Teenage Knife Wars

This programme contains some violent scenes and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

So what would you do to protect yourself?

Are you saying people want you dead? What was it?

I'm Jermaine Jenas, ex-footballer and pundit,

and I'm going to explore the rise in knife crime

that's devastating lives across our nation.

-NEWS REPORTS:

-Tributes have been paid to a 15-year-old boy who was

stabbed to death outside...

A 17-year-old died from a stab wound to the heart...

A knife or blade was used in a crime every 60 minutes...

Two teenagers have been seriously injured

in a suspected stabbing in Nottingham last night.

Although knife crime is a problem across the UK,

there has been a spike in Nottingham,

where I was born and bred.

We are seeing more severe stab wounds.

DISTORTED VOICE:

I know people that have been stabbed metres away from my house

and our community doesn't really exist.

'I care about my city so I've come back to find out why there

'has been a rise in knife crime here.'

This is how it all ends up, somebody losing a son, a friend.

It creates hate.

I want to see what can be done to stop the violence and the killing.

Football changed my life.

It gave me incredible opportunities.

I played for Premiership clubs and my country, all around the world.

For me, that journey began here, in my hometown, Nottingham.

You hear about knife crime.

I think to physically see it,

that's when it hits you and I remember going to the barber's shop

and I used to park my car just, like, round the corner.

I saw this guy who was literally just squatted down in an alleyway.

He had a balaclava on.

Four or five of them kind of rushed around the corner.

They wanted my jewellery.

They had were weapons on them and your immediate reaction

is you stiffen up, you want to fight but you just can't.

You're helpless.

It was scary because you feel like you have an element of control.

You've made it from a tough area to go and play for your club.

I mean, I captained Forest when I was like 17.

There's a respect level that you get from that.

You walk round the city, grown men respect you.

Young kids look up to you.

That completely neutralised it.

All of a sudden, you're nobody again because, you know,

these people that are carrying these weapons,

they've got no respect for anybody.

And that was the time when I properly

fell out of love with Nottingham.

I grew up in Clifton, which is way down there somewhere

in the distance, but robbery was the thing.

But that robbery has now turned into murders.

I didn't come from the privileged position that I'm in now.

It was me and my mum and... there was times when bailiffs

were knocking on the door but I was fortunate to have good friends.

Good family.

So when you go round to interview people,

will they have knives on them?

-Have you, you know...

-Probably.

I want to see what these guys are just like.

Do they just roll around and be like, "Yeah, I've got a knife."

-Do I need to be worried about this?

-I'm hoping, to be fair,

that there is a level of respect form somebody like myself,

being from Nottingham,

who's prepared to take an interest in what they're doing,

because I personally think that it only ends

-in a couple of ways and none are good.

-Yeah.

-Jail or death.

-Yeah.

As a parent, to think that your child is going to go out

and that might happen... really, really scary to me.

This fear has become a reality for some.

I feel so heartbroken when I come up here to the cemetery,

when I look at my child... I always say, "Why?"

Trish's son died from a knife attack after being robbed

only yards from their front door.

This must be tough.

Very.

You know, my son was only 27 years of age.

And I really, really miss him.

And he shouldn't be here.

You know, I have been robbed of so many things,

grandchildren, love and all the sort of things that family would do.

He was a DJ and he would always play the music so loud upstairs.

Two brothers fighting.

I miss that.

You know, the house is so quiet.

-It's the simple things of...

-The simple things.

-Two sons grow up together, and...

-Exactly.

He wasn't in any fighting.

He wasn't in any gangs.

He wasn't dealing.

-He was an innocent party in what happened to him.

-Yeah.

I'm a parent.

I've got three girls, luckily enough, and just...

the thoughts that go through the head of what this must be like

for you to have to stand here when he was taken so young.

-I mean, I can't bring myself to...

-Yes.

..to contemplate, to be honest with you.

No.

And there is so many mothers out there who is going through

the same thing.

It's got to stop.

# I smoked weed ass a young 'un

# Now my mind has ceased to function proper

# I walk with my hand on a chopper,

# Thinking I could easily stick my knife in your windpipe... #

Can you give me any reasons why there has been such

a rise in knife crime in Nottingham?

I dug out a stat that showed that one in every 25 crimes across

Nottingham involved a knife and I think what that shows is that

there's almost this culture of carrying a knife across the city.

Ben is a former Nottingham crime journalist

who has reported on knife attacks across the city.

Every time I made that call to police, I would say,

"It's a knife crime incident.

"It's a stabbing, it's a slashing.

"It's a threatening with a knife."

You speak to communities and then you realise how scared people are

in their own homes that this is happening on their streets.

This used to be BZR.

It's now been shut down.

One of the reasons it got shut down was this particular incident,

two sets of punters have fallen out.

One turns round and hits the other one with a bottle.

As he's being removed by the bouncers,

the guy who has been hit by the bottle stabs a bouncer in the back.

What was the sentence that he got?

I believe he got four years, in the end, which I don't think

the victims were entirely happy about.

Well, you wouldn't be, would you?

Stabbed in the back by a knife

when you're trying to, well, just do your job.

So we're right in the centre of town.

Saturday night, this place would be absolutely heaving with people.

I used to be one of them so I know exactly what you're on about.

Unfortunately, this is also the scene where Joshua Bradley,

who was 19, lost his life when a dispute got out of hand

and he ended up with a fatal stab wound.

The police records say that the man who stabbed him,

he was actually bragging about holding a knife.

Often, it's petty disputes that lead to bigger issues

so they escalate.

I mean, we've got to be fair, it's young lads, anything from 14,

even younger, through to about 25,

who are involved in about 99% of these incidents.

After weeks of negotiation,

I have managed to get a meeting with a schoolboy who carries a knife.

I feel like I'm going to look in their eyes and it's just going

to be just hate.

And then how do you get that back?

'Chris - not his real name - will only meet me at

'a secret location with his identity concealed.'

Are you in a gang?

DISTORTED VOICE:

Do you feel more confident when you've got your knife on you?

You feel like Superman?

Have you got one on you now?

Can we see it?

With your knife, you must feel safe.

What about if you dipped into the city centre?

You have to? Why is that?

You're having to walk round with a knife.

Have you used it? Have you stabbed somebody before?

And have you been stabbed yourself?

Right in the rib?

So you did go to hospital?

Would you have faith that if you'd told the police,

they would have found him and done something about it?

wWhere did it start? What triggered it?

Then it's going to carry on.

So, from that moment, you decided, "That's it, I'm carrying."

How did you get hold of this knife?

So it's what? Touching man's organs?

So it's not just a harming situation. You're doing it to kill?

What would a lesson area be?

Right in the torso?

What scares me is, like, you're the next generation.

You're saying words like,

"This is it." You know, "It's kill or be killed."

Basically, "This is the end" type thing.

And, at your age, you shouldn't be thinking like that.

HE SIGHS

It was scary to see the mind-set of someone so young

prepared to just lose everything, lose his life.

There was nothing that was going to stop him.

And all this started from an argument.

I mean, we all had arguments at school. Everyone had arguments

at school, but didn't get stabbed because of it.

'After hearing about Chris' deadly feud with his rival,

'I wanted to find out

'about the damage that was being done with knives.'

'I've come to the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham,

'one of the biggest and busiest trauma centres in the UK.'

-We're seeing more severe stab wounds.

-Yeah.

Attempted maiming,

so trying to divide a nerve so a leg doesn't work,

or even an abdominal stab wound

which we may end up having to bring the bowel out onto the surface,

into a bag, into a stoma.

That's life-changing for people.

We've had a few where we've still had the knife inside, and we have

to work around that. We can't pull that knife out down here.

Is it actually squashing a blood vessel, so it's not bleeding?

If we pull it out, will it suddenly start to bleed an awful lot?

I was talking to a young fellow called Chris who carries a knife,

openly uses it.

And one of the things he said to me was he doesn't always stab to kill.

And I was like, "Well, what are you aiming for

"when you say you don't stab to kill?"

The first thing he said was the torso.

If you stab someone in the torso,

you have a significant chance of severe damage to somebody,

either killing them if you stab anywhere near the heart,

permanently maiming them,

requiring them to have major surgery or dividing a big blood vessel.

So this is a CT scan.

And this is a kid, a teenager, came in not very long ago.

-Can you see this? That line?

-Yeah.

-That's the track of the knife.

This is one of the big blood vessels.

This blood vessel carries a litre and a half of blood a minute.

The end of the knife's here. That's where the knife went.

-And it hit that vessel?

-It hit that vessel.

What you can't see is it went through that vessel

and went into the other vessel that sits behind it.

That carries four or five litres of blood a minute.

That's the result of stabbing a torso.

What's the youngest you've had to deal with?

Teenagers. The 13-, 14-year-olds,

who are unfortunately involved in stuff

that you just wish that they weren't anywhere near at that age.

We still think we're bombproof and bulletproof when we're young.

Psychologically, it affects some people big-time.

But other people just say, "Oh, fine, look at me,

"I got stabbed and got on with it. I'm going back out there."

Hence, you know, the repeat people who've been stabbed more than once.

Most of the people who are coming in with stab wounds are either

drug-related or gang-related.

And we do have...

quite often we have support with police around

if there is a real or an imminent threat.

An underworld fixer has arranged for me to meet with three gang members.

I was nervous, but I needed to meet them

to find out about the weapons they used and the gangs in the city.

'The first thing I asked was about the gang feuds across Nottingham.'

How old was you when you first started carrying knives?

What do you do to protect yourself?

You say people want you dead, what was it?

So, I mean, this is for you.

Literally, you'd class it as your protection.

You pull that out, people will get scared, obviously.

You must have been in situations where you've had to use it?

And do you feel that's given you more respect now, where you're from?

Do you feel like somebody literally wants to...

Have you lost any friends through, basically, this life?

If you could get out, would you get out?

So why is it you think knife crime is so high in Nottingham?

'I know I speak from a privileged position as an ex-footballer,

'but I'm realising that some of these youngsters

'are a product of their environment,

'and can feel they need to use violence in order to survive.'

I'm not sure we are doing enough to not just get the knives

off the streets, but once some of them have been caught with knives,

they felt like there was a golden moment,

a golden point where they thought,

"I want to change and I want to be different,"

and nobody was there for them. We wasn't there for them.

And it's that moment where they just go,

"Well, I might as well go back to doing what I was doing before,

"because I know at least my crew, or my people,

"they're going to be there for me."

I wanted to see what help was available

to stop kids from carrying knives.

Today we're going to talk a little bit about knife crimes.

I just wanted to talk to you about...

'Baz is a former gang member who managed to get out.

'For him, the solution isn't prison -

'it's educating the young before the problem starts.'

If, like, you get into a fight with knives, it only takes one...

one hit to...

Your life is gone.

Yeah, for someone not to get stabbed,

in the space of the week, is a rare thing.

I know people who have been stabbed

metres away from my house and our community doesn't really exist.

After the school session, Baz told me how his boxing career

was cut short in his youth, following a knife attack.

I'm coming out of a club,

-a man just kind of like surrounded me and pulled this cleaver out.

-Mm.

"I want your watch, I want this, that and the other,"

-and it was my dad's watch, you know what I mean?

-Yeah.

And my dad had just passed away from a stroke, so I went,

"No, you're not having it," so he just went like that with a cleaver.

It was coming for my head and I put my hands up like this

and it just went straight through that hand

and then he went again.

I went there and straight through my hand there, do you know what I mean?

-Mm.

-I'm looking at my hands and my hands are, like, hanging off, man,

like, there's blood gushing out.

I thought I could box again but you know, unfortunately,

every time I was hitting a bag,

my hands would just swell up again, you know what I mean?

I was in a dark place, man.

I had people phoning me up and saying, "You need to deal with this.

"You've got to make an example of him," and this, that and the other,

and there's a lot of peer pressure going off there and, you know,

for a young person to have to deal with all that is hard, man,

and it's easy to make the wrong decision.

What we've done is we've got satellite boxing clubs like this one

across areas of deprivation in Nottingham,

especially the rival areas,

-that tend to have, you know, issues with each other...

-Yeah.

..Meadows, St Annes, and Radford, you know what I mean?

Then they can integrate the kids

from all three clubs through competition.

By the time they get to an age where they could have any kind

-of rivalry or altercation, they're friends.

-Yeah.

We need to get out there,

like we were there today, and educate these kids around it,

and stop them carrying knives, man, because they're losing their lives.

What do we do once these people have maybe served their time?

They might have completely changed whilst they've been inside

or they might not have.

The bottom line is when they do come out back into society,

what type of person have we got and then what do we do with them?

We've got people that might be in gangs who've got a criminal record

coming out of prison and they need to re-engage in society.

If we give them support which helps them with CVs,

volunteering, social skills, life skills,

we'll help them into employment, training and education.

-What we want to do is give people a route out.

-Mm.

Talking to Baz got me thinking about Chris,

the schoolboy knife user.

I wanted to meet him again.

On my way, I heard there had been a double killing

in another part of the city.

-NEWS REPORT:

-'Two men, believed to be friends

'have been stabbed to death

'within 24 hours of one another in Nottingham.

'The second man had been hosting a party

'in memory of the first victim.'

It's sad, I mean, seriously sad.

It's literally just happened - brand-new flowers...

..people visiting all the time.

I mean, you can see people have been obviously having a drink

to celebrate his life, but...

Some of the notes are just like...

I mean, obviously, they're personal, but like...

when you read them, they're heartbreaking.

But this is the reality.

This is real, you know, you can sit there

and you can talk to as many people as you want,

this is how it all ends up.

It ends up with somebody losing a son, somebody losing a father,

a friend, you know, family members and, you know,

there's repercussions as well from things like this.

It creates hate. When you read these, it's like,

"I can't believe it's happened,"

and "We love you and we miss you,"

but you can imagine each and every one of these people are feeling...

hurt and they feel hatred to the person that's done it.

This tragic incident made me worry about what would happen to Chris

if he continued his feud with his rival.

I wanted to see if he was ready to change.

You know, we spoke about the beef that you had with the guy

that stabbed you.

Have you managed to find him

or are you still intent on finding this guy?

But you still...

You still intend on stabbing him back and hurting him?

There's got to be another way,

rather than walking around with knives every single day.

Are you carrying again, like, today?

That's completely different to the one I saw last time.

It's got its own special case and everything.

Last time, just seemed like...

You told me it was out the top drawer of your kitchen.

That's going to do some serious damage, Chris.

I mean, if you land that in somebody, that's it.

I mean, that's your life done,

that's their life done instantly, you know that, don't you?

Is that what you're saying, still, then,

about your life - that it's kill or be killed?

That's killing somebody.

The minute that goes in and comes out, you're dead.

Are you prepared to die?

But you're... You're prepared to die, though?

I've been standing outside some railings today,

flowers everywhere, balloons, candles lit,

people drinking, trying to celebrate someone's life, right?

To me, I think you've got the opportunity

to make a decision before that happens.

I'm wondering what's holding you back

from just making that changing your life?

I suppose all I can do, I just wish you the best of luck

and hopefully eventually you'll make the right decision.

I can't help but think he's going to die, it's as simple as that. It's...

You know what I mean?

He can't be walking around the street with a knife like that

and if it's not him, it's someone else.

I mean, in this film, you know, I've spoke to bereaved parents,

I've seen flowers and balloons on walls where people have...

..have died and...

..I don't know, it angers me when I see him carrying that knife

because that could be him

stabbing someone's son, stabbing someone's daughter,

stabbing a father, just that blatant disregard for life

pissed me off a bit.

And I feel that...

It's, um...

He's probably one of thousands within the city.

It's that kind of...

It just shows you the... the task at hand.