Why Britain is in a knife crime crisis

Marcel Addai, 18, from Hoxton, east London was stabbed to death in December 2015 on the St John’s Estate, Pitfield Street. Those responsible were four members of the Fellows Court gang – Sheku Jalloh, 23, Rikell Rogers, 21, and Sodiq Adebayo, 23, were all sentenced to a minimum of 25 years, while Momar Faye, 19, was given 22 years.

The Fellows Court gang had been involved in rivalry between the Hoxton Boys (and indeed, the London Fields gang to the North), and Addai’s murder was a carefully calibrated show of force – Addai, who had been associated with the Hoxton Boys gang, was stabbed 14 times just near Evelyn Walk where he lived, in front of his friends and neighbours.

No random killing, the brutal murder was deliberately staged in front of Mr Addai’s friends and neighbours, who lived in Evelyn Walk, which is about 200m (650ft) from where he was fatally attacked. They rolled up in a convoy of cars and chased him down.

The Fellows Court gang seemed to form in 2010, when they started making so-called Drill videos, which feature taunts at rival gangs and violent imagery – their first video features this lyric: “Fellows Court, we bust guns and don’t play fair.”

They are still available to watch on YouTube, including this titled “Dubsy (Hackney – FFR) – Gully Creeping – Video by @PacmanTV @FFDubsy”, which appears to have been made soon before the murder was carried out. “Fuck Hoxton”, various members of the group shout to camera. Then, Rikell Rogers, one of the killers, starts rapping – “I’m aiming for your chest”, he says in a stream of threats.

Addai’s story is commonplace. Knife crime has risen nationwide for the last four years. And although the general trend on violence and knife crime has been downward since it peaked between 2003 and 2005, it is still possible now to speak of a genuine crisis of law and order – last year was the worst for knife crime since records began in 1946.

The causes of violence are complex. Cuts to frontline policing have been felt particularly acutely in rural areas making it far harder for forces to take on so-called “county lines” dealers, who move drugs from urban centres to villages and towns with fast-moving supply lines, employing children as “drug mules”.

The drugs market which has been flooded with newly potent Class A drugs including cocaine has driven a more dynamic drug-fuelled criminal economy as rival gangs and individual dealers vie for control of new supply lines and markets.

The education system is failing to direct vulnerable young people away from violence: startlingly, half of all knife crime in London is committed by children. Since 2014, we have seen a 56 per cent rise in school exclusions in England and Pupil Referral Units, where pupils excluded from primary and secondary education are sent, have been labelled “schools for crime” by educational experts, with almost a fifth classed as “inadequate” by Ofsted. The difference between PRUs and mainstream schools is stark – 26 per cent of Dunraven Base school in Lambeth got five A* to C grades for their GCSEs in 2016, while zero per cent of students at Lambeth PRU achieved the same results.

For years, London has experienced its fair share of knife crime, but, perhaps, what it makes so political damaging is that the most recent wave of violence, both in scale and brutality, seems to point to a fundamental breakdown in law and order.

Victims are younger than ever before too: a consultant trauma surgeon, Dr Martin Griffiths, told the Guardian in November: “In the 1980s in the same part of the city we cover, east London, a stabbing victim was, on average, in his late 20s and had sustained a solitary stab wound. Our average is now 18, and 25% of knife victims we see are of school age.”

A junior doctor described to me that the major trauma centres in London are seeing a massive influx in stabbings designed not to kill but to leave the victim disfigured. “Bagging” is very common, for example. Stab wounds are delivered repeatedly to the rectum; and the victim must then permanently wear a colostomy bag.

Former police chief Lord Hogan-Howe today called on the government to “get a grip” on rising youth violence. None of this is inevitable – Glasgow’s experience, where the public health approach taken by the multi-agency Violence Reduction Unit, working across the boundaries of Police Scotland, the NHS, social work and education, shows that early intervention works – addressing the deep-seated cultural causes of knives, gangs and violence in young men, and identifying those most likely to offend in future before it’s too late.

The Tories are in a real mess on this, on both front- and backbenches. As the spate of Brexit-related headlines showed over the weekend, the hard Brexiteer wing is stuck in myopia over the backstop, the customs union etc., while Theresa May, former home secretary, has contributed little to the debate.

Today, she blandly commented that there is “no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers”, while Sajid Javid, our current home secretary, in the absence of new policies to tackle the violence, was reduced to platitudes in the House: there is, apparently, “no single solution” to stopping the crime wave…

Labour’s frontbench should be making hay on this issue (incidentally forgetting their recent history when Tony Blair fought the 1997 election on a Law and Order ticket with great success), but it is honourable backbenchers like Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, who are making the running on this issue.

But let’s return to the story of Marcel Addai, murdered by pumped-up, young men, with dreams of gangsterdom, of money, of guns. In Roberto Saviano’s portrayal of the modern Neopolitan mafia, in his 2007 journalistic work “Gomorrah”, the city is overrun by anarchic violence. The old gang hierarchies, based on family, faith or clan loyalty, have broken down because of the burgeoning international cocaine trade.

They make way for the Camorristi, a new breed of mobsters, who are younger, hungrier, and more violent. Here is one testimony from a boy in juvenile detention – “Everyone I know is either dead or in jail. I want to become a boss. I want to have supermarkets, stores, factories, I want to have women. I want three cars, I want respect when I go into the store. I want to have warehouses all over the world. And then I want to die. I want to die like a man, like someone who truly commands. I want to be killed.”

Rikell Rogers, one of Marcel Addai’s murderers, posted this on Twitter just weeks before the murder: “The only way out is jail or dead and I see both.”