Facing the truth about violent street culture

Government adviser and former gang leader Sheldon Thomas speaks to Matthew Taylor about violent street culture and the role that home and family — as well as government policy — play

RSA
RSA
Sep 6, 2018 · 13 min read

by Sheldon Thomas

@SheldonThomas3

Taylor: First, tell us a little bit about your journey.

Thomas: When I was about nine I lived in Kennington. It was 1974 and I went across the road with my brother to play football and a police car pulled up and a policeman shouted “coon”. I went home to tell my mum and that was when things changed for me: with my mum’s response. She assumed that I had done something wrong. Her response confused me. That sort of incident didn’t happen every single day, but sporadically police officers would say “coon”, “sambo”, “golliwog” and “go back home”. Then, in 1978, my brother, who had been over from Jamaica since ’73, went to the funfair on Clapham Common. When he arrived, 15 skinheads beat him up because he was black; they broke his nose and jawbone. The police just stood by. The response I was expecting from my mum and dad was let’s go and find these people, but their response was let’s go to the police, which confused me because the police didn’t like us. This provided a catalyst; I had no respect for my mum and dad; I was going to form a gang and we were going to kill police officers.

Taylor: I have two sons who grew up in the same part of London. They were white middle-class kids but went to quite tough schools. It only became clear to me later that one of my sons was quite badly bullied on his way to school. My older son casually told me that the younger one had been mugged more than five times and there were areas he would never go to. I only had a pretty thin understanding of the day-to-day life my sons were leading, and it made me think how often parents don’t really know what lives their youngsters lead.

Thomas: Yes, but in a lot of black families at that time there was also denial. My mum and dad grew up under colonial rule, and they developed an inferiority complex. In Jamaica, they were meant to feel that white people were superior, and they brought that belief to England. They thought, get to work and don’t worry about what anyone says to you. So, mum and dad didn’t tell us about racism. Had they done so, maybe we could have been more prepared. There was a certain amount of denying the reality of first generation black kids growing up in a hostile situation because it would ruin their dream of escaping Jamaica and coming to England.

Taylor: This chimes with accounts about the radicalisation of Muslim communities. Again, the generation born here saw their parents who were deferential, just accepted it, grateful to be here. And their children felt humiliated by that, which led them to rediscover the culture that their parents had left behind. Radicals often have parents who are very conformist, and they’re reacting against them.

Thomas: I lost respect. I felt that there was a lot my mum and dad should have told us about and they didn’t, like slavery. In 1977, the TV series Roots came out and we were like, first they’re calling us “coon”, “monkey” and “golliwog”, now you’re telling us they enslaved us! The Monday after the programme was aired, our school was completely divided. We used to hang out with white kids; that stopped. Period. I made the gang. I began to say, if any white person calls me a name, somebody’s going to die and it ain’t going to be me. When you’re a child you don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. You’re thinking, I’ve been putting up with this for so long, so now I’m hitting out.

Taylor: So, this is political. But when people talk about gangs now they don’t think of them as political, they think they’re to do with drugs and money.

Thomas: Most gangs start off political. We were fighting a social cause, responding to injustice. Obviously, fighting police officers means you’re going to get arrested, fighting the National Front means you get your head smashed in. We began to get a reputation in London as not to be messed with. We would go to Eltham, to the National Front headquarters, and start a fight knowing we were not going to win. We would go into a pub in a National Front area at the age of 13 or 14 and smash the place up, knowing we were going to get chased by 50 beefy men. We lost all sense of reason. We believed our parents had let us down and the system didn’t like us because we were black. It got to a point in 1981 when we burnt Brixton to the ground. Look at the footage of the Brixton riots and you will see us at the front of almost every shot leading the charge against the police. We wanted to make a point, to let the world know that enough is enough.

Taylor: Was part of that consciousness raising; were there particular books you were reading, music you were listening to?

Thomas: We began to believe in the empowerment of black people. We began to think about the pan-African movement. We started to get involved with the Marcus Garvey Centre. Garvey said that in order to liberate Africa, it was going to take the black man from the West going back. We thought, that’s us! We were thinking about going to South Africa and joining up with the violent arm of the ANC to start fighting the white men out in Africa.

My generation — now in our 50s and 60s — began to look at Africa as our home. Everything was about Africa for us: the pan-African movement, African unity, giving Africa more economic and political strength. But I lost it, I began to view white people how the National Front viewed black people. That was wrong because not every white person is a racist. That is what happens when anger takes hold of you.

Taylor: So how did you go from leading the riots in 1981 to today, when you are advising the government at the most senior level?

Thomas: The key moment was meeting Lord Scarman. He came to our youth club to find out what was triggering us. We held out some hope for his 1982 report. We thought, here’s a white man coming into our world to find out from us what went wrong, there might be a change. When that didn’t happen, we became criminals. The whole political arena went out the window. We just said, you know what, this country’s never going to like us, so we might as well start selling drugs. I became an enforcer. That means people would ask me to torture people, violence was my world. Guns came on the scene and nine of my friends got murdered. It just got worse and we began to self-implode. The turning point was when we got greedy. The black gangs down south and the white gangs up north turned against the Jamaicans, who had been coming over to the country and linking up with criminal networks, then getting street gangs to distribute drugs on their behalf. We wanted more of the money and obviously this was when the gun-related drugs war started on mainland Britain, in inner cities such as Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London, during the ’80s and ’90s. Eventually, it was the first generation black kids born to West Indian parents in Britain that began to take control of the crack cocaine markets. Once the British gangs took the lead, everyone began to turn against each other and that’s where we are today. You have gangs with no moral codes. During the ’80s the street gangs didn’t commit crimes on a Sunday because most Jamaicans and black kids born in Britain were either Christians or went to church. You didn’t attack anybody who was walking the streets with their mums or dads, so there were codes by which we lived in the ’80s, but by the late ’90s the moral code among gang members had gone.

Taylor: What was the point at which the life you were living switched, and you started the path to where you are?

Thomas: Four gunmen came into a nightclub, and as they came in they shot several people, made their way towards me. They must have been 30 feet away from me and all four of them started shooting. None of the bullets hit me, but they blew the head off the guy next to me. That was my turning point. This is not what I had signed up for. I was about 20.

I turned to a man called Bernie Grant, who was an MP at the time. He took me to America to meet the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It was through them that I began to understand things like economic suppression, structural adjustment, post-traumatic slave syndrome, inferiority complexes, colonial rule and what that does. Together these men taught me that if you want to change society, you have to change yourself first and in order to change yourself, you have to have some form of faith and education, because that is what allows you to self-reflect and communicate more effectively. When I came back to England I got a degree in statistics and marketing, and diplomas in economics, accountancy, business and management. I began to go around the country and talk to gang members about how and why we were self-imploding.

Taylor: What do you think are the characteristics of the recent upsurge in killings? The gangs that I knew about were mainly neighbourhood gangs, and the whole thing was about territory and postcodes.

Thomas: What my company Gangsline has found through work both in the UK and the Caribbean is that family breakdown is the biggest problem. When you look at the families where sons and daughters are involved in this gang life, there are no fathers. That was one of the biggest things Jesse Jackson pointed out: that in the African American and Hispanic communities there was a high percentage of absent fathers. When you go to the Caribbean it’s the same, when you go to South America it’s the same; there is a correlation. In every area, when there is no father figure or positive male role model, the chances of your child being drafted into a gang are very high.

Taylor: There are two ways you might think of that. One is that there is simply no structure, not making sure you’re home on time, all of that. But there is also no authority in your life, you crave authority and gangs give you that structure and discipline.

Thomas: One hundred per cent. These kids are looking for a sense of belonging and purpose, looking for that father figure. They don’t know why they’re searching and end up looking at the guy down the road, who looks flash, drives a nice car and always has a load of money and girls. And it’s the same with the females. I think the upsurge in knife crime and shootings has more to do with societal issues, family breakdown issues, and the fact that organised criminal networks bring guns into the country but no longer care who the guns are sold to.

Taylor: My perception on gangs, when my boys were teenagers, was that they were pretty disorganised. Every estate and every postcode had to have one. That was your territory and you had to defend yourself. There were a lot of stabbings but you’d never hear about them because it would just be a wound, it was like a badge of honour. When people died, someone would push the knife in the wrong way and it would actually kill somebody, but they didn’t intend to do it most of the time. Today feels different; it feels more like organised gangs fighting over drugs turf.

Thomas: Yes and no. Street gangs are disorganised in some ways and organised in others, such as when it comes to ‘county lines’, distributing drugs in middle-class suburbs. This gangster image is now a culture and carrying a knife or weapons is part of that culture. You don’t have to be a gang member to be a part of it, although the influence of gang membership has driven some young people to carry a knife through fear. Trap and drill music actively promotes the gangster lifestyle. It encourages children to rebel against parents, society and everyone else and get yours, meaning make money by any means necessary.

Taylor: My boys were into grime and I thought what was interesting was that it was quite political. It was about people’s lives and both black and white people joined the grime movement. Then grime turns into drill, which is different, it’s more aggressive, much less political?

Thomas: What happened was the drug dealers wanted to recruit more people. Music is one way and YouTube makes it easier. When I was involved, I had to be signed to a recording label. Today you don’t need to be signed, you can go down the road, spend £5,000 and make music that sounds better than Eminem because technology has changed so much. And it’s more than just encouraging and goes out of its way to degrade women. The reason why that music has come about is because many of the artists wanted black people to keep control. They thought, we don’t want white people to take over our grime, so we’re going to start doing things that white people can’t talk about. So, trap and drill music was created, all about gang members cussing each other on YouTube.

They would use the grime to promote how bad they are, to violate another gang, and to recruit girls. So, what happens is these black guys from London or Birmingham (I say black guys because 90% of trap and drill music is done by the black youth in the UK) put music out on YouTube. The girls will message them and get a response from these guys who they see as hood celebrities. Our research has found that middle-class white families are prone to this because they themselves are in the same position as some poor white families, when it comes to bad parenting. According to Bowlby and Bowen’s attachment theory, if you don’t spend any time with your children, you’re leaving a gap. That’s when young middle-class girls go and do what young people in gangs do, which is look for somebody who they think loves them. So, the music is capturing the hearts of white middle-class girls and kids who are now the drug runners for these guys.

Taylor: What is your message to gang members, to fathers, to the people who buy drugs and pour money into this?

Thomas: We have to ask ourselves what kind of society we want. We’ve become money-orientated, meaning we spend more time at work than we do with our kids. A UN report released in 2015 talks about how Britain has become a place where children do not feel loved at home. It supported my argument about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; if your child does not have that emotional love and that security, then they will look elsewhere for family. I know some people will argue that we don’t have a choice about working long hours — and I understand that — but we have a gap and it is being filled by gang members, radicalised Muslims and far-right groups because we’re not there. Also, middle-class whites are the main buyers of cocaine and they are directly funding street gangs. This is the elephant in the room, along with organised criminal networks, who have the business and sophistication to transport drugs and weapons from the end of the world to the UK; unless we tackle this, street gangs will continue. So the message for society is that we need to rethink our priorities in our lives and develop a new strategy for tackling the middle-class and criminal networks.

Taylor: Aside from our south London background, we share something else: we have both been advisers to the government at various points. How have you found advising government? Do you feel that you have influence or do you sometimes feel that you’re the token person who used to be in a gang so you’ve got credibility?

Thomas: Token. When I met Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith, I felt they wanted me there. But as time went by, I began to realise that while they meant well, they didn’t want to do much because everything for them was about cost. I remember one time Theresa May whispering in my ear and asking “Is it really this bad?” For me, the sad part about the whole thing is that everything about this country is about class. If you don’t have a PhD, the government don’t really listen, and I’m talking about both parties.

Taylor: Is that because your message is that it’s not about stop and search, it’s not about some initiative that lasts a few weeks? We need a fundamental social shift, and that’s not what you want to hear as a politician, you want simple, quick answers.

Thomas: You’ve nailed it. I don’t think there is any government willing to do what I’m asking because that would mean admitting they’ve got it wrong, which most people don’t like to do. The black community doesn’t like to admit we’ve failed our children. The poor white communities don’t want to admit it either, so we’re in this blame culture. Black communities blaming the government, poor white communities blaming the government and the government blaming the police. A massive societal change is needed and that means looking at the redistribution of wealth and developing a real vision for children. It means helping the poorest to have higher expectations for their children. How do we get them to have the same ambitions as Matthew Taylor? We don’t have young people believing in the vision of this country because there is no vision. Children go to school, study eight GCSEs and are then told if they want to get a job at 18 the pay is less than £5 an hour. Then the drug dealer comes to him/her and offers £250 a day, tax free, if he just carries a weapon with him. How do you fight that? We’ve got to change the education system. I believe we should teach construction, accounts, economics, vocational and business courses in secondary schools. A lot of children do not want to go to university because of the debt they will incur.

Taylor: Is there something that can happen at a neighbourhood level too, because some neighbourhoods are more peaceful than others?

Thomas: In London and in most cities across the UK there is a gangs problem. Every neighbourhood has a gang problem. Until communities admit they’re in a crisis, how can you help them? We have to face some truths about ourselves. What are we doing as parents, guardians and carers for those children? How do we manage a child who says they are carrying a blade? How do you change that behaviour?

Sheldon Thomas is founder of Gangsline, which has advised the Home Office and police, and delivers workshops and training programmes for police, teachers and NHS staff

This article first appeared in the RSA Journal — Issue 2 2018

RSA Journal

The award-winning RSA Journal is a quarterly publication for our Fellows, featuring the latest cutting-edge ideas from international writers alongside RSA news. A selection of articles have been reproduced here.

RSA

Written by

RSA

The mission of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) is to enrich society through ideas and action.

RSA Journal

The award-winning RSA Journal is a quarterly publication for our Fellows, featuring the latest cutting-edge ideas from international writers alongside RSA news. A selection of articles have been reproduced here.

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