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Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.
The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.
If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.
White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.
Going by the murder rate data from the government, black overrepresentation is actually slightly worse than the famous 13/52 in the US. The issue as a whole is way less pronounced because there are fewer murders per capita from any ethnic background, sure, but the relative differences are pretty much the same.
That's most likely not an inherent property of crime though, but of geographical racial segregation, at least in the US. That's obviously a fairly trivial observation, as an environment gets more diverse you'd also expect the ethnic backgrounds of murderer-victim pairs to be more random, but the discrepancies are still pretty stark, e.g. in 26% black South Carolina about half of all white murder victims are killed by a black perpetrator. Since roughly 2020 this holds across most states in the South too, with Hispanics chipping in in states like Texas with fewer black people, while interracial murders are rising as a share of the white total nationwide as well.
In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups. As places like Newcastle or Leeds become more demographically similar to today's London, even Northerners living in their supermajority native towns and cities might get caught up in that.
Not just geographical separation but crime related too, much of the knife crime in the UK (and gun crime in the US) is between gangs, or drug related. If you aren't involved in those your risks are much much lower. And also if you aren't a young male of course.
Especially in the UK with those factors the average white adult in the north is very safe. They don't have to worry about a POC violent crime wave (which was the OP's point) because they are never going to see it . And given homicide is dropping overall after the Covid spike I don't see that getting worse.
Looking at your homicide stats, that is for victims not offenders. Black people are 17% of victims despite making up 4% of the population, while whites are 82% of people but only 71.4% of victims. That's the flip side of 13/52. Only 4% of the population but 17% of those killed. For the US that would be 13/54.
The average white person in America is pretty safe, the average white person in the UK is really really safe.
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It’s pretty clear they aren’t all that concerned with BIPOC knife crime since their government just released sentencing guidelines that call for different “tiers” of sentences depending upon the race of the offender
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