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Monday, March 24, 2008 10:32:59 AM
By Melissa Kite and Megan Levy
Last Updated: 3:30am GMT 26/02/2008
Police will be issued with portable metal detectors in a bid to tackle Britain's soaring rate of knife crime, the Government will announce tomorrow.
Hundreds of metal-detecting arches and airport-style search wands will be given to police to use outside pubs, clubs, and schools under proposals to combat violent crime be unveiled by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.
The arches are small enough to fit in the boot of a police car, and can be operated by a single police officer.
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The move follows a leap in knife offences among young people. Figures released this month show that convictions of children aged 10 to 17 for carrying bladed weapons almost tripled from 482 in 1997 to 1,265 in 2006.
Unveiling her plan, Miss Smith will promise a big reduction in violent crime over the next three years.
She will pledge that by 2011, the public will see a fall in gun crime and gang-related violence.
A £1 million poster and radio campaign will warn young people of the dangers of carrying knives.
However, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, seen by this newspaper, show that serious doubts have been raised about the strategy being launched tomorrow.
A consultation document drawn up by the Department for Children, Schools and Families reveals that officials questioned whether parents would agree to school searches, and whether there could be legal challenges.
One proposal raised in the documents is that schools could make entry conditional on parents agreeing to their children being searched.
In a section entitled "How to manage", officials ask: "Could we advise schools to seek parental consent to random searches as a condition of entry? If this were to apply from, say, the start of an autumn term to all in the school, would it need assent from parents with children already there, not just from new entrants?
"Schools would need to approach parents very carefully to minimise the risk of legal challenges to searches on grounds other than specific suspicion or a warrant. Might we want to argue that schools are like aeroplanes, in that violence by one person can affect many others in the same relatively confined space?"
The document also reveals that ministers are considering whether to conceal the extent of knife crime when the scanning programme begins.
Under the heading "risks", it says: "It could lead to calls for exclusion data to further analyse threats and assaults. We should resist by citing burden of data collection on schools, and because anything can be a weapon."
Shadow cabinet member Liam Fox told Sky News' Sunday Live: "How often have we had relaunches of policy on violent crime under this Government ... yet violent crime continues to increase year on year in this country.
"This, from a Government that has been putting that at the centre of its programme, is a pretty poor record."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/17/nknife117.xml
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