Kevin Martin, pictured, from Glasgow, was 15 when he was arrested for possession of a machete and a kitchen knife following a community event to bring rival gangs together
What drives a 15-year-old boy to carry a machete and a kitchen knife in his sports bag with the same nonchalance that he would carry his trainers?
Kevin Martin knows — he was that teenage boy — but says there’s no deep and meaningful explanation. ‘You get to a point where it’s just normal. There was no, “Oh look at me, I’m tough because I’ve got this big machete.” It was just something you did.’
Where does a 15-year-old even get a machete? Kevin, now 24, smiles at the naivety of the question. ‘Oh you can always get them.’
What’s so striking about Kevin’s story is how effortless it is, that shift from ordinary teenage ‘messing around stuff’, as he puts it, to potentially taking another life. Also, how easily innocent people can get caught up in it.
On the day he was arrested, aged 15, for possession of a machete, he and his mates had gone to a community football event, designed (he rolls his eyes at the irony) to bring rival gangs together. He and his mates went ‘tooled up’ because in a clash at a previous game he had ended up headbutting a rival.
Chaos broke out again. This time, football was abandoned as the rival gang’s reinforcements climbed over fences. A chase ensued. ‘We ran. It was mental. Bottles flying, all sorts.
‘There was a building where a yoga class was going on. I’ll never forget us diving in there. Women screaming. Bottles and bricks were flying. I had this machete and a kitchen knife in my bag, but there were also baseball bats.’
Crucially, someone called the police and Kevin was arrested before he could use the machete. ‘I don’t know if I’d have known what to do with it. It was bigger than me.’
At the time, Kevin — who already had a police charge sheet a mile long, mostly for vandalism and assault — was devastated to be charged with possession of an offensive weapon, but it could have been worse. He says he was ‘on that path to God knows where. I was lucky. If they hadn’t got me then, I don’t know what would have happened. I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you today.’
Yet it was not luck that saved Kevin, it was design. He found himself in the criminal justice system soon after Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit was set up — a response to his hometown Glasgow being dubbed the knife crime capital of Europe. Glasgow was, then, as London seems today — a Wild West where the killings of youngsters seemed out of control.
But by 2005 one woman had had enough. Karyn McCluskey, a former forensic psychologist then working for Strathclyde Police, says her watershed moment came when she read a story in a paper of a young boy who died in a stranger’s arms. He bled to death crying for his mum. ‘I sat back and waited for the public outrage. There wasn’t any,’ she later explained. ‘And I thought: “Not right.” ’
That Karyn was not a police officer is perhaps significant. Although it would be closely linked with the police force, the whole point of the Violence Reduction Unit was that it would treat the knife crime epidemic as a public health issue, not a policing one. From the off, it would involve schools and doctors and dentists.
Karyn McCluskey, pictured, was working for Strathclyde Police in 2005 when it was decided that Violence Reduction Unit would treat knife crime as a public health issue and not a policing one and after more than a decade the approach appears to be working with a dramatic reduction in the number of stabbing deaths in the city
Gang members were aggressively pursued — not necessarily to prosecute, but to recruit. Kevin was one of those targeted. Nearly a decade after he seemed destined to be in jail or dead, he has a degree, and is studying for his Masters. His subject? Community youth work. He works in schools, mentoring youngsters. He’s among a number of one-time gang members now part of the solution, not the problem.
The figures reflect the progress made. In 2004/5 there were 137 homicides in Scotland; Glasgow accounted for 40 cases, double the national rate. By 2016/17 the number halved to 62. Last year, it was down to 59, with 58 per cent involving a sharp instrument, mostly a knife.
Little wonder community leaders in London are asking how they did it. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has herself visited Glasgow, and Mayor Sadiq Khan launched a London version of the Violence Reduction Unit last year.
Will it work? All those involved say it could, but that it is not a fast fix.
‘The Mayor of London was slated for saying change would take ten years,’ says Kevin. ‘But it did take ten years here. I am that ten years.’
Youth workers specifically target at risk youngsters in areas such as Easterhouse, pictured
But how did it work? On the frontline, was the charity FARE — it stands for Family Action in Rogerfield and Easterhouse — a charity launched in 1987 to work with vulnerable kids in one of the most deprived pockets of the country.
Blunt-talking Jimmy Wilson is now CEO for FARE but was then a youth worker. He recalls: ‘You’d come in on a Monday and there would have been at least one stabbing over the weekend, and periodically, a death. All the lads — some girls too — had knives, treating them like a wallet or mobile phone.’
All gang members had similar backgrounds. ‘There was no real male authority figure. Their brothers had been involved in this before them. It was entrenched.’
Yet at his first meeting with Karyn and John Carnochan — the police chief who shared her vision — Jimmy was not impressed.
‘Karyn had been to Chicago to see how they’d solved their knife crime problem, and they had all these grand ideas. They were going to change the thinking of the Scottish Government. They were going to take gang members down to court, get them to listen to bereaved parents. Afterwards I said “This is a lot of s***. I’ve never heard such c*** in my life.” ’
The first project — to get gang members to court to listen to a bereaved mother — seemed laughable to Jimmy. ‘They had hired a 53-seater bus and I got on with five lads, heavy-duty gang members. It transpired that we were then going to pick up members from a rival gang. I went, “Woah. They will kill each other.” I took my lot off the bus and we made our own way there. I thought, “This is nuts”.’
Initially, the youth workers were accused of 'rewarding bad behaviour' but the approach worked by disrupting the spiral of violence and showing the youngsters there was another road to take which would not lead to an early grave or a long jail term
A brawl seemed inevitable in the courtroom. ‘You had all these different gangs in the one place and all us youth workers thinking “s***”. Then, at the front, they got a mum in. She had lost a son. I’ll never forget it. She was in tears. I remember looking down and realising all the swearing and jostling had stopped and they were listening to her.
‘Afterwards, well it was quite clever, looking back. The people from the Violence Reduction Unit talked to them — not talking down to them either, that was the key. They said: “It’s up to you. You can continue down this path, and you can end up in jail, but if you want out, we can help you. We can get you a job, an apprenticeship. Talk to us.’ I left court thinking it might just work.’
Today Kevin smiles at the tactics that snared him. ‘It was blatant bribery to start with. It was the World Cup in South Africa and they were taking some lads away. They promised us tickets. I thought I was going to see Thierry Henry.’
He did go to South Africa. ‘We never got to a match — we were helping with community projects to mentor kids out there — but that was a changing point. It was the carrot rather than the stick, I guess.’
Jimmy Wilson admits: ‘It was controversial at the time, seen as rewarding anti-social behaviour.
‘We’d take gang members go-karting on a Friday night. But there was method in it. The idea was to disturb the pattern of fighting. We took one gang one week; another the next. We could work at getting to the leaders, for the bigger picture, but in the short term we were stopping a few stabbings on that particular night.’
Outward Bound trips were next, sometimes taking rival gang members away together. ‘The staff would be up all night trying to stop them killing each other,’ says Jimmy.
‘Over the months and years we weren’t seeing the same levels of that fighting and stabbing as a recreation.’ It still wasn’t that there was a truce, but ‘their attitude became: “We don’t like you. If we see you, we might still stab you, but we won’t actively hunt you down.” ’
Part of the strategy was to avoid children getting excluded from school as this left them wide open to be exploited by the gangs
It was only one strand of a complex strategy. Cutting school exclusions was also vital because ‘once a young person has left school it is incredibly difficult to reach them’. Hard-hitting DVDs, including one showing a stab victim with fingers hacked off, were shown in schools.
Workshops targeted older primary school pupils because a flare point in gang violence was identified as the summer holidays between primary and high school.
As in London, Glasgow gangs operated in tiny geographical areas. Local knowledge was everything. Jimmy describes how, as the Violence Reduction Unit’s scope increased, so did the ambition of the projects. ‘We were asked to do street work in neighbouring areas. We were careful. We’d send our guys in for a few weeks, put them on the streets not speaking to a soul, just to be seen there. We’d wait for youths to talk to us. You don’t barge into an area. You wait to be invited. I think what happens in London is that strangers are parachuted in. Disaster.’
What was the role of the police? Jimmy Wilson says the chief constable at the time, Sir William ‘Willie’ Rae, was a firm advocate for community policing, and encouraged a strong presence on the ground. ‘But not heavy-heavy policing. Some cops came on Outward Bound courses with us, in civvies, so the lads could get to know them.’ A partnership with the police was ‘absolutely key’.
Jimmy believes fewer police on streets means a rise in knife crime. ‘After Willie Rae we had another chief constable who didn’t share that view about local cops and we saw a spike in trouble. In my opinion the current violence in London is directly related to austerity. If there aren’t enough cops, the kids don’t see them, and there isn’t a chance to build up that respect.’
But it wasn’t all softly-softly. Alongside community initiatives, courts got more clout.
‘Sentences were increased,’ says Will Linden, the only original member of the Violence Reduction Unit still working for the project.
‘It was a two-pronged approach. Give people opportunities, but also the message that if they want to go down the criminal route, the penalties will be harsh.’ Stop and search tactics were also employed, to levels that would probably cause public uproar in London, according to Will.
Anti-violence teams were stationed in A&E units. ‘You reach people at their most vulnerable,’ he says. ‘If there is a time when a gang member might be convinced of an alternative route, it might be just after he’s been stabbed.’
Getting kids back into education was also vital. Kevin’s story highlights how difficult it can be. He walked out of school aged 15, with no qualifications. Getting him to agree to do a college course was a struggle. But he did several — and then a degree. Kevin says: ‘No one in my family had been to university. I didn’t like reading, thought I couldn’t do it. But when people say, “Come on, just go to the interview. I’ll take you there myself”, then you do it. It’s about having someone who believes you can.’
Much of what was achieved in Glasgow came about because of a will to tackle the issue differently.
The Violence Reduction Unit is backed by the Scottish Government — but politicians were not front and centre. ‘This is too important to play politics with,’ says Jimmy, tellingly.
It hasn’t been all successes, though. Jimmy was once summoned to see the local police inspector because two of his gangs got on better than expected. ‘We ended up creating a super-gang, and the police were not happy.’
Nor was every gang member reachable. For every Kevin, another lad chose a different path. ‘I’ve sat and cried about the ones we lost — to prison, to drugs or worse. One lad I’d worked with for seven or eight years ended up killing someone. He’s in jail now.’
Yet for every failure, crucially, there was a success, and eventually, change did happen.
There may be no magic pill, but as Kevin says: ‘If there is a will to do it, it can be done. I am the proof of that.’
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2019/03/06/how-glasgow-lost-its-tag-as-britains-knife-crime-capital/
Main photo article
Kevin Martin, pictured, from Glasgow, was 15 when he was arrested for possession of a machete and a kitchen knife following a community event to bring rival gangs together
What drives a 15-year-old boy to carry a machete and a kitchen knife in his sports bag with the same nonchalance that...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves Online news HienaLouca
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/03/05/22/10623304-0-image-m-56_1551823787568.jpg
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