BLOOD ON THE STREETS! Exclusive by Ken Bendall, Criminal correspondent
Dec 14th, 2008
Boasting colour coded uniforms, body armour, fast cars, distinct jargon, vicious dogs, dangerous weapons, overwhelming numbers, access to illegal drugs and considerable financial resources, a well organised ‘crew’ known on the street as WiN (said to stand for ‘Whatever is Necessary’) is determined to assert its pre-eminence over all-comers in turf wars across Norfolk,”We will make their lives an absolute misery” according to one high ranking WiN member known only as ‘Ranking Mac P’. The group boasts nationwide connections to similar gangs across the country and make no secret of the fact that they share street warfare strategies with counterparts across the Atlantic in American cities such as Chicago. In fact, the marked absence of black members indicates a strong white supremacist influence, so much so, that even white women are known to occupy positions within its upper echelons in preference to minority ethnic men.
What is even harder to explain is the total absence of youth within their ranks of any race, colour or creed. This fact, combined with their latest declaration of war on our streets are the clearest evidence so far that our county is not immune to the spread of a growing trend in anti-youth/anti-child vigilantism which bears all the hallmarks of the modus operandi of similar gangs which have made the streets of South American cities such as Rio de Janeiro no-go areas for unaccompanied children and young adolescents.
Although it is still early days here in Norfolk, these gangs have made a grim name for themselves in other metropolitan areas where they have been known not only to use guns in the killing of innocent people, they have also been known to turn a blind eye to murder and violence carried out by racist thugs. High profile incidents of this kind have raised the question in the minds of the public as to the likely involvement of their members in the organisation of such crimes from behind the scenes.
If we are to avoid similar developments in Norfolk, a zero tolerance strategy will have to be adopted on the part of the public in general and parents of adolescents in particular, who are rightfully concerned that their children should be free from verbal intimidation, physical brutality and criminalisation on the streets of Norwich. Thanks in no small part to knee-jerk reactions from local MPs and city councillors, WiN has brought the deadly threat of its numerical and well armed superiority to bear to crack a small nut called LMS (Last Man Standing), three black schoolboys connected to the Chapelfield Mosque whose only crime appears to have been a penchant for the excitement of hip-hop competitions and the colour of their skins, which in Norfolk means high visibility and easy targeting by genuine hardcore street gangs like WiN whose reputation for violence promises a one-sided bloodbath more suited to the ghetto neighbourhoods of Los Angeles than Vauxhall Street.
As concerned citizens we all have a part to play in catching these developments before they become an epidemic. We all know who they are, we all know what they do and we all know how they operate!
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This kind of sensationalism is not difficult to concoct. It required no research whatsoever and contains a bare minimum of useful or factual information. We can even see why so much tabloid style journalism is written. It could be such a nice, easy and innocuous way of earning a living if it wasn’t for the amount of careless damage it does to people’s lives and reputations. Why let awkward considerations like balance, accuracy and proper investigation disrupt an easy life?
Having got that off our chests, what follows has been honestly written for the benefit of our community members whose children, brothers, friends and acquaintances have seen the other side of the EDP’s extravagant “GANG WARFARE” headline of last Friday, and who deserve an explanation as to how such headlines can still appear after all of the time and effort that has gone into consultation and co-operation with the police by their community leaders over recent weeks.
What can we expect when young people who happen to be black and male meet up regularly in a public place? They will stand out from the general populace because of their age and even more so because of their colour. Next, this group of friends will soon be given reason to believe that there is a concerted effort by those in authority to use all the resources available to demonise them as the dangerous fallout from fatherless families and social disintegration, to label them as violent criminals, a scourge on society and the promoters of gang warfare.
Their first resort will be to tell their parents (both in every case!) that they feel they are being dealt with unjustly. In the first instance they may simply get a warning from their parents who may have seen it all before, “What do you expect if you hang around in large groups in public places… this is Norwich not Brixton! When white people see groups of young black boys they panic, they think you must be up to no good…you’d better be careful!”
But what then happens when one of them comes back and says he’s been stopped over 50 times within a two month period without being arrested or charged with anything? And that it all started when he and a group of friends were subjected to a dispersal order because they were hanging out at Jenny Lind Park and were accused of anti-social behaviour when they weren’t doing anything except being a bit loud?
It became instantly clear that there was more to all this than meets the eye when the Assistant Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary, Sarah Francis suddenly called an emergency meeting bringing together professionals and representatives of the Chapelfield Mosque to a create a community cohesion engagement group. Norfolk Constabulary’s officers from the Partnerships, Youth and Community Division were in attendance to engender a partnership approach with community representatives to develop a plan of action to investigate, monitor and evaluate the data compiled relating to this group of boys. Her opening gambit being, “I believe we may have got it terribly wrong… and are potentially criminalising some of your youth… we need your help… to get this right!”
The expectations raised from the invitation to these meetings was that the Police were concerned to get this right and were being sensitive to ensure they got the facts right about the intelligence they had collected.
On closer examination of the dossier compiled by the Police it was found that the boys in question were, in fact, innocent of the allegations of anti-social behaviour, street robberies, posing with guns and knives online and being the architects of postcode gang battles. It became evident that these boys who have been targeted by the Police, have been victims of the adverse publicity in the local press and erroneous interpretation of the ‘word on the street’. It was this very data, much of which came from calls from local residents, who on seeing these young boys grouped together in numbers of three or more, reacted according to well established prejudices and the usual stereotyping, reinforced by negative and hysterical press reporting.
The series of articles published by the Norwich Evening News with the hard hitting headlines “Don’t let City Gangs take over our Streets” and “Action to Tackle City Gangs” did not enhance the image of these boys who have grown up in Norwich, attended local schools, and received recognition for their good citizenship and positive contribution to the fine reputation of our city.
As part of the engagement process the young boys made themselves available for informal meetings and even made a video, ‘What’s in it for Them? A Moral Panic or Something Else?’ giving the history of their music group and their experiences at the hands of the Police, the local press and the wider community. For this they were praised at a meeting where they met the District Superintendent Nick Dean and were offered a hand of support and commendation from the top cop in Norwich. But it now appears that this was less than sincere.
The sting in the tail is that during these community cohesion meetings police representatives, whilst acknowledging the erroneous interpretation of their intelligence and that the frontline service meted out to these youngsters fell way short of the standards to be expected and may well have amounted to direct racism, they have continued to publicly paint the picture that these boys are primary players in grooming unsuspecting teenagers into underground criminal fraternities.
We have found the Police response to the issues surrounding their engagement with us as a community, their treatment of the young boys in particular and their attitude to dealing with adolescents in general, wholly inappropriate. We have advised them in no uncertain terms that the culture of their organisation and its result orientated norms will further alienate sections of the community (or “you people” as one senior officer put it) while their management of the engagement and cohesion initiative betrayed an ineptness and lack of professionalism which leave them open to suspicion of direct and institutional racism.
In our view, the senior management in Norfolk Constabulary need to get out of the fast lane of career advancement and listen to the advice given by those on the receiving end of their organisation’s lack of responsiveness in the case of these boys. When asking questions about fairness and equity towards young people, we asked, “Whatever happened to the multi-agency strategic approach to Every Child Matters?” and “What happened to the recommendations in the (Sir William) MacPherson Report about the need to re-establish trust between BME communities and the police?” “What about the recommendations for race awareness training and all officers valuing cultural diversity?” “What about quality control?”
To top it all, after his own officers came to the conclusion that they had got it wrong concerning our boys and then rushed to conclude that there was no further need to continue to meet with us, the Norfolk Chief Constable Ian McPherson, echoing the national mood to suit his own public image, political ambition and by default the image of his organisation, used his position to issue a carefully worded press release, which became last Friday’s EDP headline story “GANG WARFARE” adding further insult to the injuries done to these boys and their parents by claiming they are at the centre of impending gang warfare in Norwich while conveniently stating repeatedly that it has nothing to do with race or faith. These exaggerated protestations serve only to encourage impressions to the contrary.
A measured response based upon a unified strategy involving all of the professional agencies tasked with dealing with young people who are possibly at the margins of entering into criminal behaviour would have been far more convincing and less like opportunistic grandstanding. Imagine therefore, how reassuring it is to know that Chief Constable Ian McPherson is taking the lead in The Association of Chief Police Officers’ first business group devoted to Young People for which he has once again had much press! How much emphasis should we expect him to place on ensuring that a sense of equity will prevail when presented with the highly political issue of how to deal with young black boys on his own doorstep?
There is nothing new about the scapegoating of vulnerable groups that usually have no one to act as advocate for them in situations like these, where professional integrity on the part of officials can often mean the difference between being heard and dealt with in a just manner or being crushed by the power of people in authority who should know better. Rather than being a source for cheap headlines, it is important that this issue becomes a priority for any police chief who is seeking to develop a Youth Crime Strategy that could potentially become a national model.
In the wake of Chief Constable McPherson’s front page ‘sensation’, the question we, as representatives of the community, are facing from parents is, “What use were those so called community cohesion and engagement meetings?”
Our only response at this juncture is to pose a question of our own, “What has a young person got to do to get justice in Norwich, especially if they’re black?”
Indeed, what can you do?
Just continue to be good examples of residents of Norwich. Produce more media of your own as I know you do much already – films, articles, cd’s etc. to counteract the cheap headlines!
It’s quite a shame isn’t it? Perhaps there is an opportunity here to reach out further in the Norwich community and build bridges and understanding. Getting information solely from newspapers with attention-grabbing headlines is dangerous!
Ensure that this is an expensive mistake for those that have made it. It is obvious that effort was not spared in trying to ensure that this did not happen, now for whatever perverse reasons the perpetrators have gone beyond the pale. Ensure that unacceptability of this type of conduct has a heavy political price tag attached to it.
Very interesting article.
It appears to me that to justify the treatment towards these teenagers the Police has to make this issue as large as possible to make it look like there is a real threat behind the behaviour these youngsters in the streets.
I guess time will put everyone in the position they deserve to be.
It’s a shame how we (the younger muslim youth) have been made the center of attention for the wrong reasons. The police have now realized how much damage they have created by making a ‘mountain out of a mole hill’. The media were too quick to jump on the whole idea of gang warfare, and by it have given a bad impression to the wider community about us.
However, there are many positive projects that we’re trying to do to give a good outlook. One of these projects being music, poetic pieces trying to express feelings on an instrumental track. Even though the cloud’s been put over us, we are striving to come up with something that can show us moving positively. We can be collectively seen as the name AOK, which is the name we gave to our young movement…. http://www.myspace.com/aokmovement
Shocking stuff. the police have been exposed once again as a racist and deviant body of white folk who have back stabbed leading members of the Norwich community with false meetings and “dialogue”.
Whilst the police do nothing about the soaring levels of serious crime including the horrific exploitation of children, they instead look to push a sinister agenda through the media and seek to create fictional thugs.
Their attempts will only serve to confirm the public’s growing opinion that the law establishment in this country is racist and totally incompetent.
Mr X,
horrific as paedophilia is, what we ignore is that serious crime, such as usury, or, as it is more commonly known, banking, not only goes unpunished but is honoured and highly rewarded.
And as Ezra Pound’s astonishing Usura Canto (hear it read by the poet: http://reactor-core.org/downloads/EzraPoundReadsUsura.mp3, and this site has the text and some notes: http://reactor-core.org/usura.html) articulates, it is usury or banking that is the crime that skews society so that these other symptoms emerge.
Because the police may not prosecute a law that represents justice or the prevention or punishment of crime in any real way, then their energies, fatally perverted, turn to policing the downtrodden, with the predictable outcome of their turning into bullies.
Abdassamad
To Brudda Karim,
Simply congratulations for this fine track http://www.myspace.com/aokmovement
Abdassamad
I think what is more sinister is that the police can potentially turn the fictional thug into the real. This is a situation that needs to be handled with great care. When young people are treated as thugs, accused of criminal activities and are publicly demonised for no reason other than having black or brown skin and dressing too “ghetto”, what options do they have? From their point of view they can either, do nothing(not even an option) or become the criminal they are portrayed to be because they will be blamed anyway. Without myself demonising the youth in question, I think if they are not defended by the rest of the community I predict the latter is more realistic. I have first hand experience of this treatment and know what it could lead to.
I agree with what Sidi Carberry says, you need to make the scare mongers pay politically. That is the ONLY way they learn (when its their jobs/promotion/reputation on the line). No manner of meetings etc… will do the response this will.
we need a 100 of us down at either the police station or the local rag, protesting at this vilification of blacks/asians/ethnic minorities as people of ill repute.
Dont settle for any “private” apologies, they smeared you in public, they should apologise in public and that is the Haqiqah (Truth).
I totally agree with the general consensus here and there is no doubt that no excuses can be made for the way that the young men in our community have been handled and misrepresented by the police and the media. Having said that, I would like to ask our “young men” to reflect on the possible root cause of all this attention, other than the obvious stereotypical reasons. It would seem that you have sadly become victims of your own success through your probably uncensored fan base.
I am not trying to stem the creativity that you all clearly have, but the question has to be asked, are you trying to fit something into the Deen that doesn’t exactly fit well? You have many “youngaz” wanting to follow in your footsteps and looking up to you. Who’s footsteps are you following?
Well let me end by saying that you are not “youngaz” in this community but “fine young men” in the making, that are in the best of company. Aspire to that insha’Allah and protect the community that Allah has been so generous in giving to you, by thinking about where you step and the company you keep other than the community that is defending your cause.
I am appalled at the most recent allegations against the youth in our community. We have been told many times that here in Norwich racism isn’t a thing we agree with and here we are in a situation where “people of authority” a picking on youngsters for no apparent reason. How can they stand up and say that they believe in equality when clearly it is not so?
Is there a resolution for such thing? Because it seems that meetings have been attended and so on but then an article is released talking about “gang crime”. When is this bullying going to stop and how?
Illiyin
Would founding some kind of “Press Watch” organisation be beneficial to hold the EDP (and the like) accountable for their damaging article(s)?
Maybe you could use it to sue for libel, or demand a public apology.
Having spent the last 15 years teaching in secondary schools in a number of different cities, I have seen more than my fair share of delinquent behaviour. However, I have also seen the harm that is being done by the institutionalised low expectation that is also manifest in the current trend in the public demonisation of teenagers almost as a distinct species.
How different the story might have been and how much more beneficial for the public if, while they were in the pub planning their one-sided press campaign over a few beers, McPherson and his friends in the EDP had chosen to devote some publicity to the role of alcohol and drugs in violent street crime (in all forms of violent crime, in fact), instead of using their power and resources to pick on a group of relatively defenceless schoolboys, who (as far as I know) being practising Muslims have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol and who I understand are not even cigarette smokers. How much more interesting it might have been for the readership to be able to consider a well researched and informed article which explored in a balanced and dispassionate way the consequences to society of our determination to promote the easy availability of drink and a positive image for so called ‘responsible’ alcohol consumption as an unquestioned mainstay of British culture. Imagine the general outrage that a headline such as EVERY DRINKER A KILLER would produce, and yet it is without doubt far more plausible than last Friday’s GANG WARFARE hysteria.
I for one, congratulate the people at the Chapelfield Mosque who apparently have spent decades drawing our attention to society’s greatest scourge, the banking system and the consequences of usury, something which it has taken the present terrible economic crisis for the rest of us to begin to open our eyes to, albeit still reluctantly, while the best recognition we can offer them is to persecute their youngsters. I agree with them that society’s greatest problem is usury-capitalism, but this should be seen alongside the effects of intoxicants of every kind (alcoholic and narcotic) and the demise of family and community. The environment, war and world poverty are obviously massive issues but I see these as being very much part of the mechanism of usury-capitalism.
Under the circumstances, focussing such huge attention and resources on the misbehaviour of young people comes across as a cover for the inability or reluctance on the part of their elders to confront the root causes of this as well as much more serious threats to society’s safety and well-being. How many of us have to die or suffer injury on our roads so that we can all enjoy a drink? How many women and children are we prepared to see battered so that we can all enjoy a drink? How many women have to suffer rape so that we can all enjoy a drink? How many families need to be destroyed so that we can all enjoy a drink? How many careers have to be ruined so that we can all enjoy a drink? What cost to the NHS are we prepared to absorb so that we can all enjoy a drink? How many hospital beds are we willing to see occupied so that we can all enjoy a drink? How much teenage violence are we prepared to countenance so that we can all enjoy a drink? How many unwanted teenage pregnancies and abortions are we prepared to encourage so that we can all enjoy a drink? I could go on but I think I’ve made my point. The list of iniquities would be even longer if we looked into the deleterious effects of the banking system on people’s lives.
Would anyone at the Mosque be interested in joining some kind of coalition or forming a pressure group or even a new political party to champion these issues? I think such an initiative could generate a lot of interest in the current climate.
Keep an eye on your youngsters and keep up the good work!
George Masefield
Look at this….. Mr McPherson on one hand writes an article for Barnando’s talking about the “disproportionately negative perceptions of children and young people in our society”, and then fuels such negative perceptions by inventing a fairytale story about non-existent gang wars in Norfolk and sending it to the “feet of the media”.
Is this man for real? Check the story: https://www.barnardos.org.uk/what_we_do/children_in_trouble_campaign/debate_with_the_experts/ian_mcpherson_opinion_piece.htm
[...] community. A GroupTweet alternative The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook – Not sure BLOOD ON THE STREETS! Exclusive by Ken Bendall, Criminal correspondent – muslimsofnorwich.org.uk 12/14/2008 Boasting colour coded uniforms, body armour, fast cars, [...]
Hello George. We’ve given your comments serious consideration. It is impossible not to agree with everything you say, including your suggestion for a new political initiative. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that you may already be politically active in some way, in which case you’ll know how tricky and time consuming it can be to organise these things. Anyway, we’re willing to make a start if you are! Please contact me directly by email and we’ll take it from there (contact: info@muslimsofnorwich.org.uk).
Hajj Uthman
George,
Thank you for your post, and my apologies for taking some time to reply.
You raise an interesting point, which is the devastating impact of alcohol on our society, an impact which, although vastly more harmful than that of more illegal substances, is strangely un-confronted in our time in these lands.
And, as you say, we haven’t even begun to look at the effects of banking in terms of financial stress, bankruptcy, repossession of houses etc., and ensuing matters such as marital breakdown and the great crop of young people from stressed and broken homes or from single parent families, who come into adulthood ‘dazed’ and incapable of making sense of their world. Certainly banking is much more pervasive in its effects than alcohol, but the work has not yet been done in any objective study to try and quantify its evils in a statistical fashion, whereas the deleterious effects of alcohol are now too widely documented for anyone to deny.
And where am I going with all this? Well, looking at the event that originally sparked the article, i.e. the behaviour of the police towards a group of young black Muslims (I am so tired of the language of political correctness that insists on opaque terms such as ‘minority ethnic men’), we first of all have to acknowledge that policing is originally a noble vocation inasmuch as a society must have a law that is enforced in an even-handed way, and that a society where that breaks down is on a slippery slope.
So, if I may return to one of my original themes in an earlier post, the difficulty of policing in a society in which criminals make the laws, e.g. people who, in spite of a well-established set of international laws such as the Geneva Convention and other protocols, embarked on a war of aggression which would have been recognised as illegal by the prosecutors of the Nurenberg trials, and would thus conceivably have meant the death sentence for those who prosecuted that war.
Now, if that is not provocative enough, consider the historical fact that banking is easily recognisable as the crime of usury, which was regarded as a mortal sin in Christianity serious enough to prevent the criminal receiving the last rites and a Christian burial. Add to that the concurrence of Judaic law, with one exception, and the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle onwards until the modern appearance of the apologists for usury such as Bentham et al.
In short, this odd epoch since the misnamed Renaissance has placed criminals in charge of society, the destructive nature of whose crimes is daily becoming more and more evident as a depression to match or possibly exceed previous recessions and depressions looms over us, with the serious danger of a new world war being employed as a simple expedient to prime the economic pump.
These are sombre thoughts. And in all of this we have the police trying to perform the thankless task of enforcing a law on a society that is visibly coming apart at the seams and has been for some time, enforcing laws enacted by a narrow elite of mediocre minds more intent on pleasing the super-rich than in bringing about any kind of social justice or amelioration of the lot of the poor. Nor does it help that our most sympathetic interpretation of this earnest desire to please the obscenely wealthy is based on the false premise of the ‘trickle-down’ of wealth to the poor from these, falsely labelled, ‘wealth-creators’, something which is demonstrably untrue with the alarming spread of super-poverty across the planet (“Number of hungry people rises to 963 million”: http://www.globaliamagazine.com/?id=510) on a scale never before witnessed in human history.
A part of what contributes to this desperate situation is the very fact of these issues never being raised to consciousness, for once people are aware of them, their behaviour changes quite markedly. So your parting shot “Would anyone at the Mosque be interested in joining some kind of coalition or forming a pressure group or even a new political party to champion these issues?” is possibly right on target. Along with practical measures, such things as pressure groups and new political parties or, possibly, engaging with some of the existing parties are probably very excellent ways forward if regarded as consciousness raising ventures more than being the feverish desire to get one’s hands on the illusory levers of power.
I look forward to hearing your response, or indeed that of anyone else who might be interested in taking this matter forward, whether intellectually or practically.
Regards,
Abdassamad
Its interesting reading these comments on the articles written by the chief constable, but it is not surprising to me that he is showing two faces. All career driven police officers have these two faces. If the chief constable has risen to his position through the ranks then it is not the first time he would have employed such tactics. It will not be long before he start employing the old sus & and loitering with intent laws of old to criminalize our young boys as these are the easiest way for them to get convictions. All we need is just a few more black faces around Norwich and few more sensational press stories and they are off to flying start.
Dear ‘Fine Young Men’ listen to ‘a Mother’. Nobody has greater concern for the son than the mother and when coupled with insight and intellect it should not be ignored. How many mothers are now weeping for their dead sons?
We are not going to change alcoholic hacks or ambitious careerists, be they police or politicians although we may thwart them by hitting where it hurts, as mentioned in a couple of responses, which is always a pleasure but not particularly productive unless it protects the innocent –increasingly hard to define.
One of the tactics of the Financial/Commodity/Media system –whether by design or default- is to separate society into financially manipulable groups and one of the most damaging is the artificial gulf created between old and young. I am not talking about the natural urge of the young to their own independence, this is healthy and to be encouraged but rather the creation of an artificial world which cannot be penetrated by other than its own demographic; style of dress, music, etc. I remember the disgust on my father’s face because Bob Dylan did not sound like Frank Sinatra and maybe you don’t even know who I’m talking about. What I am talking about is being clear about who you are and that is what I understand from ‘a Mother’. You see there is a difference between ‘youngaz’ and ‘fine young men’. We all know a fine young man but what is a youngaz? There is a young man here with me who loves ‘Hip Hop’ to the point that he is creating it himself. When he asked me about it I said, “Why do you need that label, why don’t you call it poetry, with or without music. Everybody knows about poetry, but hip hop? Let people hear what you have to say and let them judge it by it merits.
The trouble with this of course is that you might get criticised so it is safer to retreat to a world of ‘friends’. However if you are serious and have something to say you will find encouragement from where you don’t expect. The need to belong never goes away; what matters is what or who you belong to. I need you; we are at a critical stage as humans. We need you to be clear; the majority are lost as usual but among the lost there are many who want to find. You grew up in knowledge and understanding without ambiguity; your inheritance is to serve, which your fathers and mothers had to learn at great expense. You are going to have to take this matter further and it is no one else’s matter but Allah’s. You can use whatever means you like within that knowledge and it may be something that I and your parents don’t recognise, but that will only be the form because the content has always been the same and that can be recognised and confirmed by those who were young before you.
Define yourselves by what you do, if you go down to people it must be to call them up and not because they are calling you down. Don’t worry about the rubbish people pile on you, or those who use you for their own battles, Allah will protect those who make His matter theirs. In conclusion I ask Allah to protect you in every situation and to give you the wisdom that will attract the good of heart.
I would like to say, I went here:
http://www.myspace.com/aokmovement
I really liked the tune and message.
I am a resident of Norwich i have been living here for about 9 years and have experienced nothing but racism and bias treatment not just myself but others that i know there is not really any support groups in this area for mionorities that suffer from this form of modern day slavery i would like to know if there is any one interested in forming some a support group for victims that suffer from Oppression of modern day slavery.