimes that result. And then? “Well, I
was fat as a younger teen-ager, but now go to the gym four times a week and
weigh myself obsessively . . . maybe I should be obesity czar?” He laughs,
all Heartbeat charm again.
Don’t be fooled. If I were the Met chief, Sir Ian Blair, I’d watch my back.
Maybe Smith should, too.
