Rob Knox: Harry Potter actor's dad makes knife crime plea

Attempts to reduce knife murders since the death of a teenage actor 13 years ago have failed, his father has said.

Colin Knox's son Rob, who appeared in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was killed, aged 18, on 24 May 2008.

A "staggering" number of people had since been stabbed to death, and "new measures" were needed to stamp out knife crime, he said.

"Whatever plaster they've tried to put on this problem has not worked," he added.

Actor Ray Winstone worked with the Rob Knox Foundation on a documentary about the young actor's life and death.

Mr Knox said the film demonstrates how the impact of a murder spreads beyond the victim's immediate family.

More than 2,400 people were killed by a knife or other "sharp instrument" between April 2009 and March 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics.

"On a daily basis you're fed, 'someone died today, someone died today', but you don't get the true picture of the collective," he said.

He said schools should do more to teach children about the impact of knife crime, and he called for "tougher measures for people carrying a knife".

Any custodial sentence must be followed by an "exit programme" to try and "break them away from any gangs that they're in", he said.

"It's not punishment, it's prevention," he said. "We need to stop people from being killed."

Mr Knox, from Hawkinge, Kent, said he had cried every day for 10 years after his son's death, adding: "He can hear me. I tell him I love him every night."

"It's not just affecting one or two people," he said. "It's probably 30 or 40 people that are affected by this one act of violence."

He said hundreds of thousands of people had been affected by knife crime in the past two years alone, adding: "It's a pandemic, as much as Covid is."

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