“Can you help us?” they ask in relation to last week’s shooting of two 17-year-olds in the nearby McDonald’s. “Did you see or hear anything?”

At the fast-food outlet, mothers with young children clutch balloons and oversized milkshakes. But behind the veneer of normality there is a sense of anxiety and despair.

London’s black communities are engaged in soul-searching about the alarming tendency for their children to argue through the barrel of a gun. The front page of The Voice newspaper is dominated this week by a “Stop” sign peppered with bulletholes and accompanied by pictures of black-on-black gun victims.

“Black people are mortified, astonished and exasperated,” said Decima Francis, who has worked for a decade with young men caught up in gangs and crime. “We just don’t know how it’s got to the point where young black men think it’s better to be dead than alive.

“When people are being shot because they ‘disrespect’ someone — a remark about a hairstyle, chatting up someone else’s girlfriend — it’s just insane and it needs to stop.

“Young men don’t seem to value their lives or their culture. They call each other ‘niggers’ — like the Ku Klux Klan and the rednecks used to call us — and they shoot each other in the streets. Once you start degrading yourself, giving yourself those names, you make yourself worthless.”

Ms Francis’s experience is that the gunmen are getting younger and she says that even the 19-year-olds she visits in prison are alarmed by the behaviour of the 13 and 14-year-olds. She said: “They say that these kids are so cold, they don’t have any sense of what they’re doing.”

Ms Francis works with a number of projects, including Calling The Shots and the From Boyhood to Manhood Foundation, helping to prise youngsters from the clutches of gang leaders and get them back into education.

Scotland Yard’s Operation Trident has the confidence of many in the black community but there is a sense that the answer will come from within and not from outside. Interviewed in The Voice, Bishop John Francis, of Street Pastors, said: “The answer does not lie with police alone. They can set up all these programmes but we have to change the culture.”

www.fbmf.co.uk

www.stoptheguns.org

www.callingtheshots.org.uk

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