London Life

The Prime Minister caused a storm of protest last week when he appeared to suggest that Black Communities should do more to denounce the extreme violence that is killing many young black men. 

The implication is that gun and knife crime is being caused by a distinctive black culture. Kurt Barling looks at the enduring stigma of race and criminality, and asks if Tony Blair is missing the point.

February was a busy month this year for the capital’s killers. But what has shocked Londoners most is the age of the victims. The deaths of three teenagers sparked an outcry and a search for whom to blame.

Billy Cox Memorial

On the 3rd 16-year-old James Andre Smartt-Ford was shot twice at the Streatham ice arena in front of hundreds of revellers. Michael Dosunmu, 15, was shot dead by gunmen who broke into his home in Peckham on the 6th. Billy Cox, also 15, was shot in his parents flat in Clapham on Valentine’s Day. 

By the 22nd a hastily convened gun crime “summit” took place at No 10 Downing Street under the stewardship of the Home Secretary, Dr John Reid and the Prime Minister. It was seen as a high level response to a terrible catalogue of tragedies.

At the meeting were a host of community activists who have worked tirelessly over the past decade to impact on a rising tide of extreme violence being visited on certain parts of the capital’s impoverished and troubled communities. 

A mixture of faith organisations, civic leaders and non-governmental bodies all attended, hoping to impress upon the government the need to identify specific forms of intervention.

Some individuals like Lucy Cope, who set up Mothers against Guns after her son Damian was gunned down in 2002, refused to attend. 

As an English mother of a “mixed-race” raced son she has been angered that the problem has been consistently characterised as a “black” one. In Cope’s view it is a street problem and one which affects all the ethnicities that in reality hang around together on London’s street.

De-stigmatising it as a “black” issue has been among her principal aims and in this she has the support of most anti-gun crime activists.

Curiously enough when Billy Cox was murdered he was again characterised as a black victim. His mother is Thai and his father English but that has been mysteriously overlooked in reporting his shooting.

This single misrepresentation of the victim’s ethnicity has done more to irritate local young people on the Fenwick Estate where he lived than any other inaccuracy.

Close to the flat where Billy was shot, some pretty sophisticated street art has been painted on to several walls to commemorate his short life.

One of the slogans reads, “Why don’t the press let the kids decide what they want to be?” This is probably a veiled reference to the question of self-identity on the street rather than an identity given to the victim in the media.

On the same day in February as the Downing Street “Summit”, thousands of people, overwhelmingly Black Londoners rallied in Trafalgar Square asking for recognition of the vulnerability of young black men to gun and knife crime, but also for more tangible support in tackling it.

It seems a bit of an oversight then on the Prime Minister’s part to specifically call on Black people to denounce the killers, as if somehow only black communities are responsible for producing them.

These young people are not socialised in their early years in some system of apartheid but, in London, with their peers from other ethnic groups. 

Mainstream institutions (none of which are black) educate them and therefore it is difficult to grapple with the idea of a distinctive black culture, as opposed to an urban street culture, being responsible for attitudes leading to violence.

There may be many reasons why young men are killing each other on the capital’s streets but it is hard to identify specific cultural attributes which can be ascribed to particular ethnic groups.

Certainly criminality, above all associated with illicit drugs plays a part. The break down of families is a feature, particularly where young men have no responsible father figure.

There is plenty of evidence that low educational expectations and achievement is a trigger for disaffection which leads some young people into anti-social behaviour and worse.

These are characteristics of impoverishment which lead a minority into a self-destructive existence.

These conditions are present amongst a broad range of vulnerable young men and women who in the main live in poor urban communities. They do not come exclusively from any ethnic group, even if there is a strong representation in certain boroughs of particular ones.

The single most important institution within Black communities which provides an alternative cultural outlook is the church. Not so much the established Church of England but the independent Evangelical Churches, of which there are many hundred across the capital. 

They have ventured onto the streets with street pastors to challenge attitudes, provided venues for people to talk openly about the issues they face, even engaged those characters who’ve turned away from criminality to offer guidance to those still in trouble. 

More obviously, I have reported on a number of funerals over the past few years where the presiding preacher has used his sermon to chastise the killers and call for greater resolution amongst mourners to isolate those who would kill and use extreme violence.

The irony is the young killers and their victims do not necessarily come from families with a criminal past. Jason Fearon who was shot dead outside the Turnmills nightclub in Islington at Easter 2003 came from a family of estate agents and professionals. 

The key set of questions to answer in Jason’s case like many of the other young men who get involved in this violence is: What takes them there?

There is a growing sense that an absence of viable father figures for many of these young men plays a powerful role in shaping their attitudes. When Ashley Walters emerged from his spell in prison two years ago I interviewed him and he gave what I thought was a telling insight into the mind of some of these young men.

Lucy Cope - Mothers Against Guns

Walters said that the absence of father figures often means the young men make up their own composite images of what constitutes manhood. These characterisations of manhood don’t come from practical experience past down the generations but from perceptions gained mostly from the media; music, computer games, film, street culture all have their parts to play.

But let’s return to the search for support that took the Reverend Nims Obunge and his fellow activists in the struggle against violence in London’s vulnerable communities to Downing Street.

Obunge told BBC London that his conversation with the Prime Minister at the February “summit” appears to have been misinterpreted. More legislation rather than government spending in impoverished areas appears to be the immediate plan for the government.

Obunge believes there needs to be more financial support but also more research targeted on finding answers to exactly what the causes of the violence are. Once this evidence is available he believes the government has a responsibility to financial support community organisations to tackle the problem. 

For this to happen, the evidence must be discussed openly without reference to politically correct dogma about causing offence to particular ethnic groups.

In reality it is very difficult to reach the minority of young men who are involved in this extreme violence once they are already on that path. One way or another they end up getting caught either by the law or each other. The real challenge is to identify what is leading them there. Then others might be diverted.

Last week’s furore over the planned removal of the Mural to celebrate Billy Cox’s life offers another lesson. I talked to the friends of Billy who had “commissioned” the portrait of Billy from a respected local street artist. 

They raised the cash for paint and convinced the professional artist to do the work for free. They organised and executed what they felt was a positive response to the murder of a friend.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular piece of street art, it reminds these young people (mostly “white”) of their vulnerability to street violence. The fact that the adult world was so eager to belittle the graffiti as vandalism says a lot to them about how much the adult world is listening to their fears and their way of expressing them.

The issue remains how those working in impoverished and troubled communities can prevent more young boys embarking on a path which leads almost inexorably to an early death. There are clearly no easy answers.

It is difficult to see how stigmatising the “black community”, when so much work has been done to de-stigmatise gun and knife crime as a “black” issue, will help.