Bad Young People Today

Duane went to the most desirable and prestigious of the primary schools in his section of South London. He rubbed shoulders with the White sons of bankers and media high-flyers who’d moved into the district specifically so their kids could attend
that school.

Now, he sometimes sells drugs to them. Duane is a lieutenant in a crew that deals on a local housing estate, sitting up all day on one of the balconies that overlooks its courtyard, bored out of his skull most of the time, constantly kicking his brain into a state of alertness for potential trouble – what people don’t seem to realise, he complains, is the hard work and long hours involved in being a drug dealer.

Or how complicated and unorthodox life can be from time to time: having to sit in the sauna at the local leisure centre for a minimum of five hours to clean out every trace of gunpowder residue – everyone knows to do that - after you’ve shot someone and dumped your nine off Chelsea Bridge into the Thames and burnt your clothes.

Paradoxically, considering the explosion of gang violence, former mayor Ken Livingstone – voted out of office on May 1 this year – and the Metropolitan police had been putting out figures that purported to show that street crime in London had fallen. Yet such statistics seemed only designed to conceal the truth: the reason you’re less likely to be held up for your phone or iPod as you leave your local tube station is because some time ago the crews figured out that there was no long-term financial future in muggings or steaming Pakistani newsagents. Anyway, for the Mayor and police to linger on such truths did not give exactly a positive picture to the image of cool and groovy multi-cultural London – even though such a positive image was bound to have
a dark shadow.

Co-opted by older men who saw a way of putting to use these gangs of feral youth, often barely into their teens and many seething with an amorphous fury, the council estate phone-snatching crews formed into serious gangs dealing hard drugs, readily armed with the weaponry that has illegally poured into Britain since the end of former Yugoslavia’s assorted civil wars.

When it hits the news that yet another youth of West Indian or Nigerian or Somalian background has been gunned down or stabbed to death, it seems part of the convention that they are inevitably lauded as church-going pillars of the community. That was the story at the beginning of last year, when a 15-year-old boy, not much more than five feet tall, was gunned down outside his home as he returned from school; the estate where this happened is close to where I live, and I made some casual inquiries. “Him kinda bad,” was how one youth, himself the son of a convicted drug don, contradicted the saint-like picture presented by the dead boy’s family and friends. It turned out that, for unknown reasons, the boy and - the really worrying bit! - “several others at his school” had decided to stop paying the Mr. Big who supplied them with the heroin and crack they dealt. Killing the boy, of course, was to encourage the others. Though everyone seems to vaguely know who was responsible, there have been no arrests for this murder.

Beneath these criminal acts lurks the pathetic presence of gangsta rap and bling “culture”. But it’s only one symptom. These kids see bankers, stock market dealers and property dealers making fortunes through legalised, and sometimes not so legalised, theft. They see belligerently aggressive nations invading other countries to grab their oil wealth. They see everyone in the capital’s high streets getting high on booze and drugs, as though they are in some collective bar on the Titanic. They also know that, as long as this decimation of young teenage men is confined to Black neighbourhoods, the majority White community – and possibly the police - will be concerned, but privately doesn’t really give a shit. If they’d legalised drugs years ago, none of this would be happening. But you suspect that’s not an argument being debated too closely on the corners and corridors of London’s drug-dealing council estates.

Duane wants to get out of the “life” – at 17 he is already jaded and, more significantly, perpetually nervous and worried. But he doesn’t know how to navigate his exit. Even worse, he worries that if he attempts to do this, he too will become a statistic.

Anyway, at least street crime is down.

Chris Salewicz is the author of Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer.