Idris Elba has spoken out about a way to try and tackle the UK’s knife crime crisis.
The star has made a documentary for the BBC – Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis – for which he met victims’ families, police officers and teenage offenders, and investigated ways to break the knife crime cycle.
Speaking to the BBC, Elba said that early intervention was key for reducing knife crime, and even suggested that changing the shape of domestic knives could be helpful.
He said: “Not all kitchen knives need to have a point on them, that sounds like a crazy thing to say,” he adds, “but you can still cut your food without the point on your knife, which is an innovative way to look at it.”
According to the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), a charity that tries to prevent violence involving children by using government funding, over 500 children were treated in hospitals in England for knife injuries in the 12 months leading up to April 2024.
The UK implemented a ban on the sale of ‘zombie’ knives in September 2024 in an effort to reduce those numbers. It’s a move that Elba has said was “a massive step in the right direction”, but isn’t enough to end the crisis.
“There are indicators of hope,” Elba said. “There are intervention schemes that are really working and that no-one really knows about.”
Speaking about wanting more funding for said intervention schemes – one of which in the West Midlands costs £1,500 per year per child, Elba stated: “There needs to be a very radical look at where we spend our money. How we spend our money, what are the effective solutions versus the ones that we’re wasting a lot of money on that aren’t effective.”
The documentary sees Elba talk to offenders including a 17-year-old boy serving time for causing grievous bodily harm by stabbing someone, and a 16-year-old who carried a knife after having an axe swung at him.
This is a cause close to Elba’s heart, and one he’s been vocal about before. In January 2024, he released a single titled ‘Knives Down’ that called on the UK government to take more concrete action in banning zombie knives and machetes.
Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis is available to stream on BBC iPlayer now.