‘Did they give life? No! So how can they take it?’: on the frontline of knife crime

J hemar got home from school at 5pm. His mum and dad were out. He threw his bag down in his room and started playing Gran Turismo Sport on his PlayStation in the living room. He kept thinking about how he and his older half-brother Michael were going to catch up on Sunday. He hadn’t seen him in months; he was counting down the days.

His mum arrived home from work at 8.30pm.

“Did Daddy tell you what happened to Michael?” she asked.

“Nah, what do you mean?” Jhemar replied, pausing the game.

She said that someone had stabbed Michael to death in Betts Park, in Penge, south-east London, round the corner from his home. He was just 17.

Jhemar dropped his controller. He changed into a tracksuit and told his mum he wanted to go to the park. She told him to wait for his godmother, so Jhemar sat down and waited in silence.

The three of them drove with Jerome, his younger brother, to the park. When they arrived it was dark, the wind blowing through the branches of the big, leafless trees. The police were stopping people going inside. There was tape across the entrance. Jhemar saw his dad, also called Michael. He was crying; Jhemar had never seen his dad cry before. He started to feel angry and began to cry, too. People crowded around; a group of boys cycled by with their hoods up and Jhemar yelled at them to go away.

In the middle of the park was a big white tent with lights shining. Jhemar didn’t believe it was Michael inside. Maybe they’d misidentified him, he kept thinking to himself. But they hadn’t. They carried the body bag out of the tent and then out of the park to put it in an ambulance.

When I heard the news, I phoned Jhemar. I said I was sorry and asked how he was feeling.

“It’s funny! It’s actually kind of funny, you know? That’s the thing!” His jolted scoffs and chuckles were too jagged, too loud to sound natural. “These man think they can take life? Fam, what is going through their heads? Are they God? Did they give life? No! So how can they take it?”

I first met Jhemar Jonas nearly three years earlier, when he was 12 years old, in year 8 at a Lambeth secondary school. I was a master’s student at the London School of Economics; we were brought together by a mentoring scheme run at an education centre in Brixton Hill. When we shook hands he was wearing a puffer jacket over the top of his navy blue school blazer. He exuded excitement, cheek and confidence.

Jhemar later told me he’d been sceptical beforehand. “I didn’t really like the idea of meeting with some random person I didn’t know,” he said. “I thought you were a bit posh. I thought I needed to speak properly to you, to watch my words. But I wanted to be myself, too, so I went in and out of slang.”

That day, I suggested that he write our names on the front of the orange exercise book we’d been given to document our work together.

“What shall we call the book?” I asked.

“The Book Of…” He squinted, tapping an index finger on his chin. “The Book Of Wisdom?” He wrote it neatly below our names: Jhemar and Ciaran. The Book Of Wisdom. Mentoring. January 2015.

At the time, I had just left the home where I grew up in the London suburbs. Both my parents hail from traditional working-class backgrounds: my mum, a nurse, grew up in a white British, Church of England household. My dad, a GP, is from a Hindu, Punjabi immigrant one.

After signing up to become a student mentor, I became determined to forge a connection with local people and learn more about Brixton, where I’d recently moved. Inspired by the success of my meetings with Jhemar, I offered myself as a mentor to more teenagers, especially those who lived on my doorstep in Lambeth’s Coldharbour ward, one of the poorest in the country. One evening I walked past a community centre near my new home and rang the buzzer. I met Tony, a man in his 50s who was wearing a checked shirt tucked into jeans.

“I’d like to start volunteering,” I told him, assuming that such an offer would be welcomed. But it was more complicated than that.

“I see,” Tony replied. He shot a wary glance at another staff member sitting at the other desk, who smiled without looking up from his computer screen.

Tony had mixed feelings about me. He was, he said, happy I’d knocked on his door. He felt that people arriving to live in Brixton in large numbers, as gentrification proceeded to restitch the fabric of the area, needed to gain a connection to people who already lived there. Yet I looked like an undercover policeman. He reasoned that the boys at the club – who were even more vigilant than he was – would think I was, too.

The club was a second home for some of the most vulnerable young people living south of the Thames, but it was always full of life and laughter. It offered family support, counselling, football coaching and music studio sessions, serving the local community for the best part of 60 years.

Tony invited me to visit every Friday evening. I would sit with him in the office and hear about the complexities of the local area, as he explained the social problems that many young people under his watch faced – institutional racism, broken homes, depression. Then I would spend time talking to other community members, young and old, who happened to stop by at the end of the school or working week. I’d play games of table tennis and five-a-side football, attend poetry recitals and stop-and-search awareness workshops.

Tony was right: I was initially treated with mistrust, and suspected of being police. “Are you an undie?” or, “I don’t talk to feds!” were constant refrains.

I set out to prove my loyalty and commitment. After applying for a small pot of funding, with the help of the centre’s staff I started hosting a weekly discussion group on Friday evenings for under-16s. In the sessions, we would talk about policing, school life and music. Boys – and a handful of girls – would explain their frustrations about the way they felt their school was too quick to punish and exclude those who struggled to concentrate in lessons, and relay stories about how they’d been manhandled by police officers, leaving them feeling powerless and resentful of authority.

At the same time, Jhemar and I met at the education centre in Brixton Hill every fortnight and made progress filling in the pages of The Book Of Wisdom. Jhemar requested that I help him with English language skills. So we studied the lyrical dexterity of British MCs such as Kano and Jehst, American hip-hop greats Nas and Tupac, and the poets John Agard and Kahlil Gibran.

At the start of every meeting, Jhemar would burst into excitable updates: the fun he’d had playing PlayStation every weekend with Michael; the success of his school assembly performance; his new lyrics; his family holiday to Jamaica with his mum, dad and his younger brother Jerome. He was beginning to trust me.

B etween my job, working in state schools across the capital with students applying to university, and volunteering, I started to notice young people were becoming more fearful for their safety. Tony warned of worse to come, following a decade of cuts to public services. “The government is reaping what it sowed,” he sighed.

Until 2016, youth violence was widely understood to be falling – down from a peak in 2009. Then the numbers started climbing. In 2017, 39 minors in the UK were killed by a knife. It became clear to people working in public services such as the police, schools, youth clubs, the NHS and prisons that years of austerity were taking their toll on vulnerable young people.

Schools’ special educational needs funding, sourced from local councils, had been slashed. As a result, schools were permanently excluding more children with behavioural difficulties than ever before. Schoolchildren were expelled on 7,900 occasions in 2017-18 in the UK, equating to more than 40 pupils a day. Sentences for first-time knife carriers were being handed out more frequently, and for longer, than in previous years. Many young men I worked with suffered. Punishing rather than helping young people was becoming entrenched.

B y November 2017, Jhemar was talking about the threat of violence. He described being stopped and searched by groups of police looking for weapons. A couple of times he was confronted by intimidating older boys seeking to defend their turf. He’d heard gunshots echo across his housing estate. He told me how other young people with whom he’d attended primary school had been kidnapped, held at gunpoint, stabbed.

When Jhemar took Jerome shopping for a Mother’s Day present in Streatham, they saw someone being chased with a samurai sword down the high street. “Little bro is only 13. We almost witnessed a murder out here! London is a shambles,” he said.

I’d heard yet more tales from youth workers elsewhere in London, and teachers working at other schools, of pupils being excluded from their schools for bringing in knives, their educational trajectory cut short by a zero-tolerance approach. Yet mentoring was showing me that it was mostly fear that was driving young people to carry weapons. “For some boys, picking up a knife before they leave home is as normal as putting on shoes,” Tony said.

Youth service budgets across the UK had been drastically slashed under government austerity – more than 100 youth clubs had closed in London, and many more across the country, since 2011 – which put even greater strain on any capacity to provide additional support to the most disenfranchised young people outside of school hours, when they would be most at risk of violence or the temptation to carry a weapon.

Jhemar told me he was determined to stay out of it. I was proud of his resilience – a character trait that many wise young people I’d met over the years have exhibited. Of course, not all teenagers have a strict, stable home life, or access to mentoring opportunities, as Jhemar did.

He had good news, too: “I’m speaking to Michael again! This Sunday!” He held out his hand for me to slap. Then he danced an impromptu skank, bending his knees and waving both sets of gun fingers in the air, moving to the rhythm of his own excitement. “He’s in a better place. Man’s gonna chat to him this Sunday. Or maybe we’ll see him at his yard. I’m gassed!”

Michael had been going through a hard time; Jhemar hadn’t seen him for more than 14 months. The absence had taken its toll. Jhemar had stopped talking so regularly about his older brother. Hearing that Michael was returning to Jhemar’s life was music to my ears.

A few days later, I got the call that Michael had been killed. The police discovered he had been chased across Betts Park and stabbed to death by a group of youths. Six people would later be arrested and charged with murder.

I was at my family home when I heard. After dinner with my parents and sisters that Sunday evening, I sat in my childhood bedroom. I thought about how carefree I’d been at 16, compared with how Jhemar must have been feeling. The concepts of youth violence and loss had abruptly evolved into a more personal, urgent and emotional reality.

My meetings with Jhemar changed from fortnightly to weekly. The laughter in our conversations reduced, and the seriousness increased; we started being more open about our feelings, so that Jhemar had a safe space to express his frustrations and pain.

For weeks, he resisted every urge to leave the house to find the people who did it. “I kept thinking about Jesus, my parents, my family, you,” he would say, a few years later. “I kept thinking about the consequences of my actions if I did something. If I’d gone out on a vengeance ting, I’d just be causing another family the same pain I was feeling.”

In the weeks and months after Michael’s death, headlines reported that London’s murder rate had temporarily surpassed that of New York.

The summer of 2018 was the hottest on record. But as the sun brought about celebration, as England made it to the semi-finals of the football World Cup and commentary about the television show Love Island dominated on social media, repeated tragedy on London’s streets continued to unfold. It was disorienting to have a window into the fearful, overwhelming experiences of young people such as Jhemar, yet also to witness the summer euphoria. I felt as if I was straddling two versions of the city that were diverging at speed.

One warm weekend night, days after politicians closed parliament for the summer recess, a masked teenager wielding a shotgun chased another boy through the front door of the community centre, where I still volunteered once a week. The disturbance interrupted a Nine Night: a Caribbean wake where family members and friends were gathering to pay their respects to a veteran of the community. On seeing the room bustling with children and elders saying prayers and sharing food, the intruder turned and fled. That same week, stories about young people across Brixton and Kennington being stabbed, shot and killed spread via rumours, Snapchat and news reports.

The job of the centre to provide a safe space for young people had never been more important. Yet at the request of the police, who feared that it would become a target, its doors remained padlocked for three weeks as they tried to control the violence. With the centre closed, there was one less safe haven for young people at a time when it was needed more than ever.

“It’s gonna take someone dying inside a place like this for them to wake up and take this seriously,” Tony said when I visited him after the centre eventually reopened. The building was empty. He was slumped in his chair. He argued that making it harder for the most at-risk young men to hang out at the centre might reduce the likelihood of trouble finding its way inside, but this therefore left them more exposed on the streets.

In February 2019, I got a call from Jhemar. He was taking the P5 bus back to Brixton from his girlfriend’s house when he noticed police tape outside the community centre.

“Bro, it’s looking peak at that youth club you go to!” he said, his voice taut.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s hella feds!”

I was in bed with a cold. I’d intended to go to the centre to do outreach in preparation for relaunching a weekly group discussion programme. But to avoid passing on my illness, I’d stayed at home. I called Tony.

“Did something happen?”

“Yeah. There was a murder.”

“Inside?”

“Yeah, mate. They ran in and killed him.”

I jumped out of bed, put on some clothes and trainers, and grabbed my keys. My mind was racing.

When I arrived at the centre, police tape was tied from lamp-post to lamp-post. Two men dressed in blue overalls and face masks were carrying equipment from a large van into the football cage round the back – the scene of crime officers collecting forensic evidence.

The incident had been captured on CCTV. Two young men in their late teens had chased a group of boys into the entrance. Before anyone could stop them, they had attacked a man in the main room before fleeing. The young man, who was in his early 20s, had deep stab wounds. He died within an hour. He had been visiting the centre with a friend.

That night the centre had been bustling with people. A football tournament was taking place for five to eight-year-olds, with coaches from a local team. Mothers and toddlers had been there, watching. Helen Hayes MP and Mahamed Hashi, a local councillor and co-founder of Brixton Soup Kitchen, arrived within minutes with chicken and chips for children stranded at the crime scene. A door had been the only thing separating them from the terror of the main room.

B y the end of 2018 there had been more than 130 homicides in London, the most in a decade, within which the largest demographic group killed was men under the age of 24. The majority of murders were stabbings. The seriousness of the youth violence epidemic had finally caught the attention of the government. I was invited by Sarah Jones, the Labour MP for Croydon Central, to contribute to the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on knife crime. She set up the APPG to hold events with experts and young people about violence, investigate its causes, explore solutions and lobby the government. Our panel would discuss the contested role of social media and music in the ballooning violence. Given Jhemar’s experience, I asked if he could appear on the panel with me, alongside Demetri Addison, a criminology student from Elephant and Castle, whom I’d supported through the process of applying to university at his sixth form college.

We met Jones, her team, a handful of MPs and the other people who would be taking part in the discussion. The list of experts joining us included policy managers from a range of organisations: Facebook, Google, Ofcom and Childnet International. It included representatives from the mayor’s office for policing and crime, and the Children’s Commissioner’s Office.

Jones asked Jhemar to provide his own account of social media. “On Snapchat, you have people posting stuff they think is normal when it shouldn’t be. Guns, people popping fireworks at people, people saying stuff like: ‘I just got a new knife.’ But no one thinks about what they are doing!” he said. “One time, I was in Clapham and I witnessed someone with a machete in their hand, and they were running someone down, but they were holding their camera phone in the other hand, to record it. And I’m there just thinking: ‘That don’t make sense! You are ratting yourself out to the police!’”

Jhemar stopped, contemplating how much to reveal of his own experience. “In my family just last year I lost my eldest brother to knife crime, so it’s like, I’m seeing it happen in my family now. This ain’t correct. Knives are there to either cut what you are eating or cook with.”

The room was silent. After a few moments, Jones thanked Jhemar for his candour. He nodded and sighed. “I didn’t think any of them would give a toss!” he reflected later. “But I was sitting there speaking to a room full of people I didn’t know, and I could see them listening to me. I knew they were taking it in.”

“Jhemar’s situation I remember in particular because it was so raw. Him explaining that to the meeting had a huge impact on the people in that room,” Jones told me a few months later. The APPG would go on to hold similar sessions on topics ranging from school exclusions to “county lines” to the role of the NHS. Jones invited into parliament hundreds of young people from across the UK with experience of youth violence.

J hemar and I have since doubled down on advocating for youth-led solutions to violence. He has gone on to mentor students at his secondary school and provide consultancy for City Hall, the Metropolitan police and Google about youth culture and violence prevention. He is now an aspiring youth worker and rapper, working with teenagers in Lambeth schools and taking regular trips to the studio, where he records uplifting, hopeful raps about the realism of young life in London.

But he did not win justice for his brother. The case against the people arrested for Michael’s murder was dropped due to insufficient evidence. Their father fights to this day to seek justice for Michael’s murder. “Until I die, I won’t give up,” he told me.

The murder at the centre shook the local community in Brixton for months afterwards. Two men, both teenagers, were sentenced for the attack and remain in prison. New bulletproof glass doors were installed. It has reopened with a new lease of life. In late 2019 I relaunched my weekly discussion group with a bright and charismatic new cohort of under-16s. But the issues haven’t gone away. By December 2019, 45,627 knife offences in England and Wales would be recorded, 7% higher than 2018. Last year’s lockdown seemed to provide some respite, as rates of stabbings decreased for the first time in half a decade, but violent crime rates have soared again in 2021: 15 teenagers have been killed in London since the start of the year. The homicide rate in London has increased by more than 50% since 2014. The fundamental problems clearly remain: the faltering mental health of young people who have become even more detached from their school structures, the struggle faced by many youth clubs and charities serving young people to stay open throughout the pandemic, the drastically disproportionate number of black British boys and young men being incarcerated across British cities. There remains a long road ahead.

Witnessing heroes such as Jhemar and Demetri overcome barriers that I didn’t know existed in British society, until I stepped out of my comfort zone to confront them, however, has helped me to believe that achieving civic participation and preventing serious youth violence is possible.

“There is always hope to do better for other people,” Jhemar says. “That’s why I started mentoring other students myself.” He wants to encourage people to get involved with youth work. “Really and truly, people don’t recognise the power of conversation. And if you are looking to get involved, then please do, because I’m telling you, having a mentor was a life-changer. Trust me, you can make a difference.”

This is an edited extract from Cut Short by Ciaran Thapar, published by Penguin on 24 June at £16.99. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

On Thursday 24 June at 7pm BST, Ciaran Thapar will be in conversation with David Lammy MP in a livestreamed Guardian Live event. Book your ticket here.