Escape from gangland

The murder of a teenager on Boxing Day, stabbed during a brawl over a pair of trainers in Oxford Street, offers another horrifying glimpse of the culture of violence being incubated in our sink estates. Police have not yet confirmed if this was another gang killing, but it seems to fit a sickening pattern. There was Negus McClean, killed in April after he confronted a gang who tried to steal his brother’s mobile phone. Then Nicholas Pearton, stabbed to death in a shop doorway in May by a group of schoolboys. At each outrage politicians denounce criminality and the police promise crackdowns. Then things carry on as before.

It’s unclear at what point children killing children became part of British national life. But this social decay ought to be seen as the most urgent problem facing the country, more so than the need to balance the budget. Prosperity will hardly heal our society, given how much of the rot set in during what were supposedly boom years. Britain’s murder rate, per capita, was far lower a century ago, when the country was poorer and more un-equal. It is a puzzle, for left and right.

Yet abroad the puzzle is being solved. In Boston, after police crackdowns had failed to stop teenage murders, they tried a new technique: identify the gang members, haul them in, offer plenty of support if they volunteered to change their ways — and imprisonment if they did not. Teachers, surgeons who dealt with gunshot and knife wounds, former gang members and police would take turns in talking to the gangs. It was called Operation Ceasefire, a massive, costly exercise involving 61 gangs and 1,300 members. But it worked: the number of attacks halved. The method was adopted in Los Angeles and Chicago, with similar success.