Knife crime summit taking place in Middlesbrough
A Knife Crime Action Plan is going to be developed
Last updated 1st May 2025
A knife crime summit is taking place in Teesside today to try and reduce the impact of incidents across the area.
It is being hosted by Cleveland's Police and Crime Commissioner, Matt Storey, at the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough.
The full-day event is for professionals working in each of Cleveland’s local authority areas, particularly those involved in community safety and criminal justice.
It will include a series of workshops and key speakers including:
- Chief Constable Mark Webster, Cleveland Police
- Karyn McCluskey, Chief Executive of Community Justice Scotland
- Pooja and Nikita Kanda, Justice for Ronan Kanda
The aim of the workshops is to inform the development of a Knife Crime Action Plan.
PCC Matt Storey said: "Knife crime is a huge priority for us in Cleveland. It's something that's a really big part of my police and crime plan and something that we really need to tackle locally. So what I wanted to do is get key partners together, organisations, charities, councils and experts so we can develop a stategy together so we've got a plan to tackle knife crime in Cleveland.
"What we're trying to do is get people to break out into sort of workshop smaller groups and a lot of the speakers have got different backgrounds so that people with an enforcement background, people who were victims, the Kanda family are coming who have been lobbying nationally for the change to legislation, which the current Government are doing in order to strengthen legislation around knife crime.
"We've got a wide array of viewpoints and my hope is that not just the kind of enforcement aspects but also a lot of preventative measures. We want to try and look at education and preventative measures to try and make sure that knife crime doesn't happen in the first pace.
"I'm never complacent about these things but I think the kind of people that we have in the room, the momentum that we have behind it, there's a lot of real interest and it's going to be a room chock-full of people who are really keen to try and find solutions. The best way to do that is share best practice, listen to each other, come up with those ideas and be creative.
"The ideas and the suggestions that come forward, they'll be collated into a report and into a stategy as quickly as we can and then we'll start to hopefully put a lot of that into practice. It's already a priority of mine anyway but this summit really just brings everyone together in that meaningful way, so that we can actually put some meat on the bones of what we want to try and do and take these things forward.
"It's a good thing to do to bring people together. We had a summit on anti-social behaviour recently with key partners and organisations locally to talk about how we tackle anti-social behaviour, because that's another major issue in Cleveland and that was really positive as well. We came up with a lot of really good ideas that day to see how we can come up with smart solutions to deal with some of these major issues and knife crime's no different."