Every Sunday when the sun sets over her coastal home, Sandi Bogle watches the water before lighting a candle for her nephew, Bjorn Brown.
“He was incredible,” she said. “He used to come and spend a lot of time with me and my children; we used to go on vacation together. He had a whole future ahead of him and they took it away from him. ”
It’s been three years since thugs with a knife killed the 23-year-old aspiring musician. No arrests have been made, the police have not speculated on a motive, and his family’s pain remains raw.
Unfortunately, they are not alone.
In the time since Bjorn’s murder, the British criminal crisis has accelerated. According to official government statistics, over 45,000 knife-related crimes were committed, the highest number recorded in England and Wales last year. Now, as the UK plans to get out of the lockdown, there is fear of a further increase in fatal stabbings.
Gang rivalries were revised after months of confinement, social media scores to be resolved, including standardization of face-covering masks: in Britain after the pandemic, there will be no shortage of criminal triggers.
Last Friday, police shot and killed a man armed with a knife at a hotel in Glasgow after it erupted in a riot that left six people, including a police officer, hospitalized.
The suspect was identified as a Sudanese immigrant named Badreddin Abadlla Adam, 28.
Adam was staying at the city center hotel, along with 100 other asylum seekers, after being transferred there during the pandemic. Authorities say they are investigating.
However, for experts, the most feared consequences of COVID-19 are those that are not immediately obvious, but the deepest socio-economic effects of the disease.
John Sunderland, a retired police superintendent, spent two decades confronting the conditions in which violence breeds, and he knows all too well the agony he leaves behind.
“I remember the sound of his family singing hymns initially, and then beginning to moan, an incredibly disturbing sound,” he said, recalling the murder of Kodjo Yenga, a 16-year-old boy from West London whose fatal stabbing in 2007 signaled the beginning of the emergence of knives in the city.
In the following years, the racial dimension of the crisis has come under scrutiny. In 2018, more than a third of London’s juvenile serious criminals, and a quarter of victims, were black, official statistics revealed.
While this suggests that the city’s black community (constituting 13 percent of London’s population) is disproportionately affected by youth violence, it is important to note that 2 out of 5 criminals and serious victims of youth violence were of white heritage. Furthermore, statistical analysis indicates that outside London, ethnicity and violent crime figures are much more correlated with population proportions.
More than race, experts like Sunderland attribute Britain’s knife attack epidemic to the effects of poverty and lack of prospects.
The links between social deprivation and knife crime are well documented. In neighborhoods where unemployment is high and economic mobility is low, violent behavior is generated. When funding for local community-minded schemes is cut, this spiral of hopelessness and aggression intensifies. That, Sunderland said, is why the financial consequences of the coronavirus pandemic are so concerning.
“Many of society’s natural safety nets for children and youth caught up in knife crime have already disappeared in most parts of the country,” he said. “The cost of austerity has always been higher for those less able to bear it.”
This point became painfully clear last year, when new local government statistics revealed that three-quarters of London’s most violent neighborhoods were among the 10 most disadvantaged, and all had higher than average poverty rates for children. the city.
The data reflects an “egregious side effect” of government austerity, said Mayor Sadiq Khan, adding that “you cannot cut off police officers, public services, preventive measures and ignore the most vulnerable people in our country at the same time. ” how to keep crime low. “
James Alexander, a criminology expert from London Metropolitan University, came to a similar conclusion. His research indicates that urban developments within the city are “conveyor belts” of violence, with a constant turnover of young people with liquidity problems who turn to crime. As Britain’s closure rises and COVID-19 economic aftershocks this process is likely to accelerate, he believes.
“Starting next year, we will almost certainly see an upswing in knife crime and youth violence … there will be more pressure on young people to earn money.” [illegally],” he said.
Coping with this increase requires a systemic approach, said Alexander, one that promotes collaboration as a means of healing the collapse of the community.
“When you talk to parents, they feel very isolated,” he said. “Instead of saying: ‘I am a youth worker, I have the solution’, [outreach programs] I need to be more collaborative. They need to say, ‘I’m a youth worker, let’s help develop the solution together.’ “
One program in particular, the so-called Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), is in the hope of many. Initiated by American epidemiologists in the 1990s in Chicago, the program addresses street violence through the prism of public health, treating it as a symptom of deprivation and poverty.
Rather than simply focusing on harsh power surveillance and custody punishment, city authorities began working to improve the prospects of potential criminals, offering them an alternative to gang membership with job and education opportunities.
Officials in Glasgow, Scotland adopted a similar strategy. Guided by a simple principle: that violence is preventable, not inevitable, the city’s violence reduction unit worked with schools, health groups, and social services to disrupt the root causes of knife crime, giving young people a springboard to build a better and non-violent life. Twelve years after its creation in 2005, Glaswegian’s murder rates had been cut in half.
Could London benefit from a similar program? Its mayor believes so, and last year she launched the city’s violence reduction unit. “I direct the London response to understand the causes of violent crime and work to prevent it from spreading,” said Khan.
But not everyone is convinced.
“Wouldn’t it be better to go somewhere, maybe Germany, that doesn’t have such a big crime or serious youth violence problem, and ask, ‘Why don’t they have the problem?’ What can we copy from what they are doing? ‘”Alexander asked.
Former Sunderland Police Officer also has reservations. While the violence reduction unit formula is promising, it is concerned that, having avoided Glasgow’s rigorously apolitical approach, the London program is doomed to failure.
“When you have political leadership, the focus becomes partisan [and] in the short term in his approach, because it is very difficult to get politicians to look beyond the horizon of the next elections, “he said.
For Bjorn Brown’s family, this is discouraging news. Deprived of justice, they seek comfort in the hope that someday others may be free of their pain.
“We have to keep talking. It doesn’t take just one person to build a child, you need a village, you need a community, you need the country, ”said her aunt, Sandi.
“I don’t want my nephew to have died for nothing.”
