‘The Usual Suspects’: Knife Crime Prevention Orders and the ‘Difficult’ Regulatory Subject

Jennifer Hendry

doi:10.1093/bjc/azab063

Abstract

Abstract Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) were introduced by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 with the stated aim of providing additional tools for police to use in combatting increasing rates of knife crime in England and Wales. This article situates KCPOs within a continuous policy trend of procedural hybridization, and highlights the worrying manner in which such criminalization, underpinned by a preventive logic and facilitated by this hybrid procedure, enables new forms of ‘othering’. Drawing a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject—the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other—it argues that preventive hybrids generate a self-fulfilling category of ‘difficult’ subjects, while simultaneously denying them the procedural protections normally afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law.

Highlights

The Knife Crime Prevention Order (KCPO) was introduced in January 2019, ostensibly in response to the high and rising1 rates of knife crime in England and Wales.2 Intended as an2 The British Journal of Criminology, 2021, Vol XX, No XX ‘additional preventive tool’ for use by police, Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) will—according to published Home Office guidance—‘help to divert those who may be carrying knives, or who are at greatest risk of being drawn into serious violence, away from being involved in knife crime’ (Home Office 2019)
Drawing a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject—the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other—it argues that preventive hybrids generate a self-fulfilling category of ‘difficult’ subjects, while simultaneously denying them the procedural protections normally afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law
Pragmatism, as grounds for any diminution of due process protections, should be viewed with disquiet. It is with this sense of disquiet over the preventive hybrid form that this critique will conclude

Summary

Introduction

The Knife Crime Prevention Order (KCPO) was introduced in January 2019, ostensibly in response to the high and rising1 rates of knife crime in England and Wales.2 Intended as an2 The British Journal of Criminology, 2021, Vol XX, No XX ‘additional preventive tool’ for use by police, KCPOs will—according to published Home Office guidance—‘help to divert those who may be carrying knives, or who are at greatest risk of being drawn into serious violence, away from being involved in knife crime’ (Home Office 2019).

Results

Conclusion