Seventeen teenagers have been stabbed to death already this year in the UK capital, and some young people are being sucked into a cycle of guns, gangs and knives, say senior police, writes Kathy Sheridanin London
LAST WEEK, 18-year-old Ryan Bravo, a business student from the south London borough of Southwark, became the 22nd teenager to die violently in the British capital this year. His death had a tragically familiar ring. He was an innocent bystander, said the police, while his mother, Elfrida, and his siblings grieved for a "decent, hard-working young man" and implored witnesses to come forward to help detectives.
Ryan's death was unusual in one sense; in a year when the weapon of choice is knives, he died by gunfire. Of London's 22 violent teenage deaths, 17 were stabbing victims. Eighteen-year-old Freddy Moody was the 21st victim, stabbed yards from his front door after being attacked by a gang of up to eight youths in hoodies. While detectives were questioning a 16-year-old in connection with his death, another 16-year-old, Ben Kinsella, was being buried a few miles away, in a funky shirt, with rosary beads around his neck and his trademark shades on his head. Ben - a gentle boy and aspiring actor who had appeared in the police drama, The Bill, and whose sister acted in EastEnders - was stabbed several times after a fight in an Islington bar spilled out on to the streets. Three teenagers are accused of his murder.
A few days later, in broad daylight, another 16-year-old, Shakilus Townsend, died after a brutal assault by a masked gang armed with baseball bats and a 12-inch knife. He called for his mother as he lay dying : "I don't want to die . . . Where's my mum, I want my mum . . ." Detectives were investigating the possibility that Shakilus - who had previously been known to police - was a member of a gang and may have died following a dispute over a girl.
The 16-year-olds were not the youngest. Amid a spate of knife attacks in June, the Southwark News reported stabbing incidents in which the victims were just 10 and 12. They survived, unlike David Idowu. David was just 14 when he was stabbed in the chest and stomach after being confronted by a gang of youths in Southwark. Police believe he was singled out because of his school uniform - the blue and grey of Walworth Academy. He had been due to give a speech two days later, urging others to give up knives at the world's biggest speaking event for young people. He had dreamt of being a politician and changing the world.
A demonstration, from the site of David's murder to the gates of Downing Street, was headed by his parents, Grace and Tim, who addressed the crowd to call for a national day of prayer to be held and for the government to create "more practical solutions" to beat knife crime.
FOR SOME, DAVID IDOWU'S murder carried fearful echoes of another infamous killing in the same borough. In November 2000, Damilola Taylor, a bright, Nigerian-born 10-year- old, was walking home from the local library to the (now demolished) North Peckham estate, when he was stabbed with a shard of broken glass and bled to death in a stairwell. Reports around the killing focused on the activities of a local gang of children, serious and repeat juvenile offenders, who had been inflicting a reign of terror on the estate.
The Southwark Borough police commander, Chief Supt Malcolm Tillyer, was chief inspector in Peckham at the time of Damilola's killing. "It was undoubtedly the highest profile murder in my time and one which focused everyone's mind - how to stop young people potentially killing each other," he recalls. "Huge work" was done, including initiatives to put dedicated schools' police officers into the most challenging schools and the introduction of full-time police community support officers. The PCSOs form a valued part of dedicated Safe Neighbour Teams - each made up of a sergeant with two constables and three PCSOs - in every ward in Southwark, in a scheme now replicated across the city.
And yet the sight of Damilola Taylor's father among the mourners at Ben Kinsella's heartbreaking funeral seemed to suggest that nothing had changed.
Therein lies a conundrum faced by the authorities both here and in the UK. "Year on year for several years in this borough, crime generally has been falling," says Tillyer. "The fact is that knife-related crime here has fallen by 25 to 30 per cent for over three years, so it's not going up. It's going down. But what is going up is a sense of fear among average members of the public."
His claim is backed by the latest annual crime figures from both the police and the British Crime Survey (with its telling page one disclaimer that its statistics "are produced free from political interference"). According to the BCS, crime has halved since the mid-1990s. Yet two-thirds of those interviewed said they believed that crime had increased in the past year, a consistent pattern over the past decade.
The mismatch is a source of huge frustration for senior police officers across Britain. The Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, Peter Fahy, the 49-year-old son of Irish immigrants, who takes over the 13,000-strong Greater Manchester Police in a few weeks, believes that the problem lies in media labelling. "They have used 'knife crime' as a general label. Chief constables are concerned about the media frenzy because this is a particular kind of offence, unrelated to alcohol, mainly connected to gangs of young people, often from very disadvantaged areas and from ethnic minority backgrounds in the big cities such as South London and Manchester - and it feels like this dislocation from society is getting greater."
But general crime, he says, has "fallen significantly. We are many times more professional now, we have a tremendous workforce, yet the public and media mood is more demanding and more short-term, so it is difficult to have a considered debate. Crime stories sell newspapers and that in itself creates fear".
Talk to any senior police officer in Britain now and this "short-termism" is the bane of their lives. Some commentators agree that media coverage of the knife crime wave has been out of all proportion to the scale of the problem and has distracted attention from where the real harm to young people lies. And walking the streets of Peckham this week, this reporter noticed no greater sense of menace than in any relatively deprived urban area.
But a recent report by the independent think-tank, Policy Exchange, suggested that the public are right to be sceptical about police and BCS statistics, because much crime - especially violence between criminals and offences by children under 16 - goes unreported. Its own polling suggests that nearly three-quarters of police constables and sergeants believe that gang crime has become worse over the past five years.
As the British Home Office only began recording knife crime separately from July this year, "policymakers simply do not know how prevalent knife crime really is", it states. Knife crimes are estimated to be four times more common than gun crimes, and the risk of serious injury more than double that for gun crime.
The Merseyside Ambulance Service estimates that half of all stabbings never get reported to the police. Many schools under-report such incidents for fear of destroying their reputation among parents. "If the true figures came out, the government would be in serious crisis," said one source.
Probably the most depressing aspect is that one in five of those convicted for possessing a knife in 2006 was aged between 10 and 17. And the number of girls carrying weapons (often for boys) is increasing, says Tillyer, noting that Southwark has its own girl gang called the "Shower Chicks".
David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, believes that youths carry knives because (a) it makes them "feel grown up" or "manly"; and (b) they are "scared". Young people, he says, have reacted to a world in which adults demonise young people outside their own families - "they are all chavs and hoodies" - and no longer trust adults to protect them.
An audit of Labour's youth justice policies, published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London in May, concluded that they have had "no measurable effect" on the rate at which young people commit crimes.
"What is undoubtedly getting worse is the level of violence among the small minority of young people getting sucked into a cycle of gangs, guns, knives," says Tillyer. "And there is the straightforward fact that the average age of victims and of suspects is getting younger and younger. I think it's gone from 19 to 17. While guns were the weapon of choice up to a few months ago, this year [as a result of highly focused operations against black-on-black shootings], we are seeing a 60 per cent reduction in gun crime. But now they've turned to knives which is scarier because they are so much more accessible - and obviously there are hundreds and hundreds of young people across London who wouldn't hesitate to kill people. Years ago, they might break a glass and put it in someone's face, but they didn't set out to try and kill people without any feeling . . . Despite the loads of serious work done in the eight years since Damilola's death, eight years on, the level of violence is certainly worsening."
TILLYER'S CHALLENGES are radically different to Peter Fahy's in Cheshire, although the phenomenon of the "angry young man" is desperately evident in both. Fahy puts some of that down to the "watchdog culture" - "we've all become very good at complaining and being assertive and some take that assertiveness to violent and aggressive extremes."
For him, the problem is overwhelmingly around alcohol and the offenders are almost exclusively white. The deregulation of pubs (anyone with a clean record can open one) and 24-hour opening times - introduced with the same aspirations as proposals here to licence "café bars" - have led to a "disastrous" price war. That, allied to what Fahy describes as the British (and Irish) attitude "that you have to drink to get drunk and with no social stigma" has not in itself led to a huge increase in violence, he says.
"What we see is that standards of behaviour have fallen in the street and the trouble continues much later into the night and starts much earlier in the week." The huge growth in convenience stores with their promotional two- and three-litre bottles of strong cider and litre bottles of sherry have also hugely frustrated police efforts to keep public order.
It was on Fahy's patch that Gary Newlove was beaten to death at his home in Warrington, when he challenged a group of youths - two aged 15 and one 16-year-old - who were interfering with his car. His young daughter's poignant letter to him while he was on life support brought it to national attention.
In five years, Fahy has wrought a seachange in how the public connect with his force. Despite a government obsession with short-term targets, he has taken the emphasis off the frantic drive to respond to all calls and put it into dedicated community teams. He has also launched a 300-strong "call centre" within the bright, modern headquarters in Winsford, run on a 24-hour basis by experienced customer service staff recruited from customer-friendly companies such as Marks Spencer and British Gas, and supervised by senior officers. A key element is the regular follow-up contacts to advise people on the progress of their complaint.
Back in Southwark, Tillyer is a "massive champion" of "in-your-face, hard-edged, robust policing", in particular of the highly controversial "stop and search" procedure - he orders three times as many as neighbouring Lambeth - and he frequently avails of a section in the Act which allows his officers and drafted-in support groups such as the hard-nosed riot squad, to stop and search without grounds.
But he is also acutely aware of the downside, which is the possibility of alienating already disaffected young people, "so we involve them in training police officers and we encourage members of the community to witness stop and search operations and to give us feedback. We find that for young people, the issue is not stop and search but the quality of interaction with the police officers carrying it out."
When a child is on the edge, parents will typically get a visit from a police officer and a local authority counsellor. "We tell them that he is causing huge distress in the neighbourhood and that 'next time you will render yourself liable to eviction'." If they are in denial about their child's behaviour, they may be invited to view video footage for example.
"Some would argue that by evicting families, you're just pushing the problem on to somewhere else," he says, "but a lot of these young people are very territorial. 'Postcode' violence [where people are attacked for entering another area] has happened and by moving them, that young person is in a completely different borough and you've probably massively reduced the risk. But if the word gets out amongst parents that they might get evicted, that in itself is a massive incentive to take action.
"The majority do care, but say that they're at a loss about what to do about it. We say 'well, do you realise that the council runs parental classes?'. . . This is not just about policing; it's about diversion and prevention. And this is where the government really needs to stump up ."
And this is where Tillyer, as he puts it, puts on his "pink and fluffy hat". He is as passionate about the causes behind disaffected and criminal youth as he is about enforcement.
FAHY IS EQUALLY energised by social justice and the startling disconnect between villages in his comparatively small area. His officers can be seen taking at-risk youths or ex-prisoners for a run and helping them devise a shopping list. "For some, that can be a major challenge and is often a far harder thing for them than to go back into the dependency culture of prison, because you have to stand on our own feet. It's long-term unglamorous stuff," he notes, unsuited to the short-term judgments pertaining to numbers of arrests and tickets handed out. "You need to hold your nerve amid a few dramatic cases and learn to take the risks . . ."
This is what distinguishes both Fahy and Tillyer from their Irish counterparts. It is not only their equal passion for enforcement and social justice but their willingness to give interviews (to a foreign journalist, at short notice), openly and at length without regard for the political fall-out. It simply wouldn't happen here.
Tillyer quotes in detail from a study showing how the human brain is formed by the age of three and how in scenarios of poverty, abuse and domestic violence, that child becomes "someone who cannot relate to people . . . In Damilola's case for example, about 14 youngsters were arrested and every one of them came from a children's home, or where there was domestic violence . . . And that's the key," he says. "There are probably 50 to 100 reasons. What is the response needed from us?" Among a dozen projects designed to engage young people, Tillyer's police borough part-funds a funky, local radio station - South City Radio, based in Peckham, currently airing as Reprezent 87.7fm - to the tune of £35,000 (€44,190). The objective is not only to infuse its summer programmes with anti-knife messages, and live debates on guns, gangs and weapons with senior officers and community members on the panel, but also to target and train disaffected young people (some referred from juvenile courts) in media skills and dissipate the climate of fear.
Shane Carey is the 36-year-old director of Eclectic Productions, which runs the station and one of its several coups this summer was to get Harriet Harman - acting head of government - on a show, together with half a dozen highly disaffected local teenagers, a reformed drug smuggler and a senior policeman. In its day-to-day programming, trainees present shows and in the process are being "covertly" taught life skills, such as punctuality, how to listen, how to work on a team, how to speak articulately, how to research, plan and edit a show. In the process they gain the crucial respect of their peers because the station is perceived to be "cool". They also attain a qualification, enabling them to move into further education of some kind; some find their niche in radio and Sony music awards.
Carey's station manager is Michael Stickland, a reflective 22-year-old Peckham native, who remembers that "knife and gun crime kicked off" while he was attending a school "that went through a wave of phones being nicked and it has got progressively worse . . . But it is down to just a few young people. We need to be very clear on that . . . And we need to look at the lack of things to do and what the existing projects are doing. Sticking kids in a youth clubs with snooker and table tennis might have worked 20 years ago but the kind of technology they have in their own bedrooms now means they're producing their own tracks. We're doing something here that will engage them on that level . . .
"These guys are not the Kray twins; they need direction. Get them in a room alone and they're the loveliest people in the world. But even if only 1 per cent are carrying a knife, that's a huge problem. A lot of politicians are extremely disconnected and all credit to Harriet Harman, she came on the show. She didn't have to put herself in a position to be held to account by young people. Jacqui Smith is coming in in a few weeks to pick up on those points. It's the start of a process, holding people to account, affecting policies . . .", says Stickland. And this is a scheme heavily supported by the Metropolitan Police. Carey (with his Sligo roots) is ready and willing to bring his model to the Republic.