Gang culture

Recently a kid was stabbed to death round the corner from me, in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of horrified shoppers. Since then there have been terrible stabbings in Edmonton and Bexley. There have now been two teenage murders in London since the New Year dawned.

We simply cannot go on at this rate. We cannot allow 2008 to be as bad as 2007, when 27 teenagers were murdered. It is time we got a grip on the culture of the gangs and gang-related killings.

This matters to London. It needs leadership; and it is a scandal that so far we have heard little or nothing from the Mayor, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, or the Home Secretary. We need positive action, a short, medium and long term strategy for getting us out of this mess.

It is time for a concerted policy to tackle the scourge of teenage gang killings, and that coordination is surely the paramount job of the Mayor. If people feel the streets of London aren't safe, that negates so much of the other good work being done by the police. Over the coming months I will be announcing my plans to tackle this growing problem and I am outlining some of the specific proposals now.

To make our streets safer, we must of course begin with the police. It's not just a question of ensuring a more visible police presence, and cutting the paperwork that keeps so many officers in the back room.

We need a clear signal - from the top of the Met - that tackling the gangs is a priority. We need to do far more to end the prevalence of knives and guns on the streets and on public transport, and it is time we at least considered the use of remote hand-held scanners that can detect weapons at a distance.

The idea has been promoted by Lord Stevens, the former Commissioner, and it has the advantage of allowing officers to "search" without stopping, and without being seen to victimise some communities.

We need to prevent the teenage gangs from treating the buses as getaway cars, and intimidating other passengers.

That's why I have proposed a trial of live CCTV on some routes, so that the police can see the violence taking place as soon as they are alerted to it by the bus driver - and immediately go to the scene.

We should be making sure that all new building in London is designed to make crime more difficult; and that means no more vulnerable walkways or dimly-lit stairwells - no more repetition of past mistakes.

But we will never deal with this problem unless we also understand why kids seek out gangs. In some ways, their choice is rational. The gang provides a sense of security, opportunities to earn the esteem of their peers. The gang can be a kind of family; and that's why we should be doing so much more to allow them to obtain these benefits - excitement, competition, achievement - but in other ways.

The Mayor could be doing so much more to encourage competitive sport of all kinds, with all its potential for developing emotional maturity and for allowing young males to let off steam. There is so much that could be done with the arts.

But above all, we should be using mayoral funds to encourage the thousands of volunteers who are working with the kids - and their parents - and trying to nip the problem in the bud, trying to steer them away from criminality, because that is the best way to save the taxpayer millions.

There are people across London who are doing life changing work - organisations like the Street Pastors, XLP, Prospex, Kids Company, Eastside Young Leaders - and what we need to do now is to bring all these people together into a London-wide network.

Where necessary, we should be helping them expand with London Development Agency money, and not wasting it, like the current administration, on pointless politically correct agitprop. We need to do this now, if the problem is not to be even worse in a few years' time.

We need to take London's gang culture seriously if this year's toll is not to be a tragic repeat of 2007, or worse.

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