POCKET MONEY, PHONE, RAMBO KNIFE
Rachel Sylvester
JULY 8 2017
ITS 6PM ON A Friday evening when I join the police gangs unit on patrol in Hackney. Already, two teenagers have been arrested with knives — one of them is a 13-year-old girl, who hid the weapon in her school bag.
As we drive around the streets in an unmarked car, a report comes in on the radio of a stabbing in nearby Hoxton. A few minutes later, we hear that a knife has also been confiscated in Stamford Hill library. I am shocked. But for the two plain-clothed officers I am with, this is worryingly normal.
“We are taking knives off the street every day and they have doubled in size in the past three years,” says Sergeant Dan Murphy, who runs the dedicated Hackney unit. “I recently arrested a boy of 14 with 5 kitchen knives and a meat cleaver — he was carrying for the rest of the gang. They have moved on to carrying bottles of ammonia, too. It’s difficult for us to deal with. They carry knives but they’re also kids, so it doesn’t feel right to be too forceful.”
Hackney is my neighbourhood. Murphy and his colleague, PC Heidi Akers, pick me up from home, which is around the corner from their office. It is also, they tell me, less than 100 metres from the headquarters of the notorious London Fields Boys, one of Hackney’s oldest and most brutal gangs. We pass my 10-year-old son’s primary school, the station that my 13-year-old walks to every day and the park where the children play football at the weekend. It is all so familiar but it feels different. Next to the tennis courts, the police smell cannabis, put on the blue light and pull over a car. Although they don’t find any drugs, there is a baseball bat in the boot. The driver claims he plays with his godson, but Akers is sceptical. “Sometimes they don’t even have a ball,” she says. It seems I have stumbled into a terrifying underworld right on my doorstep.
There are, according to Murphy, 22 gangs in Hackney, each with between 50 and 100 active members. The average age is 15 but some of those involved are as young as 12. Instead of fidget spinners or loom bands, blades have become the new craze for these children. A recent knife fight broke out in an ice-cream parlour, with toddlers looking on. The local McDonald’s has become a trouble spot — the kids gather there in their school uniform for the free wifi because their parents have put a data limit on their smartphones.
The members of the gangs unit — which includes probation officers, social workers and welfare advisers as well as the police — are working 12-hour shifts to try to stop the violence spiralling out of control. In the week before I joined the patrol, 17 gang members had been arrested and 30 knives recovered in Hackney.
“Knives are a status thing for these kids,” Murphy says. “They’re showing off to their friends. The latest things are Rambo knives with 10in blades. The kids can be pretty wild. Last week they were letting off fireworks in McDonald’s in the middle of the day. They just do anything for attention and, unlike the older boys who used to be in gangs, they don’t have boundaries.”
Tonight, there is a grime music talent show at the Hackney Empire. The last time I came here it was to watch the Christmas pantomime with my family, but now a large crowd has gathered outside the venue and the police are expecting trouble. Extra officers have been deployed and youth workers are also patrolling, but there is tension in the air.
As darkness falls, dozens of young people are standing in groups on the pavement. A few are circling on bicycles. Almost all have their hoods up, and some are wearing scarves over their faces revealing only their eyes. Most do not look more than 14. One girl in a pink hair band is sucking on a lollipop. The boys seem wired, they are shouting and jostling, buzzing with nervous energy and aggression. Murphy points out the 14-year-old he recently found with the knives and machete. “Be careful,” he calls over to him, with a combination of fatherly concern and headmasterly authority.
A scuffle breaks out in the churchyard and there are reports that a knife has been produced, but by the time the police arrive the agitators are running away and the weapon has been dumped. A boy dashes up. “Is there a fight? Have I missed it?” he asks, disappointed.
The kids wave at the police, taunting them, but one is more aggressive, coming up to Akers and shouting in her face, “Stop f ***ing looking at me.” She is about a foot smaller than he is — and just back from maternity leave — but she holds his gaze. The children don’t often attack the police, she tells me; they are more interested in each other. “I’ve watched some of them going through the ranks and then the younger brothers joining, but it’s different now,” she says. “In the old days, there was a hierarchy to the gang. The ‘elders’ would keep the ‘youngers’ in check because they didn’t want us involved in their business, but now it’s groups of kids getting together on social media.”
Almost all the teenagers on the street are black, but in Tower Hamlets they would be Asian and in Dagenham white. This is, the social workers say, about poverty, not race.
“A lot of these boys have started out with nothing, so they see this as a chance to feel better about themselves,” Murphy explains. “We understand why they fall into this life. But so many lives are wasted. Some of these kids are really intelligent. If only they were directed into something productive.”
We bump into PC Gary Collins, one of the Metropolitan Police’s “super-recognisers”, who works for the gangs unit. He has a photographic memory for faces and spends every day studying police mugshots, Instagram posts and YouTube clips. When a crime is committed, he examines CCTV footage to identify possible offenders. After the London riots in 2011, he picked out 180 of the looters.
Now, as he scans the crowd outside the Hackney Empire, he begins to recognise suspects. A 15-year-old boy, who had been caught on CCTV beating up a 59-year-old man after he told the gang to stop messing around, is arrested for GBH. A 14-year-old, suspected of a recent stabbing, is picked up for attempted murder. As he is led in handcuffs into a police van, he is smiling and his friends are filming him on their phones so they can post a video of the arrest online. There is no sign of remorse. When the police search the boy, they find a small plastic bottle filled with what they call a noxious substance, maybe Domestos, ready to throw in somebody’s face. It is the contrast between domesticity and violence, the clash between innocence and experience, that is so disconcerting.
I find myself standing on a street corner with Collins. A group of boys crowds around us, trying to intimidate us, but Collins defuses the situation by naming them one by one. Occasionally, he also tells them the name of a brother or cousin. Having worked in the police for 22 years, he knows some of their parents. They come closer, horrified to be recognised but also thrilled by the notoriety. One boy begs him to forget him and walks away, but within seconds he comes back, asking, “What’s my name?” There is vulnerability as well as cruelty in these children’s eyes. “If I know them, they feel as if they’ve become somebody,” Collins says. “A lot of them have nothing at home, so the gang is like their family. They want to belong.”
There has always been an edginess to Hackney, although the borough’s “Murder Mile” has in recent years been overtaken by macchiatos and MacBooks. Its interlocking cultures exist side by side, but the gradual gentrification has deepened the social and economic divides. When I moved to the area 15 years ago, there were no cappuccinos available anywhere. Now Hackney has its own coffee bean roastery and you can get prosecco on tap in the canal café. Sourdough bakeries and hipster breweries have opened up next to the Turkish kebab shops. It is possible to spend £10 on three vines of organic tomatoes in fashionable Broadway Market, or buy a plastic bowl of them for £1 in nearby Ridley Road. With elegant Victorian terraces fanning out around the tower blocks, it often feels as if different communities are living parallel lives.
Occasionally, you see signs of a violent subculture bubbling beneath the surface — a shooting in the park, reported in the local paper, accounts of an attempted mugging by the church — but it is usually easy to look the other way an
d suppress the anxiety. Recently, though, I’ve found the danger impossible to ignore. A few months ago on the way to drop my younger son and his friend at football training, I saw a teenage boy being chased by two others waving carving knives. I dialed 999 and the police later told me that a young man had turned up at the nearest hospital having been stabbed. Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Laurence, the borough commander, compares Hackney to a pressure cooker. “With gang violence it’s about keeping the lid on, and how firmly it’s on,” he says. “When crime starts escalating, that’s when we need to push the lid down in lots of different ways.”
On the day I meet Hackney’s most senior policeman there has been another stabbing in my postcode. It looks like a gang-related crime: the victim has lost some fingers in a street fight but doesn’t want to talk to the police. A 13-year-old has been arrested. The day before, a 12-year-old had been picked up for another knife crime.
In the chief inspector’s office there is a case full of weapons, giant samurai swords and bright green “zombie slayers”. These are just some of the hundreds of knives that have been taken off the streets in the borough over the past 12 months — 585 in 2016 alone. That year, nationally, there were 32,498 knife crimes recorded in the UK, an increase of 14 per cent on 2015, according to Office for National Statistics figures. Hackney police carry out regular sweeps of local estates, looking for weapons hidden under bushes and bins, as well as proactively using stop and search powers to recover knives. Despite the number of blades seized, there were still 91 stabbings involving people under the age of 25 in the area in the past year, a 16 per cent increase on the previous 12 months.
There is what the police call a “matrix” that includes the names of 150 young people associated with gangs in Hackney. Across London, 3,600 people are on a similar watchlist. Not all have committed offences, but they are judged to be at risk and are regularly visited at home. It is not just about punishment, but also about diverting people away from crime: there is help with housing and benefits as well as jobs advice. The oldest person on the matrix is 30; the youngest is 12.
There have been gangs in Hackney for years, but what worries Laurence is that younger children are getting involved at the same time as knife crime is rising. The police now go into primary schools to warn eight and nine-year-olds about the risks. “The level of speed to extreme violence is far younger and far quicker than we used to expect,” he says.
Nobody quite knows what explains the shift: it may have started when some of the older gang members were in prison after the riots, leaving a gap for younger siblings and their friends. There is also a suggestion that new controls on stop and search, introduced by Theresa May when she was home secretary amid fears that the power was being used disproportionately against young black men, have hampered police efforts to tackle knife crime. What is certainly true is that social media sites such Facebook and WhatsApp have created new networks and ways of meeting up for a younger generation.
As the age profile of those involved changes, the gangs themselves are evolving. In the past, they were organised crime syndicates, running drugs lines to the counties as well as selling Class A narcotics in the capital. They had hierarchies and demarcated geographical areas. There were violent territorial disputes, but the gangs also competed to have the best business models and brands. They made professional videos to market themselves, sometimes even wearing a certain colour to indicate their allegiance. Although they were dangerous criminals, a sense of equilibrium had developed.
A couple of years ago one of the gang leaders was arrested. “It’s like chess,” he told the officer who was reading him his rights. “You’ve made your move and I will now make mine.” There was almost a feeling of mutual respect, an order to the criminality.
These days the groups are much more fluid and less disciplined. They are often just kids messing about on the streets. They are more interested in playing with knives than selling drugs — although these children are also often recruited by the established gangs to run errands. Laurence calls it, “The paper round of drugs — it’s, ‘Here’s a pair of trainers. Can you go and deliver this for me?’”
What makes the younger cohort difficult to police is that they are unpredictable. “They’re chaotic and their grievances are so low-level,” says Detective Superintendent Claire Crawley, who worked for the Met’s Trident Gang Crime Command before joining Hackney police last year. “It could be something from school that seems so minor to an adult — a ‘He said, she said’ thing — but that then provokes an extraordinary level of violence.”
Increasingly, she says, girls are being used to carry weapons because they are less likely to be searched. Many are under age but give sexual favours to gain acceptance. “Some of the girls are 13 and are caught in that lifestyle. That is normalised behaviour for them; they don’t recognise that they’ve been exploited.”
With children now embroiled in gangs, the police believe it is not enough to see this simply in terms of crime. “Enforcement does have its place,” says Crawley, “but a lot of these kids have had such terrible backgrounds and been exposed to such trauma themselves. It could be domestic abuse, or territorial violence. If you’ve seen extreme violence at a young age, and you may not have any parameters at home, carrying a knife becomes commonplace.”
David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, who is conducting a government review of the treatment of black and ethnic minority people in the criminal justice system, has thought about the drivers of youth violence. Raised by a single mother himself, he says the absence of a father is a recurring theme among those in gangs. “That’s a major issue. Boys need responsible male role models.”
He also worries that the young are being desensitised to violence by a “Grand Theft Auto culture” in video games, rap lyrics and TV. “I’ve seen cases in my constituency where teenagers have lost their lives over Facebook posts. There are exaggerated notions of pride that can exist in impoverished communities.”
The children who are being recruited into gangs at an ever younger age are, in his view, victims rather than perpetrators of crime.
Gwenton Sloley was 12 when he joined Hackney’s Holly Street Boys, arch-rivals of the London Fields gang. By the time he was 18, he was involved in gang crime and ended up spending time in ten different prisons for armed robbery. Then, ten years ago, he had a son and decided he had to change his life. Now he runs a football academy for boys who have escaped from gangs as well as advising the police and the Home Office. When we meet in a café, he insists on sitting at the table facing the window and the door. “I know no one’s coming to kill me any more, but it’s instinct, like a soldier,” he says.
Although he has been “out of the street” for more than a decade, he sees in the young people he now works with the same emotional issues that attracted him to gangs as a boy.
“I lived with my stepmum and my stepbrother and I didn’t know whether my mum was dead or alive. I was walking around in pain. I got sent to this boys’ school that had gangs in it, so it was survive or get bullied. You have to up your dangerousness.”
The Holly Street Boys “became a family”, he says. “We knew that if we didn’t stick together, we would get terrorised by the older boys. Once we saw the power we had we started beating up the other schools.” In that world, he explains, knives are a way of gaining respect. “If you stab someone you immediately become one of the main people in your gang. You look as if you are dangerous. That’s good — you get a promotion. Even if you’re a little kid you’re a boss. You have to be wild. If you’re not, your area is seen as not putting any work in. If you’re not noticed, you’re invisible. Who wants to be invisible in a gang?”
The boys I saw outside the Hackney Empire were “performing on a stage”, he says. Often they will carry a man-bag slung across their body, which they will pat ostentatiously to indicate there is a weapon inside, even if it contains only tissues. Many of the children who are sucked into gangs have mental health problems or hav
e been diagnosed with ADHD. “They are given Ritalin [a stimulant]. That’s like giving them crack. So you’ve got a group of young people who are self-medicating. They want to release the tension that has built up in them on someone else. If I’m a young person who’s been told I’m stupid and I’m crazy, then a group picks me and starts looking after me, I’ve been activated. And when you activate young people, you can’t turn them off.”
Sloley says that in every prison he went to, he lied and said that he was on drugs because he knew that was the only way he could get therapy. “Violence is an addiction. The first time I pull out a knife and everyone gasps, I’m going to get addicted to that feeling. The first time I stab someone, I might go home and vomit, but the next time I’m going to learn that, if you don’t push that much of the blade in, the person won’t die. The power of knowing that I could take your soul at any minute is addictive. My addiction was to the excitement that I got from chasing someone down the street or jumping over a counter and leaving with £10,000. That hasn’t left me; I just use it to do different things. Two days ago I was in Thames Valley, training police commanders. That’s what’s exciting to me now. You have to work on the addiction instead of focusing on the crime.”
Back in Hackney, I walk across London Fields. The sun is out and the hipsters are lying on the grass in the heatwave with their barbecues. Children are playing football and mothers are sitting chatting beside babies in buggies. There is a yoga class going on next to a taekwondo session, as well as basketball and baseball games. On their usual bench near the entrance to the park sit the London Fields Boys.
Within one small neighbourhood, people are living close together and yet far apart. We exist in bubbles, but it is not really possible to escape from the parallel universes all around us. I think back to the young people on the street outside the Hackney Empire, pumped up and looking for a fight, searching for recognition and a sense of belonging. Of course some of them are dangerous criminals — or will become so — but these are also our society’s lost boys.
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 29