The Metropolitan Police have stopped and searched 24,000 young people every month over the past year in an operation that is cutting teenage knife crime and violence.

Twelve months after the start of Operation Blunt 2, police in the capital have searched 287,898 people, arrested 10,266 and seized 5,480 knives.

Police figures showed that, in the first four months of this year, the number of knife offences in London fell by 11.5 per cent as the number of victims of youth violence fell by 10 per cent.

Scotland Yard put a selection of the weapons recovered on display today.

They included a knife disguised as a cigarette lighter, hunting knives, machetes, meat cleavers, daggers, kitchen knives, craft knives and a hatchet.

Acting Deputy Commissioner Tim Godwin said that stop and search was contentious and its use in non-terrorist-related operations had increased by 40 per cent.

But the Met was going to great lengths to obtain community support and consent for a tactic that was preventing injury and loss of life.

“We have maintained community support in a very sensitive area,” said Mr Godwin. “The trend in violence is downward, the trend in homicide is downward. But there is a lot more to do.

“There is still too much violence, still far too many young people carrying weapons, still far too many young people joining what they would call a gang.

“This is not job done, it’s job ongoing and we’ve got to maintain our focus.”

Mr Godwin said that he expected the Met to continue high-visibility, proactive street policing in knife crime hotspots for a number of years.

There was evidence that the tactic was successful in deterring young people from carrying weapons. The proportion of searches resulting in the discovery of a knife had fallen markedly over the 12 months of Blunt 2.

But he cautioned that the answer to youth violence and teenage gang conflicts lay in “a social response rather than an enforcement response”.

Commander Mark Simmons, who leads Blunt 2, said that the operation was intelligence-led. Resources in the form of intelligence teams, search officers and airport-style search arches, were deployed to transport hubs.

Mr Simmons said the peak time for violent clashes between teenagers was in the three hours after schools closed when many pupils were travelling home and often encountering rival groups.

He said: “We targeted the dangerous places where knife crime is most prevalent and young people are most concerned. Stop and search has helped create the environment where the carrying of knives is now less common than when we started.

“We have carefully planned the policing response at those events where historically youth violence has occurred — these include fairs, public entertainment events and so on.

“And we have put a significant amount of effort into policing safe routes home after school because again historically the after-school period saw a peak in knife crime and youth violence.

“We have maintained engagement with communities across London to ensure that our tactics are understood and have the support of the communities we are seeking to protect. The message we are continuing to get is clear — that we do have that support and that, providing we exercise our powers appropriately, stop and search is supported as a key tactic in delivering the safer environment that everyone wants.”

Ministry of Justice figures revealed this month that the number of people stopped and searched by police in England and Wales had risen to more than 1 million in 2007-08. Black people were eight times more likely to be the subject of a search than whites.

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