Tough on knife crime, tough on the causes of knife crime?

“We’re going to lock down Dale End”, the police in Birmingham told us.

In case you don’t know, Dale End is one of the busiest shopping streets in the city, the idea of “locking it down” late afternoon as everyone was starting to head home seemed a bit far-fetched. And it was.

In reality no more than a dozen officers wandered amongst the crowds and stopped and searched anyone they wanted to. Some people stopped and watched but most carried on what they were doing.

Currently the officers here have special temporary powers, known as section 60, that allow them free reign to temporarily detain and search someone without the reasonable grounds that are normally required.

It’s a tactic that casts a very wide net – but over three-quarters of searches in the West Midlands aren’t finding anything. Some days it’s higher.

That means a quarter are leading to further action of some sort but the ‘in your face’ policing is also breeding even more resentment among the young people who find themselves patted down and questioned over and over again.

Twenty-three-year-old Leonard Menka grew up in Peckham, south London, and is now studying for his Masters in Birmingham.

He was regularly stopped and searched as a teenager, once on his own doorstep. He stopped counting how many times he’s been stopped long ago. He has never committed a crime.

He watched the police tackling youths in Dale End and told us that the response, in his view, is just a small chapter in a much longer story.

He sees the tragic murder of 17-year-old Jodie Chesney in east London on Friday as the catalyst for action in Westminster.

He said: “Now that people of different races have been targeted now it is a ‘bigger’ problem and the home secretary has to step in.

“I wonder why there was no energy like this before?”

West Midlands Police can’t sustain this intense burst of stopping and searching, nor would they want to.

It is a temporary blitz that is only effective for so long.

But the root causes of knife crime, which are infinitely harder to work out and go far beyond the police, are unlikely to be solved.

We met a rapper who calls himself R Rose making a drill music video in Eastside Park and later again in Dale End.

His group quite enjoyed being able to feature the police searches in the background of their shots.

He described to me how a close friend was knifed recently and he had to hold him while they waited for help.

Predictably he rejects the idea that drill music is fuelling youth violence and instead told us knife carrying teenagers just move on when the police go heavy-handed for a few days.

He told us the effect is only ever temporary: “Only for a little while is this going to go on” he said. “And then it’s going to stop and then it starts all over again.”

That is the nub of the problem. On Dale End in Birmingham and on streets like it all over the country.

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