Knife crime has been this year’s big news story so far as our inner cities are concerned, with every incident involving a youth and a knife being front-page. Of course there are too many people being killed and injured, but that’s been the case for some time. Last year I went to two community-based marches, one in Brent and the other on ‘murder mile’ in Clapton, against gun and knife crime, both largely organised and supported by families who had suffered the loss of one of their own sons. Most of those cases hadn’t made the national news.
So its good news that more attention is being paid – so long as it leads to measures that will really have some impact on the problem, and not just a knee-jerk upping of penalties and policing.
The Seventh Day Adventist Church has a great following in black communities where the problem is most severe, and on Saturday I photographed a march that was organised by their youth movements. The most visible part of these were the Pathfinders in their military-style uniforms, but there were many others.
A grim equation: Drugs, Knives, Guns, Gangs = Death
One of the placards some marchers carried was just the message for Brian Haw, standing in Parliament Square as the march passed on its way to Kennington Park.
I stopped off there to join the Peace Strike, and listen to the singer/songwriter Harry Loco who had come from Holland to perform there.
Earlier in the day while waiting for the Adventist march to start I’d also taken a few pictures of the Rock Against the Blockade activists leafleting and collecting signatures in support of the ‘Miami Five’, Cubans imprisoned by the USA for infiltrating right wing terrorist groups among the Cuban exiles in Florida who carry out illegal terrorist attacks on Cuba. These prisoners have just lost an appeal against their conviction.