GUN CRIME 2

Gun crime in England and Wales rose to record levels in the past year, with nearly 200 incidents every week. There were 10,250 incidents, including 80 murders, involving firearms in the year to April, 276 (about 3%) more than the previous year and double the number recorded five years ago. Overall crime has dropped in the past few months, Home Office statistics show, but there is a continuing rise in the number of violent offences recorded by the police.

Public alarm over gun crime has been raised in recent months by a spate of high-profile murders, including a seven-year-old girl shot in the back in London and a shopkeeper killed during a robbery in Nottingham. Police and ministers stress, however, that Britain is still one of the safest places in the world, with one of the lowest levels of gun crime. There were 0.15 gun deaths in England and Wales per 100,000 population in the past year, compared with 3.6 per 100,000 in the US.

Two-thirds of the offences in England and Wales involved the firearm being used as a threat, but in about 17% the weapon was fired causing injury. About two out of three firearms offences took place in three police force areas: the Metropolitan; Greater Manchester and West Midlands. Offences recorded by police in England and Wales rose by 9%, or 27,800, in the three months from April to June, but the British Crime Survey, which was also published yesterday and is considered to be a more accurate, indicated that violent crime has fallen by 5% in the same period.

Calls by a pioneering group of MPs to put more armed police officers in troublespots throughout Britain should not apply to Derby, according to one of the city's MPs. Bob Laxton, MP for Derby North, said the city suffered "nowhere near" as serious a gun crime problem as Nottingham and that the disturbing report by the influential All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gun Crime should not apply to the Derby area. In a new report, the group, which is headed by London-based MP Diane Abbott, has recommended that the number of Authorised Firearms Officers (AFOs) should be increased to enable "more targeted operations".

But according to figures released by the group yesterday, there were ONLY 58 firearms incidents in Derbyshire from 2001 to 2002 compared with 71 in Leicestershire and 204 in Nottinghamshire over the same period. Mr Laxton said, "I think if armed police are directed into areas where gun crime is prevalent then fine, but Derby is not one of those. I would not want to see this as a move towards the situation where we have a completely armed police force wearing weapons as they do in America."

<<< Prev