Leeds Crime Stories: Reducing Knife Crime Part 3 of 4

The Mayor of West Yorkshire discusses the recently launched Violence Reduction Partnership.

Transcript

00:00 It's a really great day because we're at the Kallisangam in Bradford and we're

00:05 launching the violence reduction partnership. It was called the violence

00:09 reduction unit but this is more than just a name change, this is a whole new

00:14 approach of partnership working. Now the government said to partners such as

00:19 probation and health you have got a statutory obligation to tackle serious

00:24 violence so now working with them having this partnership approach I know we can

00:28 get more done to keep those young people safe in West Yorkshire. Over the last

00:32 year alone 3.3 million pounds has been spent on early interventions and

00:37 reaching out to 14,000 young people to stop them getting into crime in the

00:42 first place and then of course potentially becoming victims of crime

00:46 because for every single young person that is affected by crime what a loss to

00:51 our community and when I became mayor I made it my my absolute focus to make

00:56 West Yorkshire safer not just for women and girls but for all of our community

01:00 it's what we deserve and it's what we're worth. This is a team effort, it's a team

01:06 sport, I can't do it on my own. West Yorkshire police can't arrest their way

01:10 into a safer community so given we've seen so many cuts to our police this

01:16 sort of partnership work getting there early having those interventions before

01:21 people become victims and criminals that's the way to do it. So we work with

01:24 anyone from the year five to year six and then working with them into a safer

01:29 transition into year seven so those that are at risk or have been identified as

01:33 vulnerable we're also working throughout the whole of secondary school as well

01:36 mentoring doing a 15-week school program group work and assemblies bringing

01:40 awareness to county lines weapons awareness in secondary school in

01:45 primary school we're doing weapons awareness and gangs. I think the new

01:48 launch of the name changing its partnership I think is going to be more

01:51 beneficial for more helping more young people within within our region. I want

01:56 to reassure the public as well that the work that we've already been doing with

02:00 the violence reduction unit has also had impact so we have seen knife crime

02:05 falling we have seen the numbers of people admitted to hospital with a stab

02:12 wound or a sharp object wound actually fallen by 20% so we know that these

02:18 interventions really work so we're just going to see the deepening of those

02:21 statistics we wanted to go in the right direction we want it to reduce as much

02:26 as we can violent crime in our society. Anybody that's concerned about their

02:30 young people or violence and crime in their society please please do report it

02:36 to the police because only by getting that data can we and that clustering of

02:41 data can we then allocate resources. I know that the Chief Constable and

02:45 myself both want to see more police officers on the street more bobbies on

02:50 the beat but with the cuts to policing there's only a certain limited amount of

02:54 resourcing however if you report it and then it becomes a bigger issue then you

02:59 get the resources so please please do report that's 101 or online as well.