by Akala
When I informed the questioning officer that we were about to enter our home and pointed to the house in front of us, he could not hide his shock. ‘You live here?’ he asked in disbelief and resentment. What fascinates me is that it’s not as if I was living on The Bishops Avenue; granted, I was living in a relatively nice part of W10, but I promise you it was nothing so plush as to warrant shock that a black family could be living there. It may have even been an ex-council place, just done up well, but in all fairness a regular policeman certainly could not have afforded to live there. It was clear that I now had the upper hand, so I put some questions to the officer myself; I asked him what he thought he was showing my nephew about this society by questioning me about car thefts on our run back from school.
The officer got shirty and said something like ‘no need to have an attitude, mate’ before walking off sheepishly. I talked to my nephew about the experience but he already seemed to understand quite well the relationship between black people and the state; his father is from a pretty rough estate in south London and he regularly visited his grandmother, who still lived there.
That would have been my last example, but then a couple of weeks after the chief of the Met had announced her new strategy to get tough on ‘teenage thugs’, called for more ‘stop and search’ and emphasised the problems with gangs and black boys in London, and just a week before I was due to hand my final draft into the publisher, I got to have another rather comical encounter with the police. I was driving on the A40 near Baker Street on my way to a meeting and I saw a police van flashing its lights, I moved to the side to let them pass but they stayed behind me, so I moved again to let them pass and they moved behind me again. I realised what was happening, and as I looked into my rear-view mirror I could see the officer motioning for me to pull over, so I did.
The officers jumped out quite hyped up, or at least that’s the way it seemed to me, and I wondered why they would flag me down on such a busy road unless they thought they’d discovered something serious. The officers came to my window and to the passenger side, and started asking questions about the car. Apparently ‘cars like this are used by gang members’. I laughed at this assertion; I’m sure it was the car that made him think of gangs, rather than who was in it. Then a female officer who had been trailing behind her colleagues came to the window, looked in and clearly recognised me. She pulled one of the questioning officers aside and immediately his whole demeanour started to change. While his colleague ran my licence, he asked me what I thought they should do, and if I had a better suggestion of how to police gangs in London. The change in attitude of the officers, once they realised I was ‘someone important’ rather than just another potential gang member, was stark. Perhaps if police just approached the public in general with that level of respect things would be different. My class privileges had come to the fore and momentarily trumped their racial assumptions. I informed the officer that I did actually have a proposal on this very subject, which I was writing to the mayor and the leader of the opposition with, which is true.
I could give a hundred more absurd examples from family and friends. I could even offer the case of the brothers who were brutalised on camera outside of Brixton station for selling books.8 No, you did not misread that; they were manhandled on camera by the police for having a community bookstall, something any sensible agent of a state genuinely dedicated to education would praise. This was in 2016, and few incidents show more plainly and stupidly the relation between race, capitalism and gentrification than young black men being violently arrested on camera in front of a huge crowd in a historically poor black neighbourhood that is currently in the midst of a very visible middle-class white takeover, all for displaying books and taking charity donations. This was not about the books or trading licences at all – it was about the allocation of space, about belonging, about who is deserving of access and of rights. It was about matter that finds itself out of place. Dirt.
You see, racialised stop and search is not really about fighting crime, and the effectiveness of random stop and search as a policing tactic in general is ambiguous at best. Also to believe that a fourteen-year-old who has left his house with the intention of killing another human being, or who thinks so little of his own life that he will kill over nonsense, is going to be deterred by the potential threat of stop and search reveals a worryingly shallow understanding of human psychology. What racialised stop and search is about, in London at least, is letting young black boys and men know their place in British society, letting them know who holds the power and showing them that their day can be held up even in a nice ‘liberal’ area like Camden in a way that will never happen to their white friends, if they still have any left by the time they have their first encounter with the police. It is about social engineering and about the conditioning of expectations, about getting black people used to the fact that they are not real and full citizens, so they should learn to not expect the privileges that would usually accrue from such a status. Racialised stop and search is also a legacy of more direct and brutal forms of policing the black body in the UK, from back in the days before political correctness. The era of sus and the notorious Special Patrol Group or SPG – the unit responsible for the beatings discussed in Chapter One.
Looking back today, many people, even some police themselves, admit that the policing tactics of earlier decades were racist, though they will often admit this only to claim that things are almost perfect now and that they have sifted out all but a few bad apples. For them, the problem with policing now is simply the community’s attitude to it, or rap music or single-parent families.
But let’s return to the case of Glasgow, the city once dubbed the most dangerous in Europe which has seen a massive reduction in youth gang crime in recent years and where, if official stats can be trusted, the frequency with which young people are carrying knives is at a thirty-one-year low. The confrontation of the issue in Glasgow has revolved not just around stop and search, but around treating this kind of violence – i.e. teenage violence that is largely unconnected to proper organised crime – as a public health issue, and acting accordingly. A blitz of stop and search was used to give the public health policies time to kick in after which stop and search was scaled back, but it was ultimately understood that stop and search alone could not possibly be a serious long term solution. This approach has been led by the violence reduction unit, or VRU, and contrasts sharply with the approach towards ‘teenage thugs’ advocated by the Met Commissioner Cressida Dick as recently as 2017.9
Dick also emphasised the racial demographic of the teenage thugs in London as being ‘black’ and ‘Asian’. Again, this is in marked contrast to the rest of the country, where knife crime persists but the ‘whiteness’ of the perpetrators or victims is never mentioned. It’s also noteworthy that fourth generation English kids are referred to by their skin colour and the continent of their great-grandparents’ origin. It is also worth noting that more than 80 per cent of the murders in London committed up until November 2017 were not committed by teenagers, so I’m a little surprised that there has not been a call to lock up more ‘adult thugs’. Despite the fact that Britain already has by far the highest number of prisoners per head of population in Western Europe10 – 50 per cent more than Germany, 30–40 per cent more than France – and by far the highest number of child lifers, with no comparable crime rates to match, here we have the chief of the Met calling for ‘tougher sentences’. A slew of PhDs have long since shown that this approach simply does not work, if common sense hadn’t told us so already.11
Our ‘closest ally’, the United States of America, has almost 1 per cent of its population in prison, by far the highest ratio in the world. The ‘three-strikes’ rule in some states there sent people to prison for decades for such petty crimes as stealing biscuits and video tapes. That is not an exaggeration. Yet with millions of people in prison, retention of the death penalty and other draconian punishment laws, the USA remains by far the most violen
t of the ‘developed’ countries in the world. So if the Met are proposing ‘tough on teenage thugs’ stop-and-search tactics in 2017, we can all safely conclude that this approach will obviously not solve a problem that has affected Britain’s inner cities for over a century and a half and will likely help to actually make it worse by deepening and expanding an excluded criminalised underclass.
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The day I first saw someone stabbed was rather unremarkable in other respects. I had gone for a kick about with a friend at the park, and then went to my local barber’s in Archway with that same friend to get fresh. I was waiting for my turn; I think it was a weekend and black barber shops had not yet decided to do appointments back then, so the waiting time was often hours. It was a summer day and quite hot, and I was practically falling asleep when I noticed a commotion outside. One of my ‘olders’ – literally the older boys in your area that sometimes serve as your mentors/friends – was shouting expletives at someone. As far as I was aware he had recently got out of prison, and one of his conditions of release was that he was not allowed to be in London, so I was surprised to see him. I looked closer and saw blood on the sleeves of his torn jacket. I saw two other boys of the same age, one who I did not recognise and one who I had grown up with very closely, close enough to call ‘cousin’, waving plastic bags with knives inside them. The bags were there for the double purpose of preventing the assailant’s DNA or prints getting onto the murder weapon, and of obscuring from the victim what kind of knife was coming for them.
My older friend was already a very naughty boy by this time, so this was not a random attack over nothing, like so many other stabbings in London, but part of an ongoing feud between young men already on their way into a life of organised crime. The ‘black-on-black violence’ cliché obscures this huge distinction between random attacks and those that are actually part of gang feuds or crime, but I can tell you first hand that many of the boys that get killed genuinely have nothing to do with street or gang stuff at all and are simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. My older friend was different; after being expelled from school at thirteen he was following that path to its inevitable conclusion.
He had also been to youth prison already, had been sent back to Nigeria as punishment and had now come back to the UK. The punishment trip ‘back home’ is a cliché among the black diaspora. Sometimes these trips back to Nigeria or Jamaica genuinely did work in terms of fixing a child’s behaviour; school ‘back home’ is much tougher, life is generally harder, but there is also a communal discipline and a cultural sense of accountability that is hard to recreate in London. It’s interesting that many black parents have felt sending their children back to far poorer societies would cure their bad behaviour in England, suggesting that the parents see England as part of the problem. In my older friend’s case, however, the trip had the opposite effect, he came back feeling that boys in England were soft compared to the reality encountered in Nigeria. It saved him in one sense, I suppose – in the year he was away there was a very gruesome murder in our area of a young boy who had a very big name in the streets. Some of my older friend’s crew went to prison for that murder so if he had been in the country he might have been involved. That murder led to a spiral of street rivalries that resulted in many deaths. Anyway, back to the day in question.
My ‘older’ also had his knife on him, which he had now taken out, and was calling his attackers ‘pussyholes’. I had not noticed that one of the attackers had disappeared. My friend retreated from the street into the doorway of the barber shop, just a yard or two from where I was sat. I noticed the other attacker reappear inside the shop; he had used the other entrance through the women’s salon to sneak up behind my friend. It happened so quickly I couldn’t even warn him before the meat cleaver came down on the back of his skull – twice? Three times maybe? What seemed like endless amounts of blood spewed everywhere. I remember being struck by the stains running down the fridge, the fridge that we used to buy our ginger beer and grape soda from. It was also the sound that was most unsettling, the sound of blade cracking bone, puncturing veins and tearing into flesh. Maybe it’s because I love music so much, maybe I am just strange, but every time I have seen someone get stabbed it’s been the sound more than the visual of the violence that’s really struck me. I got used to that sound.
My friend was already fifteen stone at that age and a seasoned ‘road man’, but even I was shocked at the toughness of his reaction to being literally chopped in the head several times; he did not drop to the floor, he did not even scream. He chased his stabber out of the shop promising to kill him and calling him a pussyhole a few more times. The attackers ran off, satisfied they had done enough. Someone passed my guy a towel to wrap his head while he waited for the ambulance and he finally showed some signs of pain, while continuing to promise death upon his attackers. What is most remarkable to me, looking back now, is that nobody even stopped cutting hair. An attempted murder among what were in reality mere boys was thought to be so mundane as not to warrant any panic. Even I only made a brief trip to the phone box – remember those things? – to call my other friend and tell him that his older brother had been chopped in the head and that he should go to the hospital and check in on him. My friend, knowing his big brother’s lifestyle, did not seem that taken aback, and it’s only now I realise the horror of having to make that call as a mere child – I thought I was a man already at the time. I knew their mum well, I stayed at their house frequently, and I also knew I could not tell their mum what had happened as it was against the rules. She would obviously find out soon enough but it was not my place to say.
I returned to the barber’s and waited for my Saturday trim. I remember a girl crying at the scene, the girl that my friend had come to the barber’s to meet – it was pretty obvious to all she had set him up on behalf of the other boys, a very common tactic in ‘the hood’. I don’t remember the police turning up and though they must have it would not have made a difference; nobody, including me, would say they saw anything. So there is no confusion, despite our dislike of police the code as to what constitutes ‘snitching’ is much more complex than outsiders want to imagine. For example, had the attackers been stabbing a grandmother people certainly would have tried to intervene and would have had no problem handing over the granny attacker to the police, had we not killed him in the process first. But three young men stabbing each other, when all were known locally as rude boys, was never going to generate a swathe of willing witnesses, even though at least ten of us saw what had happened. What’s more, even the victim would not have wanted anyone to talk; it would be street justice or none at all.
What’s striking about my own reaction is that I was not traumatised. Despite never having before seen an act of comparable violence before that day, it was as if I was expecting such an incident and had mentally prepared for the encounter. My friend went to the hospital and recovered pretty quickly. He was then sent back to prison straight from the hospital for violation of his bail conditions.
Many more of my peers were stabbed before my eyes, a few boys I knew personally got killed, others went to prison for murder and there were many more police searches too. I went to clubs and parties where people got shot, extreme violence became a normal and accepted daily possibility. There were other dangers too, I recall seeing crackheads openly smoking up in a pre-gentrified Dalston Kingsland station, I saw a heroin addict overdose in Finsbury Park, I recall Broadwater Farm and Stratford Rex and under-eighteens raves and CS gas and beatings and bats and blades and the constant stench of danger.
Just a few short years after that first stabbing in the barber shop and that first search by the police, I was a completely different person. At thirteen I was still a rather soft boy to be honest; while very tall for my age, my physical stature masked an insecure, naturally geeky little boy. But by sixteen, despite all the benefits of pan-African Saturday school, a loving mother, the distraction of a potential career in professional footbal
l, many male role models and even straight As at school, I’d still become the stereotype in many ways. I carried my own knife inside the pocket of my silver Avirex jacket. It was a flick knife given to me by another local boy who I was not that close with but who happened to be on hand when I was attacked over some foolishness by two grown men, one of whom was armed with a long blade. I kept it. I liked it, it made me feel safer, less vulnerable and also gave me a magnetic sense of doom, danger and power – a sense that I was tough. However, my knife sat uneasily with my reality and my prospects. I started to smoke weed the night before football matches and I committed petty crimes. One of my friends sometimes took his dad’s gun from under the bed; they lived opposite a crack den and so his dad kept the gun for protection. We took it to the streets, and the gun was brandished more than once. I got into fights, bottles and weapons came out, yet I somehow remained relatively unharmed – a bruised lip here and battered ego there, but all in all I emerged relatively unscathed physically. I had become a very volatile young man, quite capable of articulating my thoughts and quite willing to smash someone’s face in given the right circumstances.
How did such a transformation occur in such a short space of time? How did the sweet, smiley eleven-year-old that wanted to be a scientist become the scowling, knife-carrying man-boy of sixteen? How did the knife-carrying sixteen-year-old then turn into the adult that teaches Shakespeare and lectures at Oxford? At eleven I was a ‘mummy’s boy’; I cried far more than my older sister and she made fun of me for it. By eighteen my sister knew that I was capable of grotesque violence – she had had to talk me and my friends out of trying to kill one of a group of boys we had got into a fracas with earlier that day. In an odd twist of fate, my friend who had been chopped in the head also talked us out of this action and thought we were being stupid. To him, a man that was now knee-deep in organised crime – don’t worry murder I am not dry snitching, my friend did his time! – killing someone over something so small as a glorified punch-up and a bruised ego was stupid – he had graduated beyond his teenage self, and now only major street beef would be worth contemplating murder for. Strangely, he was also the first one of my peers to ever give me a book. It was a novel called The Fourth K by Mario Puzo, and incidentally he’d found his love for espionage novels while in prison, not in school. He also had the most eclectic music tastes out of any of the man dem; he played me Nirvana and Radiohead before anyone else.