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The Home Office and the Defence and Security Accelerator are looking for innovative ways of tackling knife crime.

The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) and the Home Office are looking to engage with the market to scope the potential for an innovation challenge addressing knife crime in the UK. As part of this process they want to understand from the market what capabilities currently exist or are in development that could provide solutions.

The focus of this scoping exercise is solutions that can “identify or detect people carrying, overtly or covertly, a wide variety of steel-bladed knives in open spaces, crowds and uncontrolled areas (i.e. where there is no presence of security)”. The call to the market also outlines a requirement to detect steel-bladed knives in the presence of other commonly carried benign metal items (e.g. keys, phones, coins etc.). As well as being concealed on the person, this also includes knives carried in bags (e.g. handbags, backpacks etc.).

The DASA/Home Office team is interested in “all forms of potential solutions from specific technologies, through to advances in behavioural sciences.” While potential solutions submitted can be at any level of maturity, there is particular interest in those at the higher end of the scale.

You can find more information, and details on how to submit a Knife Crime Capability Submission Form, here. The deadline for submissions is 5pm on 20 July 2018.