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POUNDLAND has banned the sale of kitchen knives across the UK in response to the crime wave hitting the country.
The retailer stopped selling the weapons in London last week and is set to extend the ban to all 850 of its UK and Ireland stores by the end of the year.
The move follows 35 people being fatally stabbed in London since the beginning of the year as violence in the capital spikes.
Austin Cook Poundland's retail director said: "We have committed to take knives out of all our stores, starting with London, which we have done with immediate effect a couple of weeks ago, and we will take them out of the rest of the country by October.
"Since I've come into my role we have had a lot of feedback from our store colleagues that we are retailing knives that can have the wrong ultimate purpose for them.
"We want to take them off our shelves and take them out of the hands of the wrong customers and, whilst there is a sales implication for us, it's much more important to us to protect both our colleagues and our customers from any risk.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6069878/poundland-stop-selling-knives-london-stabbings/
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Town-centre pound store prosecuted for knife sale
Management and training procedures at the town-centre branch of a national retail chain were questioned when the company was prosecuted for the sale of a knife to under-age customers.
Poundworld Retail Ltd appeared at Croydon Magistrates' Court on 16 May and was fined £4,000 and ordered to pay costs after being found guilty of selling a knife to a person under the age of 18. The total penalty, including victim surcharge, amounted to £8,520.
The court heard that, as part of a test-purchasing exercise conducted by the council's trading standards department, two 14-year-old volunteers went to the store's North End branch on 28 May 2015 and, after selecting a kitchen knife from a display, took it for payment to one of the tills.
The sales assistant, on only his second day at work in the store, failed to challenge the youngsters and the sale was completed.
http://news.croydon.gov.uk/town-centre-pound-store-prosecuted-for-knife-sale/
'You cannot be soft on this': Boris Johnson calls for stop and search increase to combat London knife crime surge
Boris Johnson has called for an increased use of stop and search powers to combat knife crime following a spate of fatal stabbings in London.
The Foreign Secretary warned against "going soft" as he insisted that Scotland Yard and Sadiq Khan "come down like a ton of bricks" on gang leaders.
His comments came after teenager Sami Sidhom, 18, was knifed to death on Monday night in the capital's third killing in two days.
Mr Johnson said when he was Mayor of London he adopted a dual approach that boosted stop and search incidents while mentoring young people to prevent them getting sucked into gang violence.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, he told current London mayor Sadiq Khan: "You cannot be soft on this."
London murder rate overtakes New York as knife crime rises
LONDON (Reuters) - London police investigated more murders than their New York counterparts did over the last two months, statistics show, as the British capital's mayor vowed to fight a "violent scourge" on the streets.
There were 15 murders in London in February against 14 in New York, according to London's Metropolitan Police Service and the New York Police Department. For March, 22 murders were investigated in London, with 21 reports in New York.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday May 01 2019, @02:44PM (1 child)
The technical term is "regression to the mean". It applies to lots of things, e.g. the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, speed cameras reducing crashes in hot spots, and much more.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday May 01 2019, @05:35PM
You make a very good point, but that wasn't quite what I meant.
A spike in knife crime above the mean is reported in the media.
A drop in knife crime below the mean is not reported in the media. It isn't sensationalist enough.
In both case (a spike and a drop) you would, as you correctly point out, expect a regression to the mean - the in the reporting period after a spike, you would expect regression to the mean, i.e. a drop, without changing anything; and similarly after a drop below the mean, in the reporting period after the drop you would expect a regression to the mean, i.e. a rise, without changing anything.
Obviously, this being statistics, looking at individual events is a fool's game, and by saying expect I'm being slapdash with technical terms, but you probably know what I mean.
Regression to the mean explains a lot of things - including some aspects of CEO performance compared to their predecessors in a job.