By Julia Johnson
Home Secretary Sajid Javid says knife crime is a disease.
If so, where did the disease start and is it man-made – created by poor policing and state neglect – or passed down from parent to child?
And were the symptoms and signs always there?
The ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech made by Enoch Powell 1968, and just ten years before the murder of Kelso Cochrane in Notting Hill, both from the 50s and 60s, may have started this ‘so called’ disease to spread.
The ‘Rivers Of Blood’ speech was not only insulting but inciting. It was an insult against the newly- arrived immigrants from the Commonwealth.
In that infamous speech, Powell said: “The black man will have the whip over the white man.”
Kelso Cochrane was murdered in Notting Hill just ten years before the Rivers of Blood speech. At this time many white people saw black people as having no culture, religion, or laws.
In contrast, Afro Caribbean people saw England as the land of opportunity, and that they were coming to wonderful Britain where they would work an honest wage and then go home.
Although a lot of people may have seen the murder that night, very few said or reported anything to the police, most being scared of local Teddy Boys.
Two men where eventually arrested but later released without charge. The police said, “It was an attempted robbery and not a racial crime.”
The Institute Of Race Relations monitored black deaths in custody since the 1970s and their report has shown that a significant amount of young black men were killed or injured in prison and police stations, and the Afro Caribbean community has been subject to a disproportionate force and discrimination.
How hard can it be for the parents and grandparents of the youth of today to say anything positive about the police and state?
What positives could they give their children and grandchildren about British laws and the legal system?
This has led to the mistrust we see on the streets today, and young black men believing that sorting things out their way rather than trusting the police is a better way of handling their affairs.
Young black men taking the law into their own hands.
Steve Bernard has ideas about how things can be fixed.
He has been a youth worker for the inner London Education Authority in the 1980s and has also worked with the Holloway Youth Work Shop for 16 and 18 year olds since 2006.
He said, “The government needs to create an environment that will benefit youths and take them of streets.”
He added, “Pupil Referral units only creates an environment where these expelled students get together in numbers of 30 or 40, and make things worse for each other by exchanging bad habits, it just makes things worse.”
Steve also ran the C.H.I. on Seven Sisters Road, which helped young people of knife crime age.
It’s just had its funds withdrawn by Islington Council.
Steve said, “Unless these places stop closing down and having funds taken away from them with more opening up, then this disease as the Home Secretary calls it, will spread.”
Clover Cumby of the Nubian Health Forum said: “Unless these young people get help with their mental health, knife crime will become a revolving door for the young.”
Following a discussion with a 14-year-old from Islington who asked not to be named, I asked, “Why do you think that knife crime is the way it is?”
The adolescent replied: “We prefer 12 men to judge us than 6 men to carry us.
“This is our justice, because you can’t trust the police.”
So how will this disease stop?
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