What kind of a world do we live in when an innocent little girl of five is gunned down as she plays in the aisle of a corner shop?” the Mirror’s front page asked yesterday. The chilling answer is this: it’s a world that is everyday reality for thousands of young adults in London. Barely visible to ordinary Londoners except when shots ring out or police tape bars the pavement, there is a war raging on the streets of the capital. Police statistics say there are 250 active criminal gangs in the city involving about 4,800 people mostly aged between 18 and 24. And street gangs are believed to be responsible for around 50% of shootings in the capital. Had Nathaniel Grant, Kazeem Kolawole and Anthony McCalla hit the targets they intended – rival gang-members Roshaun Bryan and Christopher Munsaka – the incident would have gone largely unreported. More black on black gun crime. It takes an incident like this to give it mainstream attention. Little Thusha Kamaleswaran was caught in the crossfire of a street feud between the GAS gang and ABM. Guns and Shanks (Knives) and All ’Bout Money are just two of the groups that prompted the launch this year of Operation Trident’s taskforce which has dedicated 1,000 officers to preventing and investigating gang-related gun crime. The shocking CCTV footage bravely released by Thusha’s family is a rare window into a hidden world. Its most chilling insight is the casual nature of the shootings – the way indiscriminate shots were fired. It shows how the shooters barely care who lives or dies. Scene: The shop where Thusha was shot PA I have interviewed many gang members in different cities and in different post codes of the capital, and the casual nature of violence is a recurrent theme. Camila Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company is among those doing important work to show how many young people caught up in gangs have got to be in such a cut-off state. Many have suffered such a lack of care as the children of older gang members or drug addicts, they are damaged for life. Young gang members have told me they felt little choice about joining. Even the use of “gang” is to glamorise the reality that most are loose associations of friends and family. Members become defined by affiliations over which they have little choice: they are someone’s cousin or friend or live on their block. They fear bullying on the street and social media. They fear being the ones attacked. In the middle of one interview with a member of a violent girl gang, her mother came in to the cafe and punched her in the face. None of this in any way excuses what happened in Stockwell in March last year. A little girl who once dreamed of dancing is paralysed and now needs round-the-clock care. I used to live a stone’s throw from where Thusha was shot. Stockwell Food and Wine was where I used to buy newspapers every morning. I know the damage that has been done not just to a little girl and her family, but to a whole community. But in London areas like Stockwell and Brixton that community also includes the young people being drawn every day into gangs.
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