Cleveland Police ambition to have lowest levels of knife crime in future
A Knife Crime Summit took place earlier this week
Last updated 1st May 2025
We are hearing there is still work to be done IF Teesside were to have one of the lowest rates of knife crime in the country in the future.
Cleveland Police currently has the third highest levels nationally and a summit took place earlier this week to come up with an action plan to tackle the issue.
Richard Baker, Assistant Chief Constable of Cleveland Police, said: "We quite often talk about raising awareness and education but I think over the course of couple of years, the awareness around knife crime has been really loud. It's gone up and up. We've done a huge amount of work nationally and locally around awareness.
"We do a huge amount of work with education to raise awareness and educate young people especially about the dangers of carrying knives. We work with an early intervention and then robust enforcement.
"This is definitely not about taking a soft approach to knife crime. If you carry a knife, if you use a knife or threaten to use a knife, we will take really robust action against you and we will enforce an arrest. Post-arrest, it's really critical that we have the right internvention for those individuals to stop them reoffending again in the future.
"It's absolutely clear that there's a huge amount of good work going on across Teesside by a number of third sector agencies and by some of our key partners, so it's not as if nothing's happening because it is.
"It's about making sure that we work in partnership, that we join up what's happening, that we're more cohesive and we tackle this as a genuine holistic partnership, rather than doing things in individual agencies. It's about action, collaboration and making a difference in the long-term in Teesside.
"The ambition is to turn the narrative around. I want to be standing in front of you or whoever in the future, saying we have one of the lowest levels of knife crime in the country. We have seen strides already in this, so year to date we've seen a 10 percent reduction in youth-related knife crime which is really positive. It shows that some of the work that's going on is working but there's still more to do."