Until kids realise their lives are worth something, more innocents will die in Britain’s knife crime epidemic, says GMB weatherman Alex Beresford
I WAS only six when I heard someone get shot on my estate.
I grew up in Easton, Bristol – an area which was rife with gangs, and where I’ve seen kids as young as 10 or 11 dealing drugs on their bikes.
In areas like this kids get sucked into a life of crime that they can’t escape from – and things are getting worse.
This week I had to intervene when, in my role as a weather presenter on Good Morning Britain, I listened in to a discussion about how to address the current epidemic of knife crime.
When one of the panellists said we needed to build more prisons I knew I needed to make my voice heard.
As someone who got out of the ghetto – but is still proud to retain a foothold there – I don’t think prison works in its current form.
It might sound shocking, but prison can be a university for crime, where inmates get three meals a day and grow their networks and learn new tricks.
‘I was more scared of my dad than a gang leader’
For me, gangs were just a fact of life growing up: I knew the people in them and I knew what they were up to.
Born and raised in Bristol to a white working-class mum and a black father who had come to the UK from his native Guyana as a boy, for the first couple of years of my life we lived with my extended family until we were given a council house on the border of St Pauls.
Like many areas it had its problems with drug dealing, crime and prostitution. Outbreaks of violence weren’t uncommon – there were stabbings and shootings on a relatively regular basis.
I was probably only six or seven when I heard about my first fatal shooting, a guy everyone knew who was the same age as my dad.
It would have been easy so easy to join a gang but from the moment I was old enough to understand, my dad used to tell me that if he found me hanging out with any of them he would bust my ass in front of them.
Ultimately, I was more scared of him than I was of them. He was a strong black role model who made it clear that the sky was the limit as long as I stayed on the right path.
‘I get pulled over by police, but I’m not against stop and search’
That doesn’t mean I didn’t have wobbles. At eleven I went to an inner-city secondary school which had its own gang problems, and while I didn’t do anything serious enough to get expelled I started to go down the wrong path – missing lessons, giving aggro to the teachers.
My parents could see where this was heading, so they pulled me out and moved me to a school in the countryside where out of the whole 2,000 pupils, only six were black.
It was a massive culture shock and for weeks I begged to go back to my old school.
In time though, I settled, and now I know that being taken out of that inner- city environment was a major factor in setting me on the course that led me to get good GCSEs, A-levels, University and finally at job at ITV which in time – and some determination on my part – led to the life I have now with a great job, a lovely partner and a son.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m also proud of my roots, and I still frequently go back to the area where I grew up, and where I can all too easily see the problems on the streets around me. I know at first hand too some of the frustrations in the community.
When I am not at work I wear a tracksuit, and I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve been pulled over by the police when I’m driving with my hood up, the window down and my music playing to ask me what I’m up to.
The stakes are too high for me to lose my temper – but I can see how a frustrated young black boy might. Then they get arrested because they can’t control their anger, and the vicious cycle begins.
Stop and Search has its place. But the police need to be part of the community too, not in opposition to it.
‘These kids are victims, not criminals’
The reality is that we need to start seeing things differently.
For me, while some boys actively chose to be part of a gang many of them are not criminals but victims, young impressionable boys who took a wrong turn without even knowing that that’s what they were doing.
For many of them, gang life fills a void. With youth centres closing at every turn and council services for vulnerable people cut to the bone the reality is that the horizons for many kids in deprived areas are limited. Their parents, too, need support.
I’d like to see more positive black role models pushed forward in the media: all too often we only see black boys’ faces as another crime statistic.
I try and do my bit, visiting inner-city schools to talk about media careers.
The reality is that if you don’t change their environment you won’t change anything.
Prison isn’t a deterrent: it might work in certain casess but many of the guys I have spoken to on the streets see it as a risk they are willing to take.
‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ one told me. ‘We get three square meals a day, we go to the gym and we get to control the wing.’
By that he means that it’s the prisoners, not the prison officers – or ‘screws’’ – who call the shots.
Meanwhile for young boys who often go to prison for a relatively trivial offence, it’s an opportunity to link up with people in similar situations. Instead of being rehabilitated, they grow their network.
They go in with low level criminal qualifications, and come out with a degree.
I’m not saying there are easy answers: to get to the root of our knife crime problem we have to unpick so many complex issues, from family life and education to community.
More than anything, we need to help these kids realise their lives are worth something.
Until we do, more innocent people will die.