Why are they wasting money on buying knives?

"Recorded crime has gone up by 9% in England and Wales, fueled by rises in violent offences and robbery, official figures show," wrote the BBC. Police registered 5.6 million cases between June 2017 and June 2018. That is about 9% of the total population of the United Kingdom. Rate of homicides was highest in 10 years and there were 40,000 incidents where a knife or a sharp object was used. Thefts of bicycles fell. "Some analysts say that the policy of austerity cuts -- a centrepiece of of the Conservative Party's agenda for the last decade -- is helping to drive people toward crime, including vulnerable young people who had been helped by social services." Knife crimes have been on the rise since 2015, but now they have reached unprecedented levels, wrote A Timsit. "The clash has divided the Conservative cabinet, with the home secretary, Sajid Javid, demanding millions of pounds in emergency funding for the police, and Prime Minister Theresa May rejecting linkage between knife crimes and cutbacks in the number of officers." "For example, the police now spend hours answering calls involving mentally ill people and sitting with them in hospitals, work that had been done by agencies that have suffered their own funding cuts or been eliminated entirely." The drive to austerity started after the financial crisis of 2008 when George Osborne was Chancellor of the Exchequer. "The consensus today is that Osborne's 'expansionary fiscal contraction' delayed recovery by at least two years," wrote R Skidelsky. The government is not a household because "government's spending is part of almost everyone else's income". So the British government should have increased fiscal deficit instead of austerity. Writing about deflation in Japan Prof Paul Krugman wrote, "When you print money, don't use it to buy assets; use it to buy stuff. That is, run budget deficits paid for with the printing press." Patients are having to wait much longer for investigations and surgeries on the National Health Service (NHS). This is partly because an ageing population has greatly increased demand on the service but also because funding has not kept pace with demand. Domestic garbage is not being collected by local government workers, while traps have been set to catch and fine drivers for minor indiscretions. Private contractors issue parking tickets even when legally parked. If there is no deal on Brexit government finances will get stretched even further. Will that increase stabbings even further?