At about 6pm on Saturday last week, Dimitri Foskin left home in the Newtown
area of Birmingham to hang out nearby with his friends and cousins. At
9.45pm he was seen in nearby Kensington Street. Ten minutes later, two
figures were glimpsed running through Hockley Close, a cul-de-sac of modest
homes just 200 yards from the house in Guildford Drive where Foskin, an
unemployed 24-year-old, lived with his 49-year-old mother. One of the men
appeared to be chasing the other. Then people heard a loud bang, followed by
a scream.
At 10.13pm West Midlands ambulance service received a call from a homeowner
reporting a body in his driveway. When paramedics reached Foskin he had no
pulse. A postmortem confirmed that he had died of a single gunshot to the
chest.
It was the third fatal shooting in Newtown in less than a year. In total, 22
people have been murdered in the West Midlands since December. At least
three of the deaths were gang-related. Foskin had friends affiliated to a
gang.
Violent crime in the West Midlands last reached a peak more than five years
ago, when on New Year’s Eve 2002 bystanders Letisha Shake-speare, 17, and
Charlene Ellis, 18, were shot outside a party at a hair salon with a MAC10
sub-machine-gun. That provoked outrage and a fresh approach to reducing
violent gang-led crime in the area.
“We’ve been very successful over the past five years in suppressing incidents
and stopping people getting shot or injured,” said Suzette Davenport, West
Midlands assistant chief constable. “This is the first spike we have had in
that time.”
The figures speak for themselves. In 2002 there were 27 gang-related murders
in Birmingham. In 2006 the number had dropped to two and there were two more
last year.
That’s still too many, of course. Barbara Sawyers’s son Daniel Bogle, 19, was
shot by gang members in a case of mistaken identity five years ago. She runs
an organisation, Mothers in Pain, to help people deal with similar losses:
“It really saddens me that it’s still happening. It breaks my heart.”
How did Birmingham’s approach – combining police, social services, education,
public health, housing, urban regeneration bodies and the public – succeed
in keeping down the murderous attacks? And what did they stop doing right
that led to the recent increase?
Since the New Year party murders, leading members of the notorious Burger Bar
gang and Johnson Crew have been put in prison. Of the 50 most dangerous gun
criminals, 25 are in jail: either sentenced or awaiting trial.
Distressingly, it has been suggested that the new outbreak of violence is a
result of police successes: a mafia Godfather-style jockeying for position
by younger members taking advantage of the power vacuum.
Derrick Campbell, an adviser to the Home Office and part of Birmingham’s
strategy of reducing gang violence, is one who believes that younger members
are fighting among themselves for supremacy. “The police had short-term
success convicting senior gang members,” he says, “but there was no
long-term strategy. I fear in the next week or two there could be more
murders.”
Kirk Dawes, a former police officer now working as a mediator between the
gangs, accepts that tension is high but rejects Campbell’s theory. If the
recent shootings were about establishing preeminence, we’d be seeing key
gang members being shot, Dawes says – and we’re not: “This is about issues
of respect. When you talk to them, they say, ‘They did this to me and if I
don’t do something back then I’ll be considered weak’. Or, to use their own
vernacular, ‘a pussy’.”
Dawes runs the West Midlands Transformation and Mediation Service which he
helped to set up with Detective Superintendent Peter O’Neill in response to
the New Year party murders.
“One of the things that hadn’t been considered,” Dawes says, “is how do you
get warring people to sit down and talk about their differences without
using extreme violence? It was something that had never been tried in
England. For too long there would be a critical incident and efforts would
be made to fix things and then they’d fall away until something else
happened. We needed an ongoing relationship.”
A group led by O’Neill visited Belfast to learn first-hand from go-betweens
who brokered truces between paramilitaries. They also travelled to New
Jersey, where mediation persuaded two of America’s bitterest enemy gangs,
the Bloods and the Crips, to sign a peace treaty.
Setting up a similar mediation service, with backing from the then chief
constable, O’Neill, Dawes and others gained the ability to keep in touch
with the people carrying guns and shooting each other. “You’re engaged in
continuous dialogue with them,” Dawes says, “not only speaking to them when
something goes wrong.”
Having retired from the police force, Dawes is keen to emphasise that the
mediation and transformation service is not a police scheme. The mediators
include a forensic psychologist, people who were involved in gangs, firemen,
youth workers, church leaders, probation officers and mothers who have lost
their children, including Sawyers.
One of the first five mediators to do the training was Leroy McKoy, a former
drug smuggler who served 10 years in jail but was inspired by Nelson Mandela
– like him, an ex-convict – to change his ways. “I am trying all the time to
convince the young people that there is a better way and they do not have to
make the mistakes I made,” he says.
And with considerable success.
“The people I first went to with mediation three years ago – and I’m talking
about hardcore players – they now want to be mediators.”
As well as mediating, Birmingham’s approach helps to provide mentoring for
young people – giving them an alternative to life in gangs. One person
providing that is Marc Edwards, a former gang member who changed his ways
after a friend died in his arms. He set up Young Disciples seven years ago
to work with socially excluded youngsters and their families, particularly
people who normally wouldn’t talk to public services.
The results can be dramatic. A girl called Charlie Angel, brought up by an
alcoholic single mother, got involved in shoplifting, fraud and robbery on
public transport through an all-female gang called Scare Dem. She was sent
to prison for five months and was deeply shaken by the experience. “I can’t
even describe it,” she says. “I’m trauma-tised about it now.”
On her release she found Young Disciples and a whole new outlook: “Young
Disciples made me identify what I am good at which is my singing. I knew I
was good before, but I just needed some confidence.”
Another young person was steered from a five-year prison term to a place at
university and now a job. “That’s the type of progression I’m dealing with,”
says Edwards, with evident satisfaction.
Chris Lue is another reformed gangster who provides mentoring by telling young
people the grim truth about life in gangs.
“When I was going to the toilet I used to carry my gun,” he says to them.
“When I was having a bath, I used to take my gun. You never can tell when
they’re going to come, so I was always prepared.”
If anything, Lue believes that the nature of gangs has got worse and much more
territorial: “If you’re brought up in a particular area, or postcode, you’re
recognised as belonging to a gang from that area, even if you don’t. A lot
of people don’t want to be involved in gangs but if they walk to the city
centre on their own they can get hurt.” Lue believes the problem is largely
disregarded because most of the violent crime is black-on-black.
Sawyers puts on a Saturday class offering creative outlets for young people,
including cookery. She tries to discuss the craziness of gang culture: “We
say, ‘Well, what’s this postcode business all about?’ And the young people
don’t even know. They like the same food, they dress the same, listen to the
same music – they all are the same and this is what I can’t understand.”
The work done by these people should be recognised as good practice, says
Edwards, and paid appropriately. He believes it offers value for money: “To
incarcerate somebody in a young offenders’ institute costs about £50,000. To
house a young person in a secure unit costs £200,000. I run a youth
programme for one year which has to engage 30 young people each week and I
get £60,000.”
Funding for this kind of work has been cut. Dawes speaks for many others who
feel deep grievance: “It’s as though the authorities think that the people
providing this service are doing it as a hobby. They’re not.”
The dependence on external funding, although bitterly resented, seems to be
unavoidable. And the financial squeeze has come at a time when the
programmes set up after the New Year murders are changing. O’Neill, the
policeman who started the mediation service, has left the force and moved to
London to launch a similar venture. And all five of the original mediators
have left.
McKoy explains why: “[Dawes] is too closely affiliated with the police. When
you go to the youth they ask, ‘Who funds you?’ If you’re funded by the
police they say, ‘You baiting me up [preparing me for arrest]?’ ” Alas,
relations seem only to be worsening between disaffected young people and a
police force under ever greater pressure to reduce violent crime. “The youth
have grown up with bitterness towards the police,” says McKoy. “When you
have not had any education and you grow up unable to express yourself, you
get alienated. Then there is the environment – the degradation and poverty.
A lot of these young people can’t even leave their street. They have nothing
to live for. They say to me, ‘I don’t give a f*** about dying’. And this is
really dangerous.”
What many of these mediators or mentors are doing is, essentially,
state-sponsored parenting. But in such a deprived setting, where so many
families have broken down or are dysfunctional, the sorry truth is that
there can never be enough “parents” to go round.
