‘If you give police more powers, they’ll use them’: The curious case of Knife Crime Prevention Orders

This paper takes as its entry point the policing of serious violence – and especially knife crime – in England and Wales. In recent years, the former Conservative government sought to provide police with greater ordnance in the ‘fight’ against serious violence and knife crime, introducing new offences, police powers, and ‘hybrid’ or ‘behavioural control’ orders. The newly elected Labour government’s pledge to ‘take back our streets’ and ‘halve serious violence’ suggests it may well continue in a similar vein.

Campaign groups, organisers, activists, and scholars alike have expressed wariness about the expansions of police power produced by such legal changes, and about the likelihood of new offences, powers, and orders being exercised disproportionately against racially and economically marginalised people. Such concerns have often been expressed in the refrain: ‘if you give police more powers, they’ll use them’. However, while provocative, and containing a kernel of common-sense wisdom, this claim is not necessarily borne out by research evidence or official data. Indeed, the police’s recent pilot of Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) is a case in point. In short, the police’s practices in this pilot have been difficult to reconcile with predictions made by some commentators (including the author of this paper) about the frequency and nature of interventions the orders would license against members of the public.

Adopting KCPOs as a case study, this paper suggests that research and campaign work critiquing and challenging expansions of police power will be better served by more nuanced appreciation of when, why, and how legal changes affect police practice