Afraid on Hackney’s streets

For those who witnessed the shooting, and for those who read about it in the days following, the incident rang alarm bells. Violent crime is spreading under the surface of Hackney at the moment, and it is claiming a growing number of lives.

Lives like that of 16 year-old Agnes Sina-Inakoju, an innocent schoolgirl who was shot by youths on mountain bikes as she queued for a bag of chips on Hoxton Street on Wednesday 14 April. Or Godwin Lawson, an aspiring footballer who was stabbed to death in Amhurst Park on Saturday 27 March.

Last year the number of teenage homicides in London dropped to 14 – a much-quoted statistic by politicians proud of current initiatives. Yet in the first four months of 2010, ten teenagers were murdered in the capital, and half of those deaths happened in East London. The police have described reported stabbings as the tip of the iceberg, and NHS statistics show that Hackney has some of the highest numbers of hospital admissions for knife crime injuries in London, with 56 recorded last year alone.

Worse still, firearms are increasingly on the agenda. Gun crime in Hackney is up 29.1 per cent in the last year, much more than the 14.2 per cent increase across the whole metropolitan area.

Violent crime is often gang related. While there are only an estimated 200 active gang members in Hackney of a population of around 200,000, they create a breeding ground for criminal behaviour. For the residents of Stoke Newington, shootouts like the recent one in Allen Road are rare. But for those families caught in the worst affected areas, the threat of violence is more immediate. Pauline Hemmings lives in Hoxton, minutes from the takeaway where Agnes Sina-Inakoju was killed. “When I first moved here, twenty years ago, Hackney felt safe,” she says. “But now I’m terrified just walking my eight year-old son to school.”

Politicians are quick to champion Section 60 of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which gives police the right to stop and search someone if they believe there to be a threat of serious violence. Yet the Act is highly contentious.

Ishmael Roberts, a 16 year-old college student, describes being pulled off his bike as much as twice a week by police acting on stop and search laws. “They drive up in vans and put me up against a wall on the way home from college,” he says. “We try to take detours when we see them coming, because they hold you up for so long.”

“It makes me angry,” says Gracian Duimitrow, a 14 year-old student from the same area. “We don’t like the police.”

Governments may perhaps be prepared to overlook human rights considerations in the light of statistics that show that knife crime across London has decreased 30 per cent as the result of 27,000 stop and searches and the seizure of more than 500 knives. Yet stop and search has been described as a sticking plaster of a policy, relying on the idea that potential knife-carriers will be too afraid of being stopped to leave the house with a knife, rather than addressing why they felt the need to arm themselves in the first place. The alternative for many has been to stash knives in public places or to shift weapons onto girls, who are less likely to get searched and thus act as ‘mules’.

Still the message from the top gets tougher. Last November, the then Justice Secretary Jack Straw raised the minimum sentencing term for knife crime to 25 years, just shy of the 30 year minimum for gun crime, despite large bodies of evidence suggesting that longer sentences do not act as a deterrent to young people.

Pat Sands is secretary of the Pedro Club, a youth club and drop-in centre in Rushmore Road, E5, in the middle of three of Hackney’s most challenging estates. “There is an answer to all this,” says Pat. “We need a dedicated, branded youth service, so that there is a youth club in every community centre open every day.

“In it you need proper youth workers, preferably people who’ve been around the block a few times. Then you pay those people proper money and you make sure everything in the centre works.”

At the Pedro, young people can get free boxing lessons, make music and internet radio shows in the club’s studio, play pool and most importantly stay off the streets. Places like the Pedro act as a sanctuary for the poorest kids. And they really do work – according to residents, when the club was forced to close for a couple of years owing to lack of funding, violent crime in the area increased sharply.

Darrell James grew up in the area and spent time in prison for drug offences before deciding to become a mentor at the Pedro. He describes how, in deprived such as parts of E5, gangs clash over territory, as young people struggle to assert control over the one thing that can lay claim to: the streets.

“These kids haven’t got anything to lose,” says Darrell. “Most of the kids that are involved in knife crime don’t care if they get a 25 year jail sentence. I say train them, give them enough so that when they leave school they say ‘what can I be?’ A guy that knows he can achieve, you can take something away from him. You can take away his freedom and that will be enough.”

According to Christophe Lutard, a play worker at Shakespeare Walk Adventure Playground (SWAPA), education must include information about the risks. “Kids become aware of knives by 12 or 13, but they will have brushed against it when they were younger, so you need to raise the issues with them before then,” he says. At SWAPA, where memories of a once notorious local gang called SOS (Soldiers Of Shakespeare) still linger, community police officers have built up a good relationship with local children and provide presentations and workshops to keep them informed. But it doesn’t stop them from being afraid. “By 14 or 15 the young people are very aware of [the threat] and they’re frightened to leave the area,” he explains. “That’s why they carry knives: they don’t intend to use them but they’re scared.”

For many, crossing the line to carrying a knife can start a downward spiral. Statistics show that people who carry a knife are three times as likely to be the victim of knife crime, while 60 per cent of young people serving short-term sentences reoffend. Simply taking the knives from carriers is not enough – children need to be taught earlier about the risks, and given far better pastoral care, especially during rehabilitation.

Meg Hillier, MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, describes the pincer action needed to prevent violent crime in the borough. She advocates a program of prevention in schools alongside the dismantling of gangs by the borough commanders and Operation Trident, which tackles crime in the city’s black community. “There is very intensive work going on, but we can’t alert the people we’re trying to catch,” she says. And in the meantime: “We need to make sure people have safe places to go and that they have the confidence to deal with these problems.”

To do that, according to Pat Sands at the Pedro, you need to be recruiting the right people. “I’ve got five lads outside my club and they’re working in the only way they know, selling drugs or whatever,” he explains. “I would like to go out to those five kids and say ‘I’ve got £20,000 here for each of you who wants to be a youth worker.’ I might not get them all, but I bet I’d get two or three.”

Christophe (of SWAPA) agrees: “There’s always money for big projects but then there’s no money to keep them going, because every time you need funding it has to be for something new.” Pat and Christophe both describe funding application forms that take days to complete, severely restricting access to money, which may be the reason that so few youth clubs survive in Hackney today.

Pride, linked with aggressive territorialism, is often at the root of the problem. The lack of positive role models and the disenfranchisement of young black males in the poorest of boroughs can breed discontent and violence that makes easy prey for gangs. Stop and search, with its dehumanising approach, can only intensify that problem while inciting deep-seated resentment of the police.

Dismantling gangs must be a priority for any politician. Children need to be freed from the fear that incites violent crime. Young people need to feel part of a society bigger than the postcode they live in. Without this, Hackney may become dangerously fragmented.

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