Knife crime wars – the global roots of a national tragedy
You pay with prison or your skin for the power to decide people’s lives or deaths, promote a product, monopolize a slice of the economy, and invest in cutting-edge markets. To have power for ten years, a year, an hour – it doesn’t matter for how long. What counts is to live, to truly command
– Robert Saviano on modern mafia culture
About fifteen years ago, Naples experienced some of the most brutal gang-related violence in its modern history – between 1999 and 2003, gang warfare claimed 230 lives. From 2004 to 2005, 60 more people were killed in what has come to be popularly known as La faida di Scampia (‘the Scampia feud’), a vicious turf war between the Di Lauro clan and the scissionisti (‘the secessionists’), a breakaway faction of younger mobsters for control of the drugs and prostitution trade.
Roberto Saviano’s portrayal of the modern Neopolitan mafia, his 2007 journalistic work ‘Gomorrah’, took in this period of anarchic violence. His thesis? That the old gang hierarchies (represented by the established Di Lauro group), based on family or indeed faith, had broken down because of the ever-expanding commercial opportunity presented by the international cocaine trade.
If we think of globalisation not in the over-egged terms of the development of some “global village” but instead in the more narrow terms of an increase in the weight of cross-border trade, then it’s not hard to see how a new spirit of interconnection began to facilitate extraordinary new opportunities for organised crime, both in its first phase after the Wall came down in 1989 when arms and armaments flooded out of the former Eastern bloc, and then in its second, when Western ports (London, Marseilles, Naples) became hubs for fast-moving supply chains of cheap, mass produced goods from China and Southeast Asia.
For Saviano, what happened in Naples followed the logic of globalisation closely. The Camorristi began to shape a far more decentralised gang ecology (children and teenagers working as couriers to handle the increase in traffic) coupled with a stark gangster ethic that dealt in absolute terms with power and the exercise of control over the rhythms of commerce. Saviano records a cri de cœur from a gangster typical of the camorrista personality:
“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 a 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.”
In 2004, unemployment stood at 24 per cent in Naples, compared with a national average of 9 per cent, and 58 per cent of 15 to 24-year olds were out of work, so there were plenty of young men who were susceptible to the thrill of a new mob culture – this ethos that put money and power in place of God and history. “Savagery is interwoven with commerce”, notes Saviano on the amorality of capitalistic processes. Innovate or die.
Something similar appears to be happening now here in London, in our knife crime epidemic which briefly dominated the headlines but persists even though much of the mainstream media has moved on. There are uncomfortable echoes of events of a decade-and-a-half ago in Naples. Londoners live in a city that occupies a pre-eminent place as a global hub for the international drugs trade, with an insatiable domestic demand for newly potent chemical highs, including cocaine, that has driven a criminal economy in which hyper-dynamic gangs vie for control of ever-multiplying supply chains and ever-expanding markets.
This month I spoke to three knife crime campaigners – Tracy Prescott, whose son’s best friend, Marcel Addai, was murdered aged 18 in gang-related violence, Michelle McPhillipps, who lost her own son in a stabbing, and Stefan Brown, founder of the anti-knife crime charity, Stop Our Kids Being Killed In The Streets – all leading voices in a burgeoning grass-roots movement that advocates for a community-based response to the problem.
We are “a consortium of mothers, knife crime campaigners, and concerned citizens, teachers, all coming together in the spirit of ‘we’ve had enough’”, Tracy tells me.
Knife crime has gone up nationwide in England and Wales year on year for the last four years, and last year was the worst for knife crime since records began in 1946. Although the general trend in violence and knife crime has in general pointed downwards since it peaked between 2003 and 2005, the problem has been felt particularly acutely in London in the past year – because many of the victims and perpetrators are younger than ever before.
Why is this happening? We quite rightly call it a “knife crime crisis”, or a “knife crime epidemic” – but perhaps these words fail to capture its essential qualities. It is more like a war. Everything that war is, is here, and it is an intrinsic feature of the life of London. Territory, soldiers, weapons, cowards, heroes, and the dead – it all exists here and now in London.
Gangs spawned by the drugs trade compete over relatively small territories, both within estates and between postcodes.
There is an anarchic quality to the patterns of violence – so many victims of knife crime are so removed from king pin dealers that they don’t really know what they’re caught up in. The structure can be split into three levels: big time dealers associated with organized crime tend to buy in massive bulk from international sources; they then distribute to the gang leaders; and then the product is spread between a broader network of couriers (as young as ten years-old).
Beating to the rhythms of a buoyant international criminal economy, fast-moving, efficient even, but also highly unstable – there is a high likelihood that the smaller units will come into conflict, Stefan tells me: “You’ve got the big ones who send the little soldiers out to do this stuff. But they don’t understand that they’re hotting their own business up. The whole community is in terror. That’s what gang leaders are doing and it’s not just in one area, it’s happening everywhere”.
Michelle tells me a typical story of unhappy unintended consequences: “If you live on a housing estate and you’re not in the local gang, but you know that they’re desperate to recruit you every time you leave your door, but you’re trying your best to get away and one of them pulls a knife on you, then that’s when you get the non-gang people carrying. They are the ones that end up dead.
“They pull a knife without knowing how to use it. Look, they say, please don’t touch me, but the gangs almost always have a bigger knife and they know what to do with it.”
And there are those who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Michelle’s son, Jonathan McPhillips, 28, known as JJ, was murdered in 2017, the seventeenth that year.
I haven’t even started to grieve for my son. My son’s been dead for two years. I haven’t sat down and had a proper cry about my son dying because my anger is what drives me. I don’t care if the killer doesn’t go to prison. My son is a statistic in a file. I phone the police every week. I ask them what’s happening. I keep pushing. I put posters up three times a year. I finance that myself
Jonathan had been out in Angel with his cousin. As they walked down Upper Street, his cousin returned home to run an errand. In the ten minutes he was alone, he had been stabbed: “He was sitting on the steps of Islington Town hall on Upper Street. There were four cars parked in front of him. Six guys turned up waving machetes. They passed up the row of cars to the first one in the row. And as they approached, four people jumped out of it and ran away. They left one person in the front seat.”
The man left behind was then stabbed in the buttock. Jonathan recognised him, the son of an old family friend, and intervened. He was then stabbed. It proved fatal – the attack had left him with a broken rib and he had been stabbed in the pumping valve of the heart and the left lung.
My son was a father of two children. He was a 28-year-old man. He wasn’t a young boy. He wasn’t involved in gangs at all. Jonathan lived in Islington all his life. He was a well-known character in Islington. He loved music. He loved motorbikes from the age of three. He was a typical Gemini – he either loved or hated you. He could be very funny but he was also a deep, soulful thinker. Like any son and mother, we fought, we cried, we argued. But deep down, we loved each other and that was that.
He fixed bicycles. Bikes and motorbikes. Jonathan was a hands-on person. Just before he died, we were talking about getting a little van to go around the city. If you get a puncture going in to work, he would go along and fix your bike. That was his plan before he died. But you know this is the same with all of our children. They all have dreams. There isn’t a child in the world who doesn’t have a dream.
This is a typical story. Before my son was murdered, I was like everyone else. I thought it would never happen to my child.
The murderers ripped out my umbilical cord. He was my only child. I couldn’t carry any more children. Every time I tried to have more children, I lost them. They took everything of me as a woman and as a mother.
Proximity makes violence more likely. Michelle describes how, in Islington alone, there are several groups jostling for control of the streets: “You’ve got the Angel group. You’ve got EC1. You’ve got Barnsbury. You’ve got Highbury and then you’ve got the Holloway crew”.
Proximity also increases the imperative for gangs to indulge in shows of force to demonstrate their command over a particular territory: “It’s to keep control of business growth in an area. It’s turf wars and the kids can’t go over the border lines,” says Stefan, “they have to get taxis everywhere”.
Tracy Prescott’s son’s best friend Marcel Addai, 18, was killed in 2015 by members of the Fellows Court gang, hailing from an estate just off the Hackney Road, after he was seen in the background of a so-called Drill video posted on YouTube by a rival gang, the Hoxton Boys, east of the Kingsland Road. Much of the violence is “driven by bantering in grime music. Those videos, they have killed many people,” notes Stefan: “All their fixation is – that guy dissed me and I’m going to get revenge. Who gives you the right to be in my area?”
In 2015, several videos (which, remarkably, are still available online) featured taunts exchanged by the Fellows Court gang, the Hoxton Boys and indeed the London Fields gang to the North. A particularly aggressive video released by the Fellows Court gang, which appears to have been released soon before Addai’s murder, features screeds of violent imagery and taunts directed towards the Hoxton Boys.
It appears that Addai was found guilty by association. He appeared in the background of a video released by the Hoxton Boys – “He didn’t know what he was getting himself into,” says Tracy.
Even being seen in the presence of a rival gang was enough to contaminate Addai in the eyes of his assassins. Tracy speaks of his one-time friendship with his killers: “The thing is all of them used to be friends when they were younger. I don’t know what happened. He was really close to one of them.”
In a studied show of force, the Fellows Court gang pulled up in several cars in the heart of Hoxton Boys territory (remember: just three streets away from the Fellows Court estate) – Addai was stabbed 14 times about 200 metres from where he lived with his family on Evelyn Walk.
Marcel was nice. I used to say to my son. That friend of yours Marcel, he walks so cool, he talks like someone out of this world, like someone out of the movies. He was so different from all the other boys. I was in awe of him. I used to stand there and just watch him walk. It wasn’t put on or anything. It’s hard to think about him now – he was such a lovely boy. He would do anything for anyone.
This is the absolute logic of gang membership: “When they turned up, he didn’t run because he knew them. He thought that because his friend was there, he wasn’t in danger. He trusted that his relationship with that person before would save him,” says Michelle.
As Stefan says: “You might have been best friends before, but you’re in a different area now. You can’t disrespect the gang that you’re in. Your friend ain’t your friend no more. That’s the power of the street – it holds these kids.”
My son rang me and he said: ‘Mum’, he started screaming down the phone, ‘they’ve killed Marcel’. He was his best friend. I couldn’t believe it. I went down in my pyjamas and he was just rolling, rolling, rolling on the floor in grief. After that, he turned to drink. The next few days, he started drinking heavily to cope with the pain.
Rikell Rogers, 21, one of the four young men convicted of Marcel Addai’s murder along with Sheku Jalloh, 23, Sodiq Adebayo, 23 and Momar Faye, 19, posted this on Twitter just weeks before the murder: “The only way out is jail or dead and I see both.”
Jail or death – a vocabulary that reflects the brutal hierarchy that underpins the structure of these gangs. “There’s a points system,” Stefan tells me: “It’s like earning your stripes [in the army]. You have to stab someone to get in a gang. That’s 10- to 12-year-olds.”
A consultant trauma surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust in London, Dr Martin Griffiths, told the BBC in April last year: “The youth of many of the victims and the assailants is really, really concerning. Back in the 1980s, we looked at interpersonal injuries involving knives and guns as being relatively uncommon – a niche injury. Now it’s our core work.
“We routinely have children in our care – 13, 14, 15-year-olds coming in with knife and gun wounds is a daily occurrence. We used to look after people in their 20s, now children in school uniforms are being admitted.”
The brutality of knife attacks has worsened too. Major trauma centres are seeing more and more patients suffering from injuries designed to humiliate rather than to kill – “bagging”, for example, a form of buttock-stabbing which means the victim must wear a stoma bag for life.
Last year, the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner, Martin Hewitt, said: “If I was stood here five years ago, I would probably be talking about knife offences where there was generally a single puncture wound. We are now routinely seeing multiple stabbings.”
“Zombie knives are common,” Michelle notes, as well as machetes: “They have jagged edges so that when it comes out, it rips at your organs.” In a macabre postmodern twist, it seems that the shape of the zombie knife was inspired by its representation in horror film-style video games. They were banned in 2016, but police fear that their illicit status has made them more attractive as ‘status symbol’ weapons.
The gangs operate on a martial code that derives its meaning not so much from honour or heroism but simply from the mounting accumulation of bodies in the defence of its territory. Michelle: “It’s funny because they don’t actually own anything. They don’t own a house. It’s all fantasy. It’s about street scoring. If I were to go out and do six stabbings, I would get so many points.”
The growth of a form of gang culture that puts a major emphasis on rigid adherence to rules illustrates that the state (the education and justice system) has withdrawn as a meaningful influence on these young men’s lives.
School exclusions are a major feature of our education system – since 2014, there has been a 56 per cent rise in school exclusions in England. Almost a fifth of Pupil Referral Units, where excluded children end up, have been labelled “inadequate” by Ofsted. Excluded children are more likely to be unemployed, in prison and are ten times more likely to suffer from mental health problems. Stefan pleads for sensitivity from schools over problem children vulnerable to gang influence: “Don’t just chuck someone out if they’re being disruptive in class, because Pupil Referral Units are a prime place to start being in a gang. When you’re in there, it’s like being in a prison anyway.”
The justice system inspires little authority in those vulnerable to the appeal of the criminal economy – although sentences for carrying a knife appear to have been beefed up in recent years, they are rarely applied to first offenders. “The justice system hands out the most ridiculous sentencing,” adds Michelle.
“First time offender with a knife should get a six-month custodial sentence. They’re getting an eighteen-month suspended sentence, so they don’t do any time whatsoever. When I’m talking to the kids – I ask them, why don’t you carry a gun? ‘Oh because you get fifteen years miss’.”
Take “stop and search” which should empower police to take on knife crime. In practice, without sufficient resources after years of cuts to frontline policing, it can only be done arbitrarily, contributing to a breakdown of trust between police and the communities they are charged with protecting.
I put that “stop and search” has declined by 80 per cent across the country to Michelle: “School pupils tell me – where are the police officers? – they only see them when the fast cars pull up with flashing blue light. There’s no trust between them.”
Michelle adds: “The murder squads in London are under a lot of pressure too. They do good work but they simply don’t have enough people.” The Evening Standard reported in January that Scotland Yard’s murder investigation unit has lost a quarter of its officers and staff since 2008, and there is only half the number of officers within teams which specialise in violent crime than a decade ago.
More murders are happening – and fewer are solved. The inadequacy of the justice system and policing adds to the sense that those who have lost relatives or friends to knife crime are on their own.
This is a crisis that demands a comprehensive response from lawmakers. The reach of the gangs extends far beyond London. Rural police forces (which have felt the brunt of the post-2009 cuts to the police) are under particular stress as a result of the fast-moving pace of the drugs trade. So-called “county lines” dealers operate across England, moving drugs from urban centres to villages.
Although the dealers might remain based in London to maximise contacts and market access and they routinely send children as “drug mules” outside the capital. Stefan explains: “On the front page every day, you see ‘a kid is missing’, but they aren’t missing at all. They’ve been sent up country to sell drugs for two weeks and they don’t tell their Mum and Dad what they’re doing.”
On March 7th this year, the New Bletchley Network held a panel meeting with former gang members, community leaders and bereaved parents. Alongside a broad range of recommendations including more robust sentencing and exclusions, they advocated for ‘Community Units’, a sentiment echoed by Stefan: “Take a building and put everything in it – mental health, drugs, sexual health, gang relations, doctors, lawyers, dinners. It shouldn’t be open 9 to 5 – this situation is 24 hours a day.
“It’s secure as well – it’s a place with proper staff, proper security. If you meet gangs on the street, it’s a safe place to run to. And for your family too. A safe place, a unity hub. It has to have everything – parenting courses, everything.”
The call for a ‘bottom-up’ community-based approach that addresses the root causes of the violence echoes the experience of knife crime in Glasgow. Knife crime was treated not just as a crisis of effective policing or education, but as a multi-faceted public health problem. A multi-agency Violence Reduction Unit was empowered to work across the boundaries of Police Scotland, the NHS, social work and education and to address the deep-seated cultural causes of the violence and to identify those most likely to offend in future, on the basis that early intervention works.
In 2004 to 2005, there were 137 homicides in Scotland with 40 of those cases in Glasgow, double the national rate. That rate of homicides had halved to 62 by 2016-17.
It seems we can expect little meaningful action on the problem while this government remains in office and while Brexit continues to gum up the national debate. A few weeks ago, in typically tone-deaf mode, Prime Minister Theresa May blandly commented that there was “no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers”, an assertion so laughable that it needs little in the way of reflection.
After some wrangling in Cabinet (and public lobbying by our current Home Secretary Sajid Javid) Chancellor Philip Hammond announced that an extra £100 million would be made available to help ease the crisis in England. The money will be ring-fenced to pay for overtime work for police officers in areas with high numbers of incidents, with the Metropolitan Police, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire and South Wales receiving the most resources.
Labour’s frontbench seems to have gone missing on this issue, forgetting that a relentless focus on Law and Order played a large part in Tony Blair’s 1997 election pitch.
More money will relieve some of the pressure on policing – but we desperately need a coherent strategy that takes in the whole gamut of the knife crime crisis, its roots in socio-economic decay, the vibrancy of the illicit drugs trade and the sorry state of the modern state.
Stefan, Michelle and Tracy invite all readers to attend a march in Central London on April 17th at an undisclosed location. They would like to stress that it is a non-violent protest. The march will aim to send a clear message to all those who are able to make a difference – enough is enough.