British Home Secretary Amber Rudd will vow yesterday to do "whatever it takes" to curb crime as she unveils a new multi-million pound response to a surge in violence in London and elsewhere.
The new initiative, backed by £40 million (46 million euros, $56 million) in funding, aims to steer young people away from crime and tackle violent drug-dealing gangs, according to Britain's interior ministry.
It comes after a deadly start to 2018 in the British capital in which a spate of stabbings and shootings has left more than 50 people dead - pushing its murder rate higher than New York's in recent months.
"As a government we will never stand by while acid is thrown or knives wielded," Rudd will say in a speech in London.
Rudd is set to announce the introduction within weeks of new laws targeting offensive weapons, including action to stop knives being sent to residential addresses after they are bought on the internet.
She will also call on social media companies to do more to rid the web of violent gang content.
There are funds for new "community projects" for young people and a coordination center targeting national drug dealing networks, the interior ministry said.
Following a rise in violent crime in towns and cities across Britain, the Conservative government has faced criticism for years of cuts to police funding and a reduction in officers.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Sunday that Rudd and Prime Minister Theresa May were "ignoring their record" and there were 21,000 fewer officers than in 2010.
However the government insists the rise in robbery, knife and gun crime is due to improvements in police recording and a rise in drug dealing.
London's Metropolitan Police deployed an additional 300 officers over the weekend to areas most impacted by crime after a particularly violent week.
London is not the only city to be suffering from horrendous crimes. Other areas around the United Kingdom have been dealing with the devastating impact of pedophilic and abusive grooming gangs.
Just last month it was uncovered that pedophiles in Telford, central England, abused up to 1,000 girls, some as young as 11, over a four-decade period, the Sunday Mirror newspaper reported.
In what may be one of the worst British paedophile rings in recent history, girls were lured from their families to be drugged, beaten and raped, the newspaper said.
Telford lawmaker Lucy Allan said the newspaper's findings were "extremely serious and shocking" and demanded a public inquiry.
"I will be raising the matter with ministers in parliament and using every avenue available to ensure that the facts of what happened are made known," she wrote on her website.
Citing files from the local council in Telford, the Mirror newspaper said social services, teachers and mental health workers knew about the abuse but did not inform the police due to the ethnic origins of the abusers.
West Mercia Police said it took the issue "extremely seriously" but the information provided by the Mirror was not new and resulted from a number of high-profile cases including an operation in 2013.
"This was one of the first national complex critical investigations into grooming offences," Assistant Chief Constable Martin Evans said in a statement. "It centered on historic offending in Telford and Wrekin and ultimately resulted in seven men being jailed for a total of 49 years."
The newspaper said one schoolgirl became pregnant six times in four years. A 14-year-old had her phone number sold to paedophiles and was raped.
"I was told that if I said a word to anyone they'd come for my little sisters and tell my mum I was a prostitute," the girl was quoted as saying by the Mirror.
In 2014, revelations that as many as 1,400 children were sexually abused by gangs of foreign men in Rotherham shocked Britain. Eight men were found guilty in 2016 of waging what prosecutors called an "utterly abhorrent" campaign of sexual violence and intimidation against girls in the Rotherham area.