A new charity has claimed that “mock muggings” should be staged across Britain in order to deal with the country’s “walk on by” culture.

The charity, Witness Confident, reports that a person is attacked by a stranger every minute. With violent crime allegedly on the rise in Britain, the charity’s aim is to stop people from ignoring crimes on the street, and to encourage victims of violent crime to come forward.

The group claims that witnesses are so scared of reprisals, they are unwilling to become involved – especially with the amount of knife crime in the country.

A recent Home Office report revealed that there were 852,000 violent attacks last year, but only 43% were reported to the police, either by the victim or by a bystander. This figure, says the charity, doesn’t even include robberies.

The charity goes on to say that “with a recent internal report from Scotland Yard revealing that only one in a thousand CCTV cameras will help convict a criminal each year, this rising tide of street violence can only be turned by engaging the public when they witness these attacks.”

We say: Getting involved is a risk as much to the person being attacked as to the bystander who gets involved. However, we have to define “getting involved”. It does not necessarily mean wading in trying to be a hero and save the person being attacked by physical means. It could just be taking a photo of the attacker from a distance or making a noise that would scare off the attacker. The crux of this report, though, is that violent crime exists and is not being tackled – protection of witnesses and bystanders is paramount to solving this problem. Mock Muggings probably won’t help.