It Hurts me to say but Guns Really are a Black Issue
21 Sep 2005
Evening Standard Gun crime casts a particular shadow over London's innercity. Though the incidence is still tiny compared to America's urban ghettos, and most young men in areas such as Hackney will never see a gun (despite the contrary boastful responses they give gullible opinion pollsters), it is peculiarly terrifying.
This is partly because of its random nature. People have been mown down in Hackney just because they were standing at a bus stop when a drive-by shooting took place. And in London's inner cities, unlike America, yuppies in half-million pound houses live in the next road to some of the worst estates in the country. So everyone, whatever their income, potentially has to deal with the reality of a shooting at the end of their street. Gun crime is not a new problem. I remember 10 or 15 years ago stories in the black community about young men not feeling properly dressed for a night out without a weapon and bus conductors having guns drawn on them because they were ill-advised enough to ask for a fare.
And I remember raising it all those years ago with a very senior policeman in east London who replied calmly: "Well, they are not using them on my men, so it is not my problem, is it?" As long as gun crime was "black on black" or, as some policemen preferred to term it, "bad on bad", the police were curiously indifferent. But now we have Trident, the specialist Metropolitan Police squad, and periodically the media give it big coverage - normally when someone who is not a young black man gets hurt. Some people argue passionately that gun crime is not a black issue. It is true guns play a big part in mainstream popular culture through the western and the gangster movie. It is also true that we are seeing an increasing incidence of gun crime in the Asian and the Turkish communities.
But it remains the case that more than 80 per cent of gun crime in London is "black on black". And for me, as a black woman and the mother of a son, that is enough to make it a black issue. To a greater degree than in almost any other category of serious crime, the community has a role to play in the fight against gun crime. It is not normally a secret who commits these shootings. The challenge is getting people to go into court as witnesses.
As an MP I have campaigned successfully for longer sentences for carrying a gun and a ban on imitation weapons. But the community must not just ask "What are the police doing about gun crime?" We have to look in on ourselves. I remember how shocked I was to see the Metropolitan Police photo library of the victims of gun crime. All young black men, some barely out of adolescence, mostly lying face down in a pool of blood.
Fifty years ago their parents had come to Britain with such high hopes.
It was never meant to end like this.
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