Tonight we delve deeper into the issue of so called gangs in London and how we can understand and address the issue.
Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (the body that replaced the Commission for Racial Equality), waded into the debate in typically controversial fashion, namely an article for the Mail On Sunday headlined: “This is black children killing black children’: Former Equality Commission chairman TREVOR PHILLIPS says white liberals need to ‘tell the truth.” (1) In spite of the headline, the article is tellingly anchored around the murder of 21 year-old white Romanian migrant Beniamin Pieknyi, even though the main assailant of the group that killed him was a fellow European, Vladyslav Yakymchuk, who was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. (2) Yet Phillips ploughs ahead suggesting that focus on police numbers is “irrelevant” but that they should be allowed to effectively profile young Afrikan people at will and be given “exemption from race discrimination laws for a limited period.” (3)
This latter point in particular was met with widespread incredulity from those who were unaware that the police have ever been constricted by race discrimination laws (or many others, for that matter) – given their record on every thing from stop and search to deaths in custody. (4)
Among his menu of solutions Phillips includes the wearing of body cameras for the police, rehousing at risk families and boarding schools for affected young people. (5)
It’s ironic that six months after Amnesty International slammed the Metropolitan Police’s discriminatory profiling of young Afrikans via it’s Gangs Matrix, Trevor Phillips is actually calling for more of the same. (6)
It’s unlikely that Phillips is unaware of the grave implications of his suggestions. Far from incipient, war has been waged upon young Afrikans in the UK for generations. Back 1978 Stuart Hall and others charted the created (by government, judiciary, media, etc.) “moral panic” around mugging and Black youth that has persisted in variant forms ever since. (7) The panics were frequently spearheaded police operations with names like “Swamp 81,” “Blunt,” and “Shield,” ostensibly bent on criminalising increasing numbers of young Afrikans.
• Launched in April 1981 in Brixton, Operation Swamp 81, perhaps taking it’s cue from then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s dog whistling of two years earlier (8), stopped 943 people and arrested 118, charged only seventy-five (one with robbery) in four days. This operation was the pivotal factor in the Brixton Uprisings that began just a few days later. (9)
• After the then Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Stephenson declared that youth violence now takes precedence over the “war on terror,” Operation Blunt was carried out over six weeks in the summer of 2008. 27,000 searched were people with 1,200 being arrested and 500 knives seized. 4% of those searched were eventually charged. (10)
• Operation Shield was a pilot trialled in the London boroughs of Haringey, Lambeth and Westminster, with the objective of enabling the Metropolitan Police’s “Trident unit and local authorities to bring civil or criminal sanctions to known gang members.” (11) A total of 19 gangs and 321 individuals were selected across the three boroughs. 85% (272) Black African-Caribbean and 94% (300) Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME). Haringey had the greatest proportion of African-Caribbean individuals (96%). A noteworthy omission, however, was the Tottenham Turkish Boys from the Haringey Gang Matrix, even though they are said to be part of an organised crime clan, exerting power and influence far bigger and deadlier than all of the other gangs in the borough combined. (12) Nevertheless, the conclusion arrived at once the pilot was evaluated:
“As a result, there is no clear narrative in terms of an impact upon either overall offending, or on the violent offending of the specific shield nominals in the 13 months subsequent to delivery.” (13)
In other words, the £200,000 project could identity no discernible impact. Veteran activist Stafford Scott of The Monitoring Group in his extended essay, The War On Gangs Or A Racialised War On Working Class Black Youths, offered his analysis of why:
“It really is unsurprising that there would be no impact on violent offending because the entire Operation Shield pilot was based on a bogus presumption that the Gang Matrix was populated with the most violent gang members, when clearly this is not the case.” (14)
This is the kind of impulse that led Trevor Phillips to wax about 10 year-olds wielding automatic rifles, (15) or the police to claim that Mark Duggan, whose execution sparked the 2011 uprisings, was one of the 48 most violent criminals in Europe. (16) It is the kind impulse that caused Sky News to create a violent knife gang out of thin air by misrepresenting a group of teenagers they interviewed about why it is wrong to carry knives. (17)
Through the proliferation of propaganda about “gangs” and by extension “gangsters” has brought us to a juncture where: “The inclusion of the term ‘gangster culture’ meant the Government, whether wittingly or unwittingly, was initiating a process that would ultimately criminalise, not just the targeted ‘gang members’ themselves, but also their friends, their peers, the local neighbourhoods, and in turn their local community.” (18)
This should make it clear that it is not just “Black gangsters” that are in the state’s cross hairs but the entire community. In addition to the day to day harassment and media onslaught the very manner that the Gangs Matrix database is currently run not only breaks data protection laws bur also the Metropolitan Police’s own rules. The Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, said flaws in the Matrix of 3,200 names were so bad that in some cases “Al Capone”- style enforcement tactics were being deployed against people listed on the database solely as victims of crime. She added that as a result of these “serious breaches” the police Scotland Yard is wrongly jeopardising the future of some young black Londoners. (19) The fact that details of the database have been leaked online can only increase the danger. (20)
This injustice against our young people, arguably exposes the inability of the community at large to protect them – in spite of the demonstrably inter-generational nature of the police profiling encompassing not only today’s young people but also their parents and even grandparents throughout the years.. In the previous programme we looked at Rites Of Passage programmes as way to address the issue. Laudable as they are though, to be truly effective on the scale required, Rites Of Passage programmes need to be institutionalised throughout the community. Other direct action strategies striving to “make sure our children… can simply walk where they can feel safe and doesn’t have fe worry about getting shot or stabbed,” like that demonstrated by G.A.N.G. (Guiding A New Generation), also form part of the response. (21)
But as organised as the forces rained against our children are, the response should be organised, collective, comprehensive and able to provide a clear analysis of the real issues (as opposed to sensationalised media fodder). This is something probably beyond the scope of the various initiatives currently being deployed but should, ideally, form part of a cohesive national agenda, were one to exist.
(1) Trevor Phillips (11/11/18) ‘This is black children killing black children’: Former Equality Commission chairman TREVOR PHILLIPS says white liberals need to ‘tell the truth.’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6376287/Former-Equality-Commission-chairman-TREVOR-PHILLIPS-black-children-killing-black-children.html
(2) Tom Powell(07/11/18) Beniamin Pieknyi: Family of Romanian stabbed to death weeks after moving to London return home out of safety fears as killers are jailed for 48 years. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/beniamin-pieknyi-family-of-romanian-stabbed-to-death-weeks-after-moving-to-london-return-home-out-of-a3983806.html
(3) Phillips. Op. cit.
(4) Home Office (11/05/18) Stop and search. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-law/policing/stop-and-search/latest; Dame Elish Angiolini DBE QC (2017) Report of the Independent Review of Deaths and Serious Incidents in Police Custody. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/655401/Report_of_Angiolini_Review_ISBN_Accessible.pdf; David Lammy (08/09/17) The racial bias in our justice system is creating a social timebomb. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/08/david-lammy-review-bame-children-face-prejudice-flawed-criminal-justice-system
(5) Phillips. Op. cit.
(6) Amnesty International (2018) TRAPPED IN THE MATRIX: Secrecy, stigma, and bias in the Met’s Gangs Database. p. 37. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/reports/Trapped%20in%20the%20Matrix%20Amnesty%20report.pdf.
(7) Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts (1978) Policing The Crisis: Mugging, The State, And Law And Order.. The Macmillan Press Ltd; C H Thompson (22/10/14) Stuart Hall – Policing the Crisis. https://sociologytwynham.com/2014/10/22/stuart-hall-policing-the-crisis/
(8) Radhika Natarajan (17/04/13) Ties of blood: how Thatcher altered ‘British’ . https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/radhika-natarajan/ties-of-blood-how-thatcher-altered-british http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol10no3/10.3-19-MBishop.pdf
(9) Dr Evan Smith (13/04/15) The Communist Party and the 1981 riots. https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/the-communist-party-and-the-1981-riots/
(10) Kweku Khem and Ikechukwu Ouagadou-Quamina (2008) Exposed: The propaganda war waged against our youths! The Whirlwind, Edition 6, p. 4.
(11) Stafford Scott (2018) The War On Gangs Or A Racialised War On Working Class Black Youths. The Monitoring Group. p. 31. http://www.tmg-uk.org/the-war-on-gangs-or-a-racialised-war-on-working-class-black-youths/
(12) Scott. p. 24-5
(13) Scott, p. 35
(14) Ibid.
(15) Phillips. Op cit.
(16) BBC News (23/09/13) Mark Duggan ‘among Europe’s most violent criminals’, inquest told. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24210480
(17) Khem and Ouagadou-Quamina. Op. cit
(18) Scott. p. 10.
(19) Martin Bentham (16/11/18) Scotland Yard’s secret gang matrix ‘breaks law and puts young black lives at risk’ . https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/scotland-yards-secret-gang-matrix-breaks-law-and-puts-young-black-lives-at-risk-a3991916.html
(20) Rachael Burford (09/11/18) Young Londoners put in ‘serious danger’ after names from secret Met gangs matrix are leaked online. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/young-londoners-put-in-serious-danger-after-names-from-secret-met-gangs-matrix-are-leaked-online-a3985786.html
(21) Mike Urban (10/04/18) Photos: G.A.N.G (Guiding A New Generation) solidarity walk through Stockwell and Brixton. http://www.brixtonbuzz.com/2018/04/photos-g-a-n-g-guiding-a-new-generation-solidarity-walk-through-stockwell-and-brixton/
So tonight we ask the question:
Youth violence – who is responsible? Part 2
1. Are body cameras and boarding schools the answer?
2. Why are of so many of our youth regarded as a bigger threat than terroism?
3. Who has most to gain from the online Gangs Matrix leak?
4. Are our current strategies having an impact?
5. Do we have the capacity to develop a national strategy?
Bro. Ldr. Mbandaka: Resident guest who is Spiritual Leader of the Alkebu-Lan Revivalist Movement and UNIA-ACL Ambassador for the UK and national co-Chair of the interim National Afrikan People’s Parliament. Bro. Ldr is a veteran activist of over 30 years standing, a featured columnist in The Whirlwind newspaper and author of Mosiah Daily Affirmations and Education: An African-Centred Guide To Excellence.