Knife crime & stop and search

• Bring "widespread stop and search back" — the paper says explicitly this should happen despite "accusations of racism".
• "Strict sentences for anyone caught carrying a knife", alongside "no-nonsense policing that does what it needs to do".
• In a written question answered in June 2025, Mr Lowe asked the government to introduce a minimum five-year mandatory sentence for adults convicted of carrying a knife. The minister's answer noted that minimum sentences are rare in England and Wales and that sentencing is a matter for the independent courts.
• He has also asked how many foreign-born prisoners are serving sentences for knife crime, and what progress the government has made on knife crime overall.

• 528,582 stop and searches were carried out in the year ending March 2025, down 1.4% on the year before.
• 14.9% led to an arrest; two-thirds ended in no further action.
• Weapons were found in 3.0% of searches. Drugs, not weapons, were the object of about 61% of searches.
• Suspicionless section 60 searches were rare — 5,572, about 1% of the total.
• Black people were searched at 3.8 times the rate of white people — the disparity at the centre of the "accusations of racism" the party's paper dismisses.

The Home Office's 2016 evaluation of Operation BLUNT 2 — in which weapons searches in ten London boroughs rose from 34,154 to 123,335 in a year — found "no discernible crime-reducing effects" from the surge at borough level.

That does not mean stop and search never works; the authors caution that localised effects could be masked. But it is the strongest available test of the specific claim that volume drives crime down.

"Simply increasing stop and search without using an intelligence-led approach is unlikely to reduce crime and needs to be balanced against the cost to police resources and its potentially detrimental effect on police legitimacy."

The College's position is that targeted, intelligence-led searching can be effective; indiscriminate volume searching tends not to be, and carries costs in public trust.

Vickrum Singh Digwa was convicted of murdering the 18-year-old student and sentenced on 1 June 2026 to life with a 21-year minimum; the sentencing judge said he was sure Nowak "had said nothing racist", rejecting the claim made in the call that brought police to the scene. Two officers are under gross misconduct investigation over the handling of the dying teenager, and the police watchdog's investigation continues.

The case, Mr Lowe's response to it, and the death-penalty demand it revived are covered in detail on the sentencing and the death penalty page.

• Check whether the knife-crime trend the proposals respond to appears in the ONS series — the deadliest measures were falling as of the latest full year.
• Compare the "widespread stop and search" pledge with the BLUNT 2 evaluation and College of Policing guidance.
• Test "strict sentences" against the existing two-strikes minimum and the actual custody rates above.
• Watch the next ONS release: a single year's fall is not yet a trend.