Policing minister Chris Philp said he would like to see officers ramp up their use of stop and search to tackle knife crime. The government has also announced that around £4 million will be allocated to technology to tackle knife crime, including mobile scanning devices and live facial recognition technology. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 Today we're announcing a significant new investment in technology to help us fight knife crime.
00:05 The first area is an investment in developing technology to enable the police to scan people
00:10 who are walking down the street at a distance of maybe five or ten or twenty feet. When that's
00:15 ready for deployment, which I'm hoping will happen later this year, it will really help us
00:19 take many, many more knives off the street by giving police that ability to scan passers-by.
00:27 The second area we're investing in is live facial recognition. That's where people who are wanted
00:32 for serious criminal offences are on a watch list and if they happen to walk past a camera
00:37 that the police have set up, they're identified and arrested. I have raised with the Mayor of
00:41 London, Labour's Sadiq Khan, he needs to do more with the resources he's got to fight knife crime
00:47 in London, including using more traditional physical stop and search because that does
00:52 take knives off the streets and I'm worried that in London stop and search has gone down in the
00:58 last two years by contrast to the rest of the country. So I would like Sadiq Khan to make sure
01:03 the Met use those powers, of course lawfully and respectfully, but more confidently, more widely,
01:08 to take knives off our streets. Knives that could otherwise be used to injure or even kill someone.