A Nottinghamshire Police sergeant has declared one knife offence in the city is one too many as police scanned people for weapons at Nottingham Station. Officers used a metal detecting arch at the Station Street exit on Thursday afternoon (November 17).
One man was arrested during the operation which is part of the nationwide Operation Sceptre. "We've already stopped a male that avoided going through the metal detector and he was found to have a knife on him, so he's been arrested and is on his way to custody now," sergeant Richard Tiernan told Nottinghamshire Live at the scene.
"We've also stopped a male who was behaving suspiciously around the arch. When we've gone to search him he had £11,000 and some cannabis. We're looking for any knives that fit the definition of a bladed article. The knife we recovered was a large lockable knife, around five to six inches long."
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Police asked some commuters to pass through the arch, by Sgt Tiernan said this was not the main focus for officers. "We're looking for people who are avoiding the arch or set it off," he continued.
"If we think we've got the ground to do a search for a knife then we will. A big part of an operation like this is looking for people who are avoiding the arch. They might see it and spin around quite obviously and we will be looking at picking them up.
"It's focused on detecting people coming into the city centre with knives or weapons on them and trying to disrupt that activity. We see the station as a transit hub for people that come in on the tram from other parts of the county.
"One knife offence in the city centre is one too many. This isn't something we do for a week and then forget about, it's part of our daily business. We have officers going into colleges to have conversations with kids and we have regular operations where plain clothes officers act as spotters to help identify people with knives. There's always a huge amount of work going on around knife crime."
Inspector Paul Gummer added: "There's a deep rooted issue within society, this is only one element of the work we do to tackle it. There's input we're giving to schools and colleges, there's the work we're doing on the street all the time. There have been fairly high profile incidents where they are predominantly young people getting stabbed.
"Our researchers tell us the people who are carrying knives are much more likely to stab someone and be stabbed by somebody else. That's the cycle we need to break."
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