New Year’s Eve in London saw an unprecedentedly high number of stabbings in the UK’s capital – many of them fatal. A 17-year-old boy and two men, aged 18 and 20, died on New Year's Eve, while a 20-year-old man died in the early hours of the following morning. A fifth victim remains critically ill in hospital as of January 4.

Axar.az reports citing sputniknews.com.

The deaths provoked shock, outrage, and fury not merely among residents of London, but the wider country. Among the furious was Peter Kirkham, security management consultant, and policing specialist. While six people have been arrested in connection with two of the attacks, he's certain who's ultimate to blame for them all.

Mr. Kirkham is no ordinary security management consultant — he's a former police officer, and similarly no ordinary former police officer either. A farmer's son from rural Cheshire, he joined the police after studying at a London university and becoming a special constable (volunteer officer) as a student in 1979. Over the course of his subsequent 23-year policing career, he went "around the block," and then some.

"I started off as a PC, before becoming a detective, then a sergeant, then I joined the 'flying squad' as a detective sergeant, and I was an acting detective inspector for five years until the early 1990s. Then I got on accelerated promotion course, but all it did was accelerate me out of the police. I saw the shenanigans at the higher level and didn't want to be a top cop. I finished up serving five years as a senior investigating officer, and left in 2002," he explains.

He was begged to stay, as no one else had a range of experience quite like his — but he knew if he did, "I'd end up punching someone."

In brief, if anyone knows how the British police would be best run, Mr. Kirkham probably does. Over the course of an incendiary conversation with Sputnik reporter Kit Klarenberg, he pugnaciously pinpointed a number of major areas of concern — responsibility for which can largely, he feels, be placed at the feet of May, and the Conservative governments she served in and now leads.

He notes the UK has only ever had a maximum of about 145,000 police in active service — the notion of the country ever having "an officer on every street corner" is a romantic fiction. However, now there's "nobody left on any corner" — the government believed the country could get by cutting active police presence, and focusing instead purely on "response policing."

Such a move may not be without merit in principle, but in practice, a number of factors result in very few officers actually being free to respond to incident reports.

If there aren't enough officers to respond adequately to incoming calls, Mr. Kirkham says the only thing police can do is "just say no" — there were significant controversies in 2017 when police forces announced they would no longer investigate certain crimes, including lost property, burglaries, thefts, and assaults, as there are insufficient resources to properly investigate them.

Despite this, G4S' services were retained by Lincolnshire Police, to provide staff for the force's control rooms, the nerve centers taking and directing emergency calls. Later that year, five workers — including the control room manager — were suspended after it was revealed the quintet had made over 600 bogus calls in order to meet their target of answering 92 percent of calls within 10 seconds or less.