Damilola Taylor`s father urges commissioner to respond to knife deaths culture in capital

The father of murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor has made a personal plea to Britain’s most senior officer to raise the intensity of stop and searches to combat heartless youngsters treating knife crime as an everyday “killing game”. Richard Taylor said the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) needs to expand the operational tactic but called on Commissioner Cressida Dick to adopt “more humane” ways of adopting the strategy. He spoke out after a week in which six men were killed in knife attacks in London and several others seriously injured. Mr Taylor, whose ten-year-old son was stabbed to death in Peckham in 2000, said: “It’s become so uncontrollable, beyond my imagination. “I cannot imagine why young people have now taken it to that level, treating it as a game to kill each other. “I don’t think those kids have a heart, if you can take a knife to go and pierce it through another person. They know what they are doing, they really want to kill.” Eight teenagers have been murdered in London so far this year, five of them in knife attacks while the MPS recorded a 24 per cent spike in knife crime in 2016. Mr Taylor, who leads the charity Damilola Taylor Trust, said: “Stop and search has to be increased. They should review the method by which they carry it out at the moment and change the strategy. “You don’t need to use that force, to pin someone down – you have to find a more humane way of doing it. You have to target the people carrying knives, you have to watch them, study their family background.” The MPS has scaled back the number of stop and searches carried out in London in recent years. In 2014 Theresa May, then Home Secretary, said stop and search should be more targeted saying it was undermining relations between police and ethnic minority communities. Research showed black people were seven times more likely to be stopped by police than white people. A year later former MPS Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe ordered an increase in the tactic, though he made clear there would be a more “targeted, intelligence-led” approach. The new MPS commissioner has pledged to make knife crime deterrence her priority. New figures have revealed an increase in the number of young people carrying knives, many of them in a mistaken view it gives them protection. In January, Mr Taylor said that the streets of London had become “more dangerous” for young people in the 17 years since his son’s death. Damilola bled to death in a stairwell on a Peckham estate after being stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle on his way home from the local library in 2000. Mr Taylor said police forces and Government had been “paying lip service” to combating knife crime since his son’s death, and that Ms Dick “has a lot of work to do”. He was commenting as his charity launched a new scheme to create opportunities for disadvantaged young people in the banking and financial sector.