Knife crime | ukwatch.net

'My son was killed by a knife but he was failed by the system'

JamieSW — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:15:10 +0000

Leon Francis was just 24 years old when he was fatally stabbed in December last year. He was a bright young man, adored by his family and treasured by his friends. Yet life had not been easy for Leon. He was excluded from his Birmingham school aged 15, and without proper help he drifted into crime and then a prison sentence. On release, Leon was determined to turn his life around and plan a future away from crime.

But every effort Leon made to do this was met with failure or contempt by the very bodies that were supposed to help him. Following Leon’s death some of the press chose to demonise him. This week Jackie Ranger, Leon’s mother, speaks to Socialist Worker to set the story straight.

My eldest child Leon was only 24 when he was stabbed to death in December last year. Our family and friends are still devastated at his untimely death, but we are campaigning for justice for Leon, and to make sure that his name is not discredited.

We want him to be remembered for the person he was. Sadly Leon’s story is indicative of the destructive paths that some of our young people find themselves trapped on.

My son was no angel. He made some mistakes throughout his short life, but it is important to know that 2007 had been a year of reflection and transition for him.

He realised that he had to change and he kept trying to turn his life around right until the day that he died.

Leon brought joy and laughter throughout his life and was a popular young man with a potentially bright future ahead of him.

He was extremely loyal to his family and friends and greatly valued his close relationships. His troubles began when he was permanently excluded from school aged 15. Sadly it was a downward spiral from there.

Exclusion

Inadequate post exclusion support contributed to the choices that Leon made. He blindly entered a life of crime and went to prison for five years for attempted armed robbery.

To this day I question if Leon really understood the seriousness of the offence that he committed and the consequences it would have on his life – he was after all still a child at the time.

Leon’s imprisonment was an extremely traumatic period for all his family, but more so for Leon himself.

He often tried to mask the pain of the injustice he felt at being excluded from school, and subsequently excluded from society.

As a parent it was important that I did not allow him to minimise his responsibility for what he had done, while acknowledging the way social factors contributed to his predicament.

Leon himself understood he had done wrong and was remorseful. During his sentence Leon was transferred between prisons more than 15 times.

He was also placed in some difficult situations – a poignant and most insensitive ordeal was being jailed on the same wing as the man who killed his fiancée’s brother.

Nonetheless, Leon remained extremely resilient, striving to remain positive about the future.

While incarcerated he gained some qualifications and was determined to lead a more productive life after his release in 2006.

Due to the nature of his offence, and the political climate around “gangs” at the time, Leon was released with extremely strict conditions about where he could go and what he could do which impacted on his human rights.

In April 2007 he was wounded after being shot in the head while in his “exclusion zone”.

He reluctantly offered the police information about the incident and was assured he would be treated like a victim, but instead he was sent back to prison.

This led to an irretrievable loss of trust in the police. When he was released again in August 2007, Leon fought to maintain his focus of rehabilitation.

He was on the verge of beginning a new life outside Birmingham and had secured a place on a BTEC music technology course.

Leon was excited about his fiancée’s pregnancy and the thought of becoming a father. He was looking forward to 2008 with an increasing sense of maturity – he had everything to live for!

However he became increasingly concerned that his efforts appeared not to be taken seriously by those responsible for assisting his rehabilitation.

He was sick of the differential treatment and outcomes for people of African heritage in education and the criminal justice system.

A series of incidents in October last year meant Leon was in breach of his residency conditions, and as a result he went on the run.

His family urged him to give himself up, but Leon was adamant that he would never go back to prison.

On 27 December 2007 Leon was fatally stabbed.

Quite rightly there is national uproar when the victims of knife crime are innocent. However, when the victim is involved in a gang or caught up in violence it is a different story.

The press demonises them, and their families are further victimised, humiliated and treated with disrespect.

There is no opportunity to present an accurate picture of their loved one.

Yet my pain is no less than the mothers of “innocent” victims. My son is also dead. My family have the same feelings of grief, sorrow, regret and frustration that the family of all other victims share.

Leon was also somebody’s son, somebody’s fiancé, somebody’s father, somebody’s brother and somebody’s friend.

He was my child and I love him and miss him dearly. He was my friend, my confidant, and my heartbeat.

Statistics about exclusions, violence and black deaths belie human tragedies, and Leon is yet another tragic victim that can all too easily be forgotten.

However, both his life and his death emphasise the drastic and urgent need for more preventative, innovative and timely measures to be developed for all young people who have been excluded from school or who are subject to anti-social behaviour measures.

Myths

We should not fall for the myths of poor parenting, absent fathers, family breakdown or demonise our youth like the media often does.

Instead we must try to understand the complex reality of young people’s struggles and provide them with proactive support and an earned second chance. That is their right!

I want to reach out to all the families, and especially the mothers, who have lost someone to gun, gang or knife crime – particularly those who have been made to feel ashamed that their child was involved in a gang, and it is said that they only ever did terrible things.

Now our children are dead, and there is little sensitivity towards us. We have to stop demonising people and look behind the myths that stop us from acting to change things.

Leon left us with a beacon of hope, his beautiful daughter Princess who was born five months after his death. She symbolises life, youth, opportunity, hope and light.

Crime and punishment in the neoliberal twilight

JamieSW — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:10:11 +0000

Last year it was gun crime, this year it is knife crime, and next year it will be blunt object crime. There is hardly a day that passes without a headline about another young man who has been stabbed, usually in south London. And this is not to be dismissed. It is a serious issue. Regardless of the overall statistics, which show violent crime to be quite low compared to, say, the early 1990s, the problem is concentrated in a number of run-down working class areas and the risk is experienced in an elevated way there. And while it is true that people generally overestimate their own chances of being subject to violent crime, an artefact of a politically-driven campaign to frighten and demoralise people, in some areas and for some population groups the risk is very real. Yet, to have the issue serialised as a tabloid shriek-fest is possibly the least appropriate way to address the problem. Joan Smith pointed out the other day that serious and ongoing violent crime against women isn’t receiving this treatment (apparently she has forgotten that misogynistic violence is only a media topic if Muslims are involved). Endemic violence against children by authority figures is also generally ignored.

Nonetheless, this being the topic du jour, and quite a serious one, what is the cause of it? One hears from pundits that young black men in particular are prone to violence because they exist in a survivalist subculture that values macho behaviour and endorses violence (blame Fifty Cent again). One also hears that they often come from ‘broken homes’ (those ‘deadbeat dads’ and ‘absent black fathers’) and thus don’t form a strong identification with social norms. Various associated explanations – drugs, ‘gang culture’ etc – are posited with equal gravity. I simply take it as obvious that these kinds of explanations, more often than not, are about scapegoating population groups deemed in the ruling culture to be somehow ‘alien’ and a problem in and of themselves. Moreover, these explanations are incoherent. There are those who have listened to the So Solid Crew without blasting someone’s head off. There are those who have bought and even sold drugs without knifing someone to death. And some people from single parent families are perfectly average human beings who don’t carry knives with them. Again, the fact that these explanations neither explain nor cohere is not strictly relevant, since their purpose is to create an overriding impression of menace and disorder. A problem whose boundaries are not defined by race is given a racist twist in such analyses. It is the ‘New Barbarism’ thesis transplanted into New Cross and Stockwell. Even where it isn’t explicitly racist, it is doggedly reactionary, as when commentators recycle Blair’s old speeches on ‘respect’ and its putative breakdown. Can’t we just go back to the 1930s, when everyone knew their place and the kids could get a clip round the ear from a disgruntled bobby if they misbehaved?

The scholarly research points to alternative conclusions, with radical policy implications. For example, one recent study by Fajnzylber et al on the causes of violent crime took a trans-national analysis of various trends and found one outstanding factor: income inequality raises violent crime rates dramatically. This is backed up by earlier research. Related factors such as educational inequality, and ‘ethnic polarisation’ (racism in the society) contribute as well, while the rate of such crimes fluctuates with the economic cycle (much of violent crime being property-related). The dry statistics point to a reality that is palpable for anyone who lives in London, where all of these social ills co-exist, and where inequality of all kinds is glaringly apparent. It is not so surprising that there are a relatively small number of extremely damaged individuals who, as Yuri Prasad argues, “see little value in human life – neither theirs, nor anyone else’s”.

What about drugs? Andrew Resignato at Florida State University has summed up a wealth of literature on this topic, and concludes that there is in fact scarce data to support the thesis of a positive correlation between drug use and violent crime. On the contrary, there is a much stronger correlation between the enforcement of drug laws and violent crime. Drug users who do have to support the cost of their habit (inflated by dint of its control by criminal cartels) through crime tend to opt for non-violent means. On the other hand, the more investment in policing to control the sumptuary habits of the poor, the more likely there is to be violent crime. This is unsurprising. Create an illicit capitalist economy in the hands of extra-legal cartels embroiled in competition with one another, with that competition delegated down to those lowest in the hierarchy, and you get a great deal of violence in the process. I strongly suspect that states which impose drug laws are well aware of this, and that their function is to facilitate a strongly interventionist police force with ready-made pretexts for detaining and imprisoning people considered dysfunctional to the society’s requirements. It keeps ‘problem’ populations, generally the urban poor, under tight surveillance. It criminalises them before they have necessarily even broken the law.

If talking tough and ratcheting up repression, with heavily policed schools and widely used stop-and-search applied in a racist fashion, worked, then American cities would be the safest in the world. Yet this is exactly what New Labour, and the Tories after them, will continue to do. Can we even take them seriously when they claim to want to deal with the problem? Is it not obvious that the periodic episodes of hysteria on what are chronic problems are opportunistic attempts to expand the state’s repressive capacities? Isn’t this just what we have seen in other fields, such as ‘anti-terror’ legislation, whose dystopian precepts were being driven through parliament by New Labour well before 9/11 or 7/7? We now have a criminal justice system with an extraordinary scope for control, with such disgraceful policies as curfews and ASBOs, in which non-criminal behaviour becomes the subject of sanction. Given that crime rates are not soaring, given that the risks that people face of encountering violence have not substantially altered, the most likely explanation is that as the neoliberal era enters its most decadent phase, states are attempting to manage the adverse social by-products of the descent with an iron fist.

And next year, when they’ve got round to blunt object crime, the newspapers and politicians will pretend that it’s all new again, that we’ve never been here before, and that whatever repression is in place isn’t enough.

Gordon Brown's tough talk won't stop knives

JamieSW — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:37:37 +0000

It seems that in the last week the entire political establishment has jumped on the issue of knife crime.

Gordon Brown used his monthly press conference on Monday of this week to announce his new get-tough approach. There are to be tough “community payback” schemes, tough plans to deal with “problem families”, and tough curfews for the under-16s.

But beneath all this robust language it is clear that none of our politicians have a clue as to how to reduce the number of young people carrying knifes, only the vague hope that by talking tough they can prevent their political rivals from outflanking them.

Brown’s community payback scheme is one such example.

Here those convicted of carrying, but not using, a knife will be forced to undertake up to 300 hours of work over 50 days.

“Communities… should have a role in deciding what they should do,” says Brown. “Cleaning up parks or scrubbing graffiti, and what time they should do it, such as cleaning the streets on Friday and Saturday night.”

The overwhelming majority of young people who carry knifes do so out of an acute sense of fear that unless they are armed, they may become the next victim of a stabbing. Some are scared for their lives every time they leave their house.

Does Brown really believe that people in such a situation will be deterred by this scheme?

Is it the case that the very small number of people who have become so alienated from the society that they see little value in human life – neither theirs, nor anyone else’s – will now think twice before reaching for a blade?

Surely even New Labour knows this is rubbish.

Programmes

Brown is attempting to lay the blame for knife crime at the feet of the families of the 110,000 children he claims have been found guilty of anti-social behaviour.

“I think all of us recognise that the first responsibility where a child is in trouble or in danger of getting into trouble rests with the parent,” he argues.

Now up to 20,000 of those families could face “parenting action” programmes, and even removal to residential accommodation for retraining.

Those that refuse the scheme could find themselves evicted from social housing and their children taken into care.

How making families homeless, turfing their belongings out in the street, and then sending their kids to a care home will make the situation better is anyone’s guess.

Nevertheless the idea does have a specific ideological purpose. It says social problems in our communities are the result of personal and family failure, rather than being connected to any wider concerns.

If knife crime is the product of families that are out of control, then there need be no discussion of other issues, like the levels of exclusion from schools, unemployment rates, crap jobs and lack of apprenticeships. There need not be any understanding about the way many working class young people feel completely undervalued and under siege.

Above all it means that the state can absolve itself from any responsibility for providing real remedies to the situation.

By accepting such a right wing agenda on crime, Brown has given credibility to David Cameron’s talk of a “broken society”.

Failed

He has allowed the Tories to suggest that some problems may not stem only from failed individuals but from a society whose values have failed – an idea that can masquerade as both left and right wing.

But we cannot afford to allow the right to dominate the debate over crime.

Many people rightly feel that anti-social behaviour and violence grow when the idea of community is undermined. This notion of community rests on the idea that we are not just atomised individuals, but people capable of collective action.

Struggles to improve our estates, build community centres and challenge the way our education system is developing as a test factory have the potential to unite people in ways that no mainstream politician seems capable of.

But the success of such campaigns is dependent upon rejecting the idea that young people are the problem and that a crackdown is the answer.

Stop the demonisation of Britain’s young people

William Benzies — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:53:26 +0000

The Tories and the tabloid press have waded into the debate on knife crime with demands for mandatory and longer prison sentences for those found carrying knives.

The Sun, the Mirror and the News of the World all now have their own online petitions calling for more government crackdowns over knife crime. The News of the World is even running a roadshow to garner support for longer sentencing, more police and the building of more prisons. Labour has responded by announcing a review into sentencing. It has also publicised the appointment of a new lord chief justice, Sir Igor Judge. He is writing to every magistrate in England and Wales to warn them that they should apply tougher sentences to deal with knife crime.

But simply pouring more police onto the streets or locking people up for longer will not address the problem – it will make the situation worse. Britain’s jails are already overflowing and more young people are locked up here than anywhere in western Europe. There is already a huge police crackdown underway. The London Metropolitan Police force launched its latest operation in May. Known as Operation Blunt 2, the high profile operation has led to an astonishing 27,000 people being searched since May. This uncovered only 500 knives – from less than 2 percent of those searched.

But as children’s commissioner Al Aynsley-Green has pointed out, policies like this simply antagonise and further alienate young people. Stop and search is also disproportionately used against black and Asian people and increases the racist harassment that young black people face.

Threat

Underlying New Labour’s approach is the assumption that there is something fundamentally wrong with young people, that they are a threat to society. Policing minister Tony McNulty made this clear last week when he said that knife crime among young people “is apparently a generational, almost cultural thing that’s getting into the collective DNA”. There is no serious attempt to understand why young people may carry knives – to consider the fear, poverty, alienation, anger and frustration that may lead to violence or crime.

Worrying statistics show that while overall deaths from stabbings have remained fairly consistent at around 200-250 a year for the past decade, the victims of knife crime are getting younger. Knife injuries also seem to be rising. The number of children admitted to hospitals in England and Wales with wounds from a knife or other sharp instrument has risen 62 percent in just three years.

Racism is one of the issues connected to knife crime. Yet politicians ignore this. In London, for example, 19 teenagers have been stabbed or beaten to death this year – 16 of those are black or Asian. Young black men are disproportionately excluded from schools, discriminated against in jobs and training, more likely to be stopped or arrested by the police or to end up in prison.

There is a worrying development in the reporting of those killed by knives. There is a growing division between those (usually white people) who are depicted as innocent victims and those (predominantly black people) who are portrayed as being gang members and violent thugs and therefore partly to blame for their own death.

We should reject this division. The rising number of young people carrying knives is a damning indictment of a society that demonises and alienates the majority of young people instead of listening to them and offering them a decent future.

Labour may grab headlines with its increasingly punitive policies, but it is badly failing young people.