The shooting of a 15-year-old boy by a classmate on his first day back at school in Kesgrave, a quiet town in Suffolk, England was a tragic new low in a nation becoming increasingly used to a shocking rate of random youth violence. Although gun crime is on the rise in the UK, the weapon of choice is usually a knife. The attack that critically injured the teenager came just a day after a 27-year-old man went on a 90-minute stabbing rampage through Birmingham , the UK’s second largest city, killing 23-year-old Jacob Billington and injuring seven others. Two were seriously wounded, including a young woman deliberately stabbed in the neck. Police arrested the 27-year-old man on suspicion of murder. Police have ruled out a hate crime and rejected any links to gang violence or terrorism. At least 13 people were stabbed in the 24-hour period between Friday and Saturday night in the London area. Five were teenagers, the youngest victim aged just 14, the oldest a 79-year old man. A 22-year-old man died after he was stabbed in Burnt Oak, a leafy suburb of northwest London. As the UK opens up after months of lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an increase in violence. Much of it is gang-related, including drug and postcode turf wars. Some are personal grievances settled violently. West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson, a Labour political appointee, came under attack from local Conservative politicians on Sunday when he said he had been expecting an increase in violence because of economic hardship made worse by quarantine measures. “I’m not saying that this is directly related to that, but nevertheless we are seeing now a growth of violence among younger people, particularly younger males, we’re seeing that growing across the region,” he said after the Birmingham attack. “My fear is that if we don’t address that and some of the underlying problems with some urgency then we could see that grow.” How East Asians in the UK are fighting back against a rising tide of racism Youth workers and experts dealing in gang and youth violence agree that the economic aftershock of Covid-19 had created a troubling environment. The UK is also facing its worst recession in 100 years and the post-Brexit trade agreement with the European Union looks like it may be collapsing. “During lockdown the government paid £75 million to fly people home to the UK after they missed their flights back. However, such large funds are never available to address issues of gang crime, drugs or knife crime,” said criminology professor Simon Harding, head of the National Centre for Gang Research at the University of West London. “We need large-scale investment over many years. It only becomes a priority if the politicians jump onto it and it is not a popular issue for many. All of this stems from poverty and deprivation – as long as we have both – we will still have gang crime, knife crime and violence.” Before the UK locked down on March 23, UK knife crime deaths in England and Wales were at their highest level since the end of World War II, according to government statistics. In the year ending March 2018, 285 deaths resulted from knife attacks . Sharp instruments where used in 40,100 reported offences. Suspects were mainly young men aged between 16 and 24. Prime Minister Boris Johnson made youth and gang violence the subject of his first televised broadcast of 2020. He said he was going to take personal charge of the effort to root out “county lines” drug dealing where young people from the inner cities are coerced by gangs to peddle illegal drugs in more rural areas or seaside towns. At least 10,000 youths were believed to be involved in dealing. The number of stabbings fell sharply as the country was made to stay at home, with knife crime offences committed by the under-25s falling around 40 per cent across London. But as soon as the country began to open up in July, violence rates began to surge again. Perhaps the most shocking thing about the murder of Jeremy Chalarca Meneses on August 8, is that people weren’t more shocked. A week after his 17th birthday, Meneses, whose mother is Colombian, was hacked to death in broad daylight in front of horrified shoppers after a fight between two gangs of youths in London’s West End. Three minors were arrested after they took themselves to hospital with knife wounds. UK police say stabbing spree that killed three in Reading was terrorist attack A fortnight later 20-year-old Salem Koudou was left bleeding to death naked on a housing estate in Brixton, south London after being attacked by thugs with machetes. Five people have been arrested for the attack. Also in August, in the commuter suburb of Pitsea, Essex, a 12-year-old boy was stabbed and hit with a hammer in an alleyway. Harding agreed that the British public was becoming desensitised to the violence. Monday’s shooting of a schoolboy was soon competing with other stories in the day’s news cycle. He said that people “also feel helpless and unable to comprehend it or to stop it, so they often just shrug and say ‘that’s just how it is with young people’. “Also, some people have become obsessed with the idea that gang crime just means black kids – this is not true either and a better understanding of this is needed by everyone, including the media,” he said. In London, where the problem is worst, “a lot of us parents are feeling scared to even send our child to the shop, even to school” said one woman whose son was a close friend of Meneses. She only wanted to be identified by her professional name as a poet and performance artist, “Antique”. “I work with young people and there are far more on the straight and narrow than those involved with gangs. Young people may pick up a knife because they are scared, because they think they need to protect themselves from what’s going on with the rise in knife crime. It’s become the normal. It’s a virus. I would say a pandemic.” She also pointed to the fact that other children who witness the violence also become traumatised. A case in point is of 15-year-old boy, Baptista Adjei, stabbed to death on a bus in Stratford, East London last year after “a school beef” on WhatsApp about a football match. His murder was witnessed by 32 other children. Last month, a 16-year-old was found guilty in his death. Another youth worker in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, where many of the knife crime perpetrators and victims are of Bangladeshi heritage, agrees. “Everyone is doing it, all races and creeds.” He blames the problem partly on the drugs trade, a market fuelled by mainly white middle-class casual users. Another major factor is the lack of youth centres for urban youth in particular, many which have been closed down after 10 years of Conservative government cuts to public services. Shaun Bailey, the Conservative Party’s candidate in next year’s elections for London mayor, a former youth worker, last month suggested making large corporations randomly test their staff for drugs as a way of squeezing demand. While white middle-class drug use was “certainly part of the whole drugs landscape”, Harding said the main reason for the violence was still mainly county lines and gangs. Fatal stabbings in England and Wales at highest recorded level “There is great hypocrisy of course among some City of London corporations and businesses where taking cocaine is rife. But I would prefer to see a levy or tax against those institutions and businesses to help provide better treatment for drug users”. Conservative media and pundits want to see more random stop-and-search of young people as a deterrent to knife crime. But that could also be a Catch-22, and could alienate and anger among black and South Asian youth who already feel victimised by police. David Lammy, the shadow Justice minister, wants the UK to follow other major European countries and legalise marijuana for recreational use in order to stop the criminalisation of youths, much earlier. Johnson has promised to increase police numbers by 20,000 – roughly the same amount that was cut by his predecessors Theresa May and David Cameron. That would certainly help to boost police presence on the streets. But as the Tower Hamlets youth worker pointed out, the closure of local police stations as part of government cuts, including one in Brick Lane, the heart of London’s Bangladeshi community, has also made it difficult for families of those showing a propensity to violent crime to discreetly inform the police. Recognising that a holistic approach was needed, Johnson said he wanted to see every civil service department involved in tackling the county lines problem. But as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage in the UK, many more young lives are also likely to be lost to the knife crime pandemic.
