Project title:

Knife Amnesty

Country of Origin:

United Kingdom

Project description:

The aim of this project is to encourage residents of Great Britain to hand over their stabbing weapons to the police voluntarily. Police stations have special lockers where people can leave their weapons anonymously. This ensures safety, and freedom from prosecution for possession of a weapon.
This project is repeated regularly, sometimes as part of broader anti-violence campaigns. Apart from taking stabbing weapons off the streets, it makes people aware of the dangers of weapon possession (if you have a knife in your pocket, you might use it).
The awareness campaign focuses primarily on behaviour change. This is essential, because any knife handed in can quickly be replaced by a new one.
The weapon amnesty project and the awareness campaign reinforce each other. The result is that fewer people reach for a knife during conflicts with others, both because they don’t have a knife on them, and because they realise using weapons is not the way to solve the problem.

PLEASE NOTE: The amnesty is now complete and lead to the removal of over 89,000 knives and offensive weapons

Project Start date:

2006

Project Status:

Fully Implemented

Is project still running?:

Yes

Date of last review:

décembre 2010

Contact details:

Documents:

UK_Knife Amnesty Initiative.pdf - 7 janvier 2009 (46KB)

Good practice document3.pdf - 20 novembre 2006 (885KB)