In a matter of fact way, Denny Mendoza admits: “Yeah, I done stuff, I’ve been
in jail. That was a phase I was going through, one you go through as a black
man in urban society.
“You know, you get in trouble, school is frustrating. Most of the teachers
didn’t bear any relation to me. And when you get kicked out of school, you
think you’re not gonna get a job.
“But you gotta eat and live — how you gonna do that? You think, ‘I’m gonna
build an empire. A bit of drug dealing. I’ll start with a little piece, then
an ounce, then two and then I’ll get a key [a kilo] and I’ll be a baron.’
“But it doesn’t work out like that. I made a lot of money at one point, then
it ended in a day: the day I got nicked. That was it. You either get nicked
or you get killed.”
Mendoza, now 35, was lucky enough to forge a new life after release from
prison. He now runs Capo-Power, a communications group in London that helps
urban youngsters and is about to release a documentary examining life on
inner-city estates. It’s not a pretty picture.
The culture of gangs and drugs is more pervasive than ever, particularly among
the young. Broken families and absent fathers have bred a generation of
youngsters that glory in violent rap music and find comfort in a gun, say
critics.
Last week that culture claimed the life of 15-year-old Billy Cox, the fifth
such slaying in London in two weeks. Four were shot and one was stabbed in
the street. Yesterday another man was shot dead in London and three were
injured in shootings in Manchester.
The appalling, casual brutality was all the more shocking since two of the
London victims were just 15 — and both were apparently executed in their own
homes. Another was 16, shot in front of scores of onlook-ers at an ice rink.
Cox was found by his 13-year-old sister as she returned from school. She heard
a bang as she approached their home in Clapham, south London, and discovered
her brother mortally wounded in the chest. She tried to save him and ran to
neighbours for help, but it was too late.
“I doubt she’ll ever recover from the shock of this,” said a neighbour. “Her
clothes and hands were covered in her brother’s blood and she was sobbing
uncontrollably.”
Later Billy’s distraught father said: “We are missing Billy so much. He was
not perfect, but he was dearly loved. I’ve been watching the news about the
two other boys shot and thought — these are just kids. They don’t deserve
that.
“The way they get hold of guns now is unbelievable.”
John Baxter, 19, who grew up with Billy, could attest to that. “It’s easy to
get guns,” he said as he hung around the estate last week. “Too easy. I
could make one phone call, I could get a Glock, a Mac10, an Uzi, a Beretta
9mm. Any gun. One call.” IN the aftermath of the killings, the authorities
tried to reassure the public. “This is not a metaphor for the state of
British society,” said Tony Blair. “It is a specific problem, in a specific
criminal culture among specific groups of young people.” The police declared
that gun crime has been falling recently.
Up to a point. It is true that the number of murders committed with firearms
has dipped from a peak in 2001-02. But the overall level of violence from
people using firearms has soared in the past decade.
In 1998-99 there were 653 “slight injuries” from recorded offences involving
firearms; in 2004-05 the figure was 3,369. Over the same period the number
of “serious injuries” jumped from 162 to 410.
Other figures reflect how handguns in particular have taken an increasing hold
in street culture. While the number of offences involving shotguns has
remained broadly level, the use of handguns has almost doubled. The use of
“imitation firearms” — typically replica handguns that can be made to fire
bullets — has gone up more than fivefold.
Gun crime has become so common it often passes almost unnoticed. Last week,
while attention focused on the London killings, a hooded robber burst into a
shop called Super Booze in Liverpool armed with a gun. Police believe the
suspect has carried out 19 similar raids in the past two months alone.
In Burton, Staffordshire, four men, one brandishing a handgun, robbed a van
outside a Tesco supermarket in mid afternoon. In Leeds a man was found
guilty of murder after a shooting outside a nightclub last year — the
incident had begun when two men simply bumped into each other.
And in London on Friday two men were jailed for dealing in weapons. They had
been caught with 18 pistols, 18 silencers and 748 rounds of ammunition in
the boot of a car.
Blair can claim figures show gun crime is mainly a problem of specific areas
because more than half of all recorded gun crime in England and Wales
happens in London, Greater Manchester, Nottinghamshire and the West Midlands.
But relatives of the victims and other observers fear gun and gang culture is
now spiral-ling beyond its previous boundaries. Ivette Bryan-Graham, whose
son Javorie Crighton was killed in Peckham, south London, on February 3,
said: “Youths are roaming wild and nothing is being done about it.”
In the past 18 months, Operation Trident, set up to tackle “black on black
crime” in London, has dealt with 35 murders; of those charged in relation to
the killings more than half are teenagers. In the West Midlands two children
aged 13 and 15 were arrested in possession of firearms in July 2005.
Daniel Silverstone, a lecturer at the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies at
Portsmouth University, said: “The biggest change has been the availability
of converted imitation firearms made to fire real bullets.
“Over the past few years, younger criminals have been getting these weapons
and older criminals therefore want to have real weapons. There’s been
something of an arms race.”
Imitation weapons can be bought for as little at £20; a real handgun can cost
anything from a few hundred pounds to more than £1,000; and a study by
Silverstone, who interviewed offenders in prison, put the cost of automatic
weapons at anything up to £4,000.
In the past, the wider community has silently taken comfort from the fact that
many killings are “black on black”. It was the stuff of ethnic ghettos. No
need to worry.
Rap music is often blamed for glorifying violence: “Nothing left to do, but
buy some shells for my Glock / Why? so I can rob every known dope spot” sang
Snoop Dogg. But now violent films and computer games have become the norm
beyond black culture.
Billy Cox was not black; his father is white, his mother Thai. Nor was he the
stereotypical image of a ghetto victim. He was brought up in a stable
family, his father a builder and his mother a cleaner. Their estate in
Clapham is a few hundred yards from the million-pound villas of City
slickers.
Cox’s mother tried to do the best for her children, often taking his sister
Elizabeth to ballet classes. “Her mum was always travelling back and forth
with her, she was very dedicated,” said a neighbour who asked not to be
named. “Elizabeth was very good.” She recently won a place at the Royal
Ballet School.
Aiden Jama, 22, who lives in the flat above on the Fenwick estate, said:
“Billy was a good guy, friendly and would always say hello. I never saw him
fighting or giving attitude.”
But about a year ago Cox’s life began to spiral out of control. Somewhere he
fell in with a “bad crowd”; he was convicted of burglary and expelled from
school. He began dealing in drugs. And yesterday a former teen gang
“general” claimed that Billy and his friends had already clubbed together to
buy a gun.
It is all too easy to fall prey to the drug dealers and gangs, according to
Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company, an organisation that helps
vulnerable children.
“It’s usually a child who doesn’t have much support at home or in school. The
local drug dealers know who they are, they live on the same estate, they
hang out there.
“They target the vulnerable, they offer a way out of being a victim, a rung
up, an alternative home.”
The youngsters find safety in numbers, too. While south London gangs such as
the Peckham Boys and the Clap Town Kids are looser affairs than Los Angeles
models such as the Crips, they provide people who “have your back” — they
look after you.
There is also the lure of money and the strutting of status. Cox, said
friends, could not have been heavily into drug dealing. Why not? “How much
trainers did he have and how much clothes?” asked one. “If he had money, he
would have had more expensive trainers.” WHAT can be done? The government
has tightened the laws on owning firearms and increased the penalties for
illegal use. It hasn’t stopped the rise in offences.
The police have created specialist units to tackle gun crime and various
pressure groups have grown up. Their impact is hard to measure.
Batmanghelidjh believes that much more time and money must be invested in
providing vulnerable youngsters with emotional support and guidance. Shaun
Bailey, a youth worker who grew up on a tough north London estate, believes
it is vital to revive family values.
“It is only recently that people have started talking about how good it is to
be in a two-parent nuclear family,” he said. “It’s not rocket science. If we
don’t give our children moral guidance you get what we have just seen.”
Denny Mendoza suggests that schools should deliver more practical lessons.
“They teach a load of stuff kids don’t need to know. They should be teaching
them how to deal with life,” he said. “It’s all very well telling me about
the battle of Hastings and the Bayeux tapestry, but what am I gonna do when
a bro’ comes up to me and wants to punch me in the face when I’m, like,
eight?
“They need to know how to deal with these things.”
For until the spiral can be broken, violence tends to beget more violence.
Last week on the Fenwick estate some of the talk was of vengeance. “If the
police don’t find out who did it, someone from round here will,” said a
teenager who grew up with Cox. “Someone will die for this.”
Gun crime Britain
Crimes involving the use of firearms in England and Wales have doubled
since the late 1990s, according to Home Office research
- A study of 80 offenders by researchers at Portsmouth University found that
“with few exceptions, they had grown up in disrupted family environments,
underachieved in and had been excluded from mainstream education and had
poor work histories”
- The same study found many offenders who used guns had also been victims of
gun crime. Half had been threatened with guns, 29 shot at and eight wounded.
In addition, 26 claimed friends or family had been shot dead
- An analysis of data from eight police forces in 2002-03 showed that 48% of
offenders using firearms were aged 15-24. According to the Metropolitan
police, “offenders and victims are getting younger, and a disproportionate
number are African Caribbean”
- Automatic weapons were banned by the Firearms Act 1937. Semi-automatic
rifles were banned after the massacre of 16 people in Hungerford in 1987
- Handguns were banned in 1997 after the Dunblane massacre in which 16
children and a teacher died n Typical prices for illegal guns are: £50-£200
for a shotgun; £200 for a used handgun; £1,000 or more for an unused
handgun; £400-£800 for a converted imitation gun
- In north London, tit-for-tat violence occurs between the Tottenham Man Dem
gang and the Hackney Boys. “In south London, the picture appears more
complex,” researchers found, with rivalries between areas but also within
them
Additional reporting: Will Iredale, Brendan Montague
