In U.K. Chicken Boxes, Drumsticks, Thighs and Tough Talk on Knife Crime
Critics blamed cuts in the police force, while the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising to build up the size of the police force.
He's also planning to implement a program of stop and search:
The chicken box campaign and the crackdown has been getting strong criticism, especially since it appears that black people will be stopped and searched more often than white people:
The chicken box campaign was also considered racially crude.
LONDON — Fried chicken, a mainstay of takeout food in Britain, normally comes in colorful paper boxes with a company logo or a joking reference to the succulent contents inside.
But this week, customers at chicken shops across the country will instead encounter boxes with a government message about knife crime, which has been rising in Britain in the past four years and has become a political issue.
The boxes are all black with the hashtag “#knifefree” printed on the lid, a reference to a government campaign against knife crime. Inside are firsthand accounts from reformed knife offenders. The government hopes the messages will help reduce the numbers of young people carrying knives.
Critics blamed cuts in the police force, while the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising to build up the size of the police force.
Politicians and commentators have blamed years of austerity and cuts to the police force, leading to demands that the government invest more in the fight against violent crime.
Boris Johnson, who became prime minister last month, took office with a promise to crack down on violent crime. “I want the criminals to be afraid — not the public,” Mr. Johnson wrote in an article in The Mail on Sunday, announcing the recruitment of 20,000 new police officers.
He's also planning to implement a program of stop and search:
He promised to back the police in deploying random stop and search powers where they deem necessary across England and Wales. “I know stop and search is controversial. I know that left-wing criminologists will object,” Mr. Johnson wrote in The Mail on Sunday. “But I also know that the people who back this intervention most fervently are often the parents of the kids who are so tragically foolish as to go out on the streets equipped with a knife, endangering not only the lives of others but their own.”
The chicken box campaign and the crackdown has been getting strong criticism, especially since it appears that black people will be stopped and searched more often than white people:
“Boris Johnson has effectively admitted that increased random stop and search will be discriminatory, but does not seem to care that it is black people who are more likely to be targeted,” Diane Abbott, a Labour member of Parliament who speaks for the party on home affairs, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This is a reckless disregard for civil rights, good community relations and the evidence on stop and search.”
Liberty, a human rights organization, said black people were 12 times more likely to be stopped than white people in London, and 26 times more likely in the rest of the country.
The chicken box campaign was also considered racially crude.
David Lammy, another Labour member of Parliament, said the campaign was either “explicitly racist or, at best, unfathomably stupid.”
“The Home Office is using taxpayers’ money to sponsor an age-old trope,” Mr. Lammy told The Guardian. He said that Boris Johnson’s government was “pushing the stereotype that black people love fried chicken.”