The man battling London’s knife crime epidemic
The man battling London’s knife crime epidemic
The head of the Met’s Violent Crime Task Force talks about why he’s taking on drill music and social media
Hilary Rose
February 14 2019, 12:01am, The Times
Chief Superintendent Ade AdelekanCHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES
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The week in which I meet Chief Superintendent Ade Adelekan is a difficult one for him. The head of the Metropolitan Police’s Violent Crime Task Force speaks against the background of some grim statistics: the number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales is the highest since records began. According to the Office for National Statistics, in the 12 months to March 2018 there were 285 killings by a knife or sharp instrument. In 2017 there were nearly 40,000 knife crime offences nationwide, up 8 per cent on the year before, and 35 per cent of them were on Adelekan’s beat, London.
“Knife crime at the moment keeps me awake at night, it really does,” Adelekan says softly, sitting in a waiting room at New Scotland Yard. “I want the public to feel safe, and that’s why it keeps me awake. I’m not playing at this. This is a heavy weight to carry, not just as an individual, but as an organisation.”
It’s ten months since Adelekan was put in charge of trying to get the numbers down. He is keen to stress that it isn’t just numbers, saying several times that behind every stabbing is a devastated family. “That saddens me as a human being and as a police officer.”
New figures released recently by his task force show that children in the capital are now responsible for half of all knife crime; 41 per cent of offenders are aged between 15 and 19, 8 per cent between 10 and 14. It’s not just the offenders getting younger, Adelekan has said, the attacks are more ferocious. Why? “That’s what we’re experiencing on the streets, that young people are involved with knife crime. The causes of violence in London and across the country is quite complex.”
More than 90 per cent of offenders are men and more than 70 per cent come from the black and ethnic minority community (BME). He says it’s a difficult problem, that everybody’s reasons for becoming involved in violent crime are different, whether or not they share the same race or background. “I don’t think the causes for a certain group can be extrapolated as solely the causes for one group. Social media plays a part.”
But everyone uses social media, not just young BME men. “That’s a challenging question,” he replies. He cites his time as a borough commander in east London, when he saw at first hand the role social media played in helping people to egg each other on, until the situation escalated into violence. Apart from race, the background — he uses the word “journey” — of many of those involved can be a familiar one: excluded from school, moving home regularly, gangs, drugs, boredom, lack of mentors or role models or parental figures . . .
“There’s an old African saying that it takes a village to raise a child. We should all be role models. There’s a whole host of things that play a part. We want to tease out what some of the causes might be for the cohort of people you’ve just talked about. It’s complex and multifaceted. Because people share the same colour of skin, or are from the same race, the reasons for them getting involved with crime could be entirely different.”
The scene of a knife attack last month in Caledonian Road in north LondonVICKIE FLORES/LNP
Over the course of only two weeks last month, the Met made 483 arrests connected to violent crime and 270 drug seizures, and seized 144 weapons. Drugs, Adelekan concedes, are often a factor, as is drill music, the sometimes violent language of which he describes as “provocative”. The head of Operation Trident, the Met’s gang violence unit, said last year that he would like to be able to treat some drill musicians in the same way as terrorism suspects, whereby speech or video doesn’t have to be linked to a specific act of violence to get a conviction for incitement.
“I’m with the head of Trident,” Adelekan says. “Each case on its merit. If we’ve got clear evidence that drill music is causing a problem or fuelling violence, then we should find a way of removing it from wherever it is. But I don’t come from the school that says, ‘It’s drill music and that’s it.’ Drill music is classed as rap as well, I believe, but there’s some rap music that you probably get in churches. They might be rapping about Jesus. We’ve got to be careful.”
He believes that knife crime may not be on the decline, but it has plateaued, “and it’s definitely not out of control. We’ve definitely got it under some control. We’ve sort of apprehended total knife crime.” Apprehended? “It’s a different way of saying ‘plateaued’. We’ve stopped it from increasing.”
In achieving that, he cites an increase in the use of stop-and-search, a tactic that, he believes, when done “ethically and with the community”, helps to drive down violent crime. Some sections of the community, though, feel singled out and mistreated. “That’s my job, to listen and understand those concerns. I live in the community. I’m conspicuously black. So I totally understand some of those concerns.”
Adelekan won’t speculate on whether the increase in younger kids getting involved with gangs and violent crime is in part the result of austerity-driven cuts, including the closure of after-school youth clubs, beyond saying: “The Devil finds work for idle hands.” Yet drug-related turf wars are certainly to blame, so presumably all the people buying coke for their dinner parties must share responsibility for causing the knife crime they worry about.
“Anyone who buys drugs has to share in the responsibility. Anyone who buys drugs and takes drugs has a part to play in all this chaos.” So logically, it’s socially irresponsible to take drugs? “It’s illegal to take controlled drugs.” Would legalising them make his job easier? “That’s not a question I can answer. It’s not a question I’m prepared to answer. I’m a police officer. I’m here to enforce the law, I don’t make the law.”
Adelekan is circumspect about his life. He was born and raised in London, he is 51 and married, with two grown-up children and a daughter still at school. He says he wasn’t one of those kids who always knew he wanted to be a policeman, far from it. He was in his twenties when, after a series of jobs, including a stint in a ticket office on the Tube, he began looking for something different. He called the police recruitment line and was told to go and meet a serving officer at Forest Gate police station. The officer took him for a run around in his patrol car and told him about the job. Adelekan was hooked.
“Twenty-four years later, here I am. I would do it all again and again and again because when we get it right there is no better feeling than knowing that you’ve impacted positively on someone’s life.”
And when things go wrong? “I don’t think the word ‘wrong’ is right. It’s when you feel you can’t deliver the help people need or the results don’t go the way you expect them to go. Sometimes you feel you’ve let people down and that’s saddening and depressing and devastating. Trying to drive down violence and knife crime isn’t just a professional endeavour, it’s a personal one. I’ve got family and friends.”
He was stationed in Tottenham in 2011 when rioting broke out after the police shot dead a local man, Mark Duggan, while trying to arrest him. Adelekan’s eyes well up when he talks about the riots, and for a moment he can’t speak.
“Was it a career low point? Personally, as a human being, it was a low point. To see a community left like Tottenham was left saddened me then and it still does. Forget me being a police officer, there’s a real human side to seeing a community being decimated in the way it was. So of course it was sad and I find it difficult to talk about it now.”
He talks eloquently about how violent crime will only be brought down not just by enforcement, but early intervention — for example, posting police officers in some schools — and productive police engagement in their local communities. He talks of the “engagement activities” planned by local police chiefs, the advisory groups, the teams that try to make sure the police know about tensions within a community before they become violent and about the importance of having honest, difficult conversations with local people who will challenge the Met’s thinking and tactics. No area, Adelekan insists, is beyond help.
“If I thought that,” he says, radiating optimism, “then I might as well pack up and go home.”
