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SCMP Reporter

London
The CCTV camera shows four black youths chatting on a bench at a street corner. They move on, laughing and joking, and nothing happens for 10 seconds until a white youth suddenly appears, thrown to the ground in mid-screen from around the corner.
The fight moves into view with other white youths attacking the teenager, who draws a knife in self-defence, only to drop it. The scene ends with the boy tumbling to the ground, stabbed with his own knife, his girlfriend hunched over him; his assailants scattering.
It's a chilling reminder of how easily a young person can die, part of the British government's #3 million (HK$46 million) campaign to halt knife crime,  especially in the capital.
The message on the campaign's website (itdoesnthavetohappen. co.uk)  is clear: if you carry a knife, you are more likely to get stabbed.
Knife fear has gripped London. Last week Robert Knox,  18, an actor who appears in the next Harry Potter film, died from knife wounds after a fracas outside a club in Sidcup, in the southeast of the city. Two weeks earlier, Jimmy Mizen,  16, from the same local rugby club, died in an attack in a shop.
Sidcup is not an urban ghetto. It is a largely genteel, reasonably affluent white suburb. But the  killings are indicative of what's happening: male youths are carrying knives, and using them, with alarming frequency. Attacks are more random and increasingly fatal.
As The Economist pointed out, the number of murder victims each year in the capital  aged between 11 and 19 hovered in the mid-teens. Last year it rose to 27 in what the Metropolitan Police called 'an unprecedented year of violence involving teenagers  - the worst in memory'. This year, by Sunday,  the figure stood at 15. Last weekend  three young men died.
Some claim the plague of stabbings equals the worst gun crime in the most violent US cities.
At the Royal London Hospital  in Whitechapel, East London, a trauma surgeon told the Evening Standard  newspaper that a third of patients were knife or gun victims, describing wards as a 'war zone'. A poll of wards across London showed 424 stabbings treated this year, half of them serious.
Karim Brohi,  a  consultant in trauma, vascular and critical-care surgery, said that 23 per cent of the Royal's workload last year involved penetrative wounds. This year it climbed to 30 per cent, worse than hospitals in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, he told the Standard.
The panic in part led to Boris Johnson's  election as mayor, the  Conservative candidate promising to curb the violence. Mr Johnson installed metal detector arches at 10 locations, including tube stations, and appointed Ray Lewis,  a former prison governor, as deputy mayor for young people.
The  Standard thinks it has the answers, devoting eight pages to a charter against knife crime. It calls for more stop-and-search operations, something which sits uneasily with ethnic minorities, though not their parents, who are stopped more frequently by the usually white officers.
Police, though hamstrung by the extra paperwork such stop-and-searches warrant, applied for new powers in 10 inner  boroughs.
Last month they cracked down, carrying out 4,277 stops and searches, seizing 200 weapons and arresting 210 people. As the new deputy mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse,  said: 'Every one of these 200 weapons represents a tragedy averted.'
The Standard wants more scanners and patrols on school routes. Such plans demand more bobbies (slang for London constables) on the beat, something ruled out for decades on grounds of efficiency.
It  also wants everyone found with a knife to be prosecuted; no more cautions, no more second chances, it declares. But British jails  are at the bursting point, and campaigners say those who go inside as miscreants come out as criminals.
Perhaps its plan for perpetrators to meet victims, and the doctors who treat them, face to face, may work.
It would cost little but time and patience, two resources that are fast running out.
Tomorrow: Sydney



Hospital wards compared to war zones  as city is up to the hilt in teen knife crimes