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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 181-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
tuesday 16 january 2007
PROFESSOR GUS JOHN and DR TONY SEWELL MS SUKHVINDER STUBBS and MR MARC EDWARDS Evidence heard in Public Questions 358 - 417
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday 16 January 2007 Members present Mr John Denham, in the Chair Mr Richard Benyon Mr Jeremy Browne Mr James Clappison Mrs Janet Dean Margaret Moran Martin Salter Mr David Winnick ________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Gus John, Chief Executive, Gus John Partnership Ltd, and Dr Tony Sewell, Founder and Project Director, Generating Genius programme, gave evidence. Q358 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much indeed for coming to this session of our inquiry into Young Black People and the Criminal Justice System. We are grateful to both of you for the written evidence you have given and the other material to which you have pointed us. I wonder whether for the record you would introduce yourselves to the Committee, and then we will get under way. Dr Sewell: My name is Tony Sewell. Currently, I am chair or CEO of a charity called Generating Genius which works in science and engineering and literally provides a longitudinal pipeline for boys from 13 until the time they go to university. Basically, we train them at three universities: Imperial College, Leeds and London Met. We look to produce a leadership programme in science for boys. That is essentially what I do. As an academic I feel that it is all well and good writing and analysing the problem but I am always challenged as to what I can do about it practically. That is my legacy or contribution to this. Formerly, I was a school teacher. By the way, all the schools that I have talked to have now closed down. I do not know whether that was due to my bad behaviour in those schools or the policies of the government's representatives here. Hopefully, I can give you a positive contribution today. Professor John: I run a consultancy company, the Gus John Partnership Ltd. I combine that with work as a visiting faculty professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow where I teach education policy and practice and run in-service development courses for head teachers. I work in a voluntary capacity as chair of an organisation called Parent and Student Empowerment which works with young people who typically have either been excluded from schools or have been identified by schools as being at risk of exclusion. We run a leadership development programme for them in conjunction with sympathetic colleagues from universities and people involved in youth offending and other arms of criminal justice. Q359 Chairman: When you heard that this Committee was to hold an inquiry into young black people and the criminal justice system what did you think were the most important issues on which it should focus? Professor John: For me, the Committee should be focusing upon the causes of young people's involvement in crime and ways to prevent it, as well as working with them in the course of their custody, or whatever sentence they receive, such that the degree of re-offending is minimised. The central issue is an understanding of the underlying causes of their involvement in crime and doing something about that. Those include school experiences; the link between school exclusion and youth offending; issues to do with identity and aspiration; their belief in the extent to which they can be successful and see others around them as being successful, as well as offending cultures within communities of which they become a part. It seems to me that the interrelation between education and youth opportunities and employment and how young people see the prospects within communities is pretty critical to the work you are doing. Dr Sewell: I would take a slightly different tack. The causes of this are quite well documented. It is a shame if as politicians and as a community we are not aware that the particular group of young people we are talking about will not be going down this path and we are not really aware of that. There is a big volume of literature and debate about causes and so on. I would have wanted the Committee to be a little more proactive and positive in terms of saying that maybe it has an understanding of what is going on and asking what it is to do. What are some of the yardsticks and what will it try? What I mean by "try" is: will we come up with something fairly bold here, or will we do bits and pieces based on a scattergun approach? I would be looking for something quite dynamic which puts up a couple of big ideas and runs with them. We might falter but that is where we want to go with this. I suppose that I am a bit weary of the debate. I have contributed a lot to it but have not found much in terms of attempted solutions to it. Q360 Chairman: I hope that in the course of this session we can cover those solutions and flesh out a bit what some of these big ideas may be. I shall come to that in a moment. Your response to the question indicates that clearly both of you are in the camp which says there is a real issue to be dealt with here and the fact that we should be concerned about young people and crime is not a sudden bi-product of statistical quirks or the reporting of crime, and so on. To push our understanding of the issue a bit further, first obviously crimes are committed by all types of young people. Are there particular aspects of crime that are prominent amongst black people that give you particular concern? Are there patterns or trends in criminality that you believe are particular issues for young black people or for the wider community? Dr Sewell: My colleague is more expert in this in terms of what is going on in his work in Manchester, but I want to stress one matter. The evidence in terms of criminal activity and racial groups is quite interesting. I am not absolutely sure that, for example, black males are committing more crimes than white males. I think they are committing different crimes. The involvement in the criminal justice system is quite interesting. For example, the patterns of crime are very similar to those in which African Americans are involved. They tend to be street crimes that involve individuals and people who look like them. That is the pattern now. Therefore, crimes involving black youths knocking down old ladies, taking their handbags and killing them are a very small percentage of what goes on. It seems to me that most of it involves other people who are their peers. That is distinct from crimes involving white young males. Let us take burglary and house-breaking. Very few black males are involved in that sort of crime. They do it but they do not represent such a high percentage. Vandalism is another example. One could racially profile those sorts of crimes. What we are looking at here is the sort of crime that is on the street and is very open. Sadly, obviously one is more likely to be caught because one is out in the street running around. The police have good intelligence and CCTV cameras. You are more likely to be caught. The other element that makes the figures look interesting is that statistically one is more likely to get a custodial sentence if one is black than if one is white. For me, that brings up a number of issues that we need to bear in mind when looking at this. Professor John: I agree with everything that my colleague has said. Three or four years ago my organisation did a fairly major study for the Crown Prosecution Service which looked at bias on the part of prosecutors in reviewing cases based on race and gender. It was found that there was a high number of failed cases where typically the defendants were young black males. What it suggested to us was that the police were apprehending and charging black people on the basis of particularly flimsy evidence that could not stand up in court. That is one aspect of the visibility of the crimes in which young black people are involved. It seems to me that we need to concentrate on two particular issues. One is that young black people's fear of crime is typically to do with them being attacked by other young black people. That takes place at various levels, whether it be fights, knife attacks and, in the more extreme cases, guns, drive-by shootings and so on. While the number of them involved in those activities is not huge, it has a sufficiently devastating impact on communities and the sense of security of young black people themselves to be a matter of grave concern within inner city areas of this country. Q361 Chairman: Before we ask you to go to some of the other issues, there is another important matter that I ask you to deal with briefly. When we set up the inquiry obviously we had some discussion about definitions of young black people and who would be included in those categories. We have tended, therefore, to put African, Caribbean and mixed heritage young people into that category. We have had evidence that there are some distinct differences and variations across different parts of the country. On one of our visits we were told that mixed heritage young people tended to be much more involved in crime than Africans and Caribbeans, for example. To what extent do we in our inquiry need to look at the differences between different groups within the black community, or to what extent is it reasonable to say there is sufficient commonality of experience, behaviour or activity that it does not matter too much? Professor John: But I think it does matter. There are variations within and between groups and to some extent those variations are geographical. In the communities where I work, for example in the North West, there is a growing issue about the involvement of young Somalis in crime, particularly in Manchester. I was director of education and leisure services for the London Borough of Hackney for eight years or so. There we had a growing concern about the involvement in crime of young Turkish as well as young Bangladeshi males. It very much depends on the demography of the area that one looks at. For that reason, while we may be concentrating on the offending of African heritage as well as African Caribbean males we need to be careful to understand the specific circumstances in particular areas before we make overall judgments about the involvement in crime of one particular group. Q362 Mrs Dean: How far do any particular offending trends among young black people relate primarily to black boys? Are you concerned about the involvement in crime of black girls? Dr Sewell: The issue of gender is interesting here. The evidence shows that it is still predominantly a male issue in the sense that the numbers in the criminal justice system show that, but if one were to go to some of the women's prisons one would see a high proportion of black prisoners. One reason why there was a large increase in that particular population was the number of women from the Caribbean being caught as drugs mules at airports. One saw them going through the system. For our sins, we also deport perhaps too quickly those people back to the Caribbean where they cannot cope, but that is another issue. The sorts of crimes that we see - gang-related offences that are to do with conflicts involving knives and guns - are still a heavily male issue. Professor John: There is a growing level of involvement of girls in attacks on the person, that is, girls attacking other girls, and juvenile offending in and on the periphery of schools and colleges, largely as a result of inter-group conflicts which become very violent, such as slashings with knives and other sharp instruments and so on. Girls are also involved in getting their male siblings to attack other girls or boys associated with those girls. The work that my organisation has been doing with schools and colleges has focused a good deal on conflict resolution with those groups, because that gives rise to a fairly significant amount of offending and offences that lead to prosecutions of girls. Q363 Mrs Dean: Dr Sewell mentioned that young black people would be more likely than whites to receive custodial sentences. How much does that relate to the crimes that are committed, or is there an element of discrimination? Dr Sewell: I came from an education background with exclusions from schools. There is a parallel here. There are offences against the person in school, ie not even violent attacks but even a verbal attack against authority. Somehow the school regards that as more serious than, say, an act of vandalism or another type of crime. Incidentally, more white boys were involved in that kind of vandalism. In the same way, once that comes into our justice system - the notion of a violent person and violence itself, whatever its cause and however we perceive that - I think that in the heads of jurors or whoever, or the justice of the peace in the magistrates court, it triggers the feeling that that should be dealt with more seriously. Maybe it should; I do not know, but that is the signal it gives. Q364 Mrs Dean: Professor John, you mentioned the example of failed cases where prosecutions should perhaps not have been brought. Can either of you give any more examples of where differential treatment by the police or the criminal justice agencies, or even the wider society, contributes to the higher representation in crime statistics? Professor John: I think that in areas where the police have a concern about particular types of crime, for example the carrying of knives by young people who are known to be involved in gangs or on the periphery of gangs, or young people who have access to guns and are threatening to use them, understandably there is an argument that stiffer sentences are necessary as a deterrent. Certainly, in my experience in the North West the police with the consent of the communities have given much more attention to young people involved in those kinds of activities than to other types of offences, for example taking and driving away vehicles. To a large extent, it very much depends on the profile of crime in that particular area and the extent to which the police believe that they are acting with the community in sending out a message that that sort of activity will not be tolerated. Q365 Mrs Dean: Some respondents to this inquiry have suggested that perceptions of young black people in crime are largely created and perpetuated by the media. To what extent do you believe there is any truth in that? What effect do you think that has? Dr Sewell: Who is saying this? Q366 Mrs Dean: We have had people before us who have suggested that. Dr Sewell: Name names. Who are these people? Q367 Mrs Dean: I am not sure I can. Dr Sewell: Break some rules here! Who said this? Q368 Mrs Dean: City University is mentioned in our briefing notes. Dr Sewell: Do they believe that the media are causing crime? Q369 Mrs Dean: No. They suggest that the perception of crime being committed by young black people is largely a media creation; in other words, in some instances the media highlight those cases where a young black person is involved and not those involving a young white person? Dr Sewell: I think there is an obsession in the media with trying to portray a certain image. Let us take young black males and how they are perceived through the media. That influences lots of people in a sense, not just those particular young people. I feel that there is a kind of interaction going on here. If you are vulnerable and you do not have all the support mechanisms around you that could feed a culture. One of the problems I have with my particular programme is that the boys do not have a real concept of what it is to be a black male. For example, they struggle with conformity in the sense of wanting to go back into some sort of street stereotype. Often they do not want to have that, but because there is pressure to be that it has an impact. If one has the media riding on top of that it makes it even more difficult. Professor John: There is quite a lot of evidence going back to the 1970s and the work that Stuart Hall and others did in the 1980s to suggest that the media report crimes involving black people in a much more sensational way than the same kinds of offences committed by whites. Certainly, when it comes to young black males particular emphasis is given to them, especially if the crimes are to do with sexual abuse. There is significant evidence of that irresponsible reporting on the part of the media. Recently, a Conservative MP talked about the majority of crimes being committed by young black people, or something like that. It gives the impression that the incidence of offending among black people is way off the scale as compared with the rest of the population, but also for some young people it induces a sense of recklessness. Particularly in the case of the national media, it is important to get some sense of how they relate to the incidence of crimes across the piece, such that if there is an issue to do with knives they identify with the fact that there are many more knife-related crimes - for goodness sake, I teach in Glasgow - among white working class people than among young blacks. That balance is not there all the time. Q370 Mr Clappison: I am absolutely fascinated by what you have said. Do you think it is important to put this in the context of the different type of offending you have just raised? You rightly said that offences of burglary tended to be committed more by white people from certain backgrounds and certain types of street robbery tended to be committed by people from certain ethnic backgrounds in some circumstances. Taking those differences into account, when it comes to the same type of offence, say robbery which is a serious matter because of the potential violence involved in it, do you have any evidence that people from an ethnic background are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than people from, say, a white background when it is a like-for-like offence, because somebody who commits an of robbery is likely to get a more severe sentence than somebody who has committed a burglary, although that is very serious? Dr Sewell: I do not think anybody here should seek to defend anyone who has committed a street robbery. I certainly would not like to be the victim of that. I think we need to have a clear understanding of who the victims of this are and what happens to the person who perpetrates the crime. The likelihood is that the victim will be black and young or in the same age group. We do not excuse it but I think we should understand it. The media highlight certain crimes: for example, if someone from the City is attacked by a black youth it will be on the front page of the Evening Standard, and rightly so. One wants to report that, but how often do we hear of crimes where another black youth has been assaulted? It happens day in and day out and we hear little of it. We have to understand who the victims are predominantly. The criminal justice system appears to be a bit strange if it does not punish people who rob houses with custodial sentences, if that is what the tariff is. Mr Clappison: My question was whether there was anything wrong with the criminal justice system because people were being treated differently. Chairman: I want to move on. Hopefully, we will come back to this in other questions. We need to have one eye on the time. Q371 Mr Winnick: Professor John, in evidence you said in effect that some black people had decided to exclude themselves - it was not a question of being discriminated against in any way - from the mainstream. Can you explain precisely what you mean by that? Professor John: I do not think I put it in quite those terms. Q372 Mr Winnick: You did talk about choices by excluded groups which contributed to their own marginalisation. Professor John: I am referring to polarisation between passive and active social exclusion. I define "active social exclusion" as circumstances in which young people adopt particular lifestyles that add to their marginalisation, which is slightly different from what you suggested. What I am saying here is that in many of our communities there are young people who may have been failed by the school system and unemployed for a very long time, and then they get into a lifestyle which by its very nature puts them on the edge. They are constantly operating on the margins of society either in terms of being engaged actively in an alternative economy or living by their wits and constantly on the edge of the law. That is what I mean by "active social exclusion". Q373 Mr Winnick: At the same time, in the very useful paper you produced for us Guns, Gangs and Ghosts you write: "It is often the result of a conscious decision to be in a gang and enjoy the power, the thrill, the danger and the rewards that gang membership brings, even if one is bullied to join the gang in the first place." Professor John: Yes. Q374 Mr Winnick: That is a rather disturbing state of affairs. Apart perhaps from those who have been bullied into it, there is no interpretation other than that they would rather engage in that sort of activity than follow the mainstream of young life: school, examinations, jobs and what-have-you? Professor John: Yes. In that particular instance I am talking about the involvement of young black people in gun violence, but in relation to gangs per se the same arguments can be used about white people's involvement; in other words, making a choice that a particular lifestyle which you consider to be very zappy gives some thrills and brings some rewards in terms of your economic position, status and so on. That is fairly classic in terms of gang behaviour and the profile that people who have an active involvement in gangs are noted as heavies, whether they be black or white. But it is important to understand that in addition to whatever bullying might take place to get people to join gangs there are those who enjoy being part of it. The report on that conference which I prepared for people in Manchester provided, interestingly, some narratives from inmates at Hindley prison, most of whom were there because they had been sentenced for gun activity. It was interesting to learn what they were saying about their activities and how gang violence persisted within communities. I believe that it is a perfectly valid point to make about the conscious choices people make about their involvement in gangs. Q375 Mr Winnick: Professor, if one takes the United States where in the main there are white elements involved in gangs, be it the mafia or otherwise - not necessarily going on the movies - am I not right that gang membership, whether it be whites or blacks, provides a sort of status for members, apart from the thrills and all the rest of it, which they have not had in their lives and do not believe they can have by legitimate means? Would that be a fair interpretation? Professor John: That would be a fair interpretation. It also provides for particular sections of communities a certain degree of security; in other words, the existence of the gang allows the enjoyment of certain privileges, or access to them, on the part of members of that community who might not otherwise have them. Q376 Mr Winnick: Al Capone came to that view some time ago, did he not? Professor John: Yes. Q377 Mr Winnick: Turning to gun warfare, you say in your evidence that a third of all such victims are shot dead mainly by other young black men. You go on to say that there is now a growing problem of gun crime within what is still a small section of the African heritage male population. Obviously, we are very concerned in the course of our inquiry about the amount of gun crime, which is sometimes described as black on black and can be used in a rather dismissive way to describe the lives lost, that is, that it does not really affect other people but only black people. Is there any particular reason why this has become such an acute problem? Professor John: You will have noticed that I steadfastly avoided using the term "black on black". I will not go into a discourse on why it is so reprehensible to me. On the question of why this is so prevalent, in my earlier submission I talked about the genesis of criminality and the involvement of young black people in particular activities throughout the sixties and seventies especially related to the drug trade, typically cannabis which preceded crack cocaine and so on. It seems to me that the business of guns is still very much related to drug activities. Whilst there is a correlation between gang violence and the use of guns in protecting the drug trade, to a very large extent the growth of gangs and the fear of other gang members without the drug component leads to a greater use of guns within communities. For example, if one analyses shootings, including drive-by shootings, in Manchester from, say, 1992 until now, quite often they have less to do with the victims' involvement in damaging somebody else's drugs patch than with some issue to do with revenge or people being "dissed" - disrespected - and so forth. Q378 Mr Winnick: When one reads of these gun murders, in one in every three cases both the victim and suspect are black. They are so young; they are 22 or 23 year-olds and seem to have contempt not only for other lives but to some extent their own? Professor John: Yes. The Greater Manchester police provided evidence at the conference at which I presented that keynote address that the life expectancy of people involved in those activities at least in the Manchester area - I think that nationally Trident would show that, and London would be the same - is 25 years. Certainly, not one of the funerals of young people I have attended over the past decade and a half in Manchester has been for a person older than 25. Q379 Mr Winnick: That is very alarming. What part do you believe socio-economic disadvantages play in any disproportionate level of offending among young black people? Dr Sewell: I think it has a part to play, but as we see from the evidence it is a complex story. I would have thought that to say that because you are poor you will be a criminal is a slap in the face to working class people; it is an outrage. It is clear to me that what is missing in the biographies of lots of these young men is the notion of a significant adult in their lives, for example in terms of the home, the low expectation of the adults in the schools they attended and the adults around them who are not doing much or anything at all, or who are themselves involved in some form of criminal activity. Therefore, one has a syndrome which is almost like the story of Lord of the Flies where the adults have gone from the camp and the children are left to get on with it. To a certain extent, that is the story in many communities from the post-1990s until now. Poverty has a part in that, but there is a drifting away of adults to guide the young. The shepherd has left his sheep. Q380 Mr Winnick: Do you dismiss the glib explanation given by some that it is all a matter of background, deprivation and the rest and that does not really provide the answer? Dr Sewell: Yes. Q381 Mr Winnick: Professor John, do you agree with that? Professor John: I agree with it wholeheartedly. It seems to me that to argue anything else is to indulge in a form of deterministic social pathology which gets us nowhere. Q382 Martin Salter: Dr Sewell, I looked at the interesting email exchange between you and Lee Jasper a couple of years ago. It was tetchy but illuminating. You write here: "I was talking to a head teacher recently who said that when it came to access black boys today have real opportunities they are failing to grasp. I talked to middle-class black parents who tell me they literally have to fight to keep their boys on task. These boys are from well-resourced homes; they go to the better state schools, and yet they are performing well below their potential." How much do you think educational under-achievement among young black men or black people is a root cause of the descent into the cycle of crime and violence and over-representation in the criminal justice system? Dr Sewell: To me, it is the key cause. The evidence is quite clear. If one looks at the period between 13 and 18 significant adults are not there, particularly in relation to low expectations in schools. One is bright and attends school but does not achieve one's potential, yet there is massive peer pressure and perhaps even the resources to go somewhere else. The temptations are there and that is where one goes. For example, we have quite a rigorous process to get boys onto our programme and train them to be scientists. One boy aged 12 had gone through all of it to get on. The mother said to me that she would not allow her son to be on the programme to protect him because when he got back to his estate he would be likely to be beaten up because he attended a science academy. That anecdote does not arise all the time, but the point is that there is massive pressure on these young men to leave all their intelligence and academic potential behind and go somewhere else and resort to instinct. The main instinct is violence; the other one is to go into some sort of gang activity. It leads to some sort of answer to the question whether if you had given that child a different experience the outcome would have been radically different. Q383 Martin Salter: That leads nicely to my next point. The figures before us show that permanent exclusions from school for Caribbean and other black pupils are three times the average for other groups. Professor John: It is much higher than that in effect. Q384 Martin Salter: Please explain. Professor John: There are a number of reasons. First, not all exclusions are recorded, so the statistics are questionable. Secondly, there are two processes which are commonplace. One is to encourage parents to remove children for a cooling-off period or whatever, and sometimes they never finish cooling off and do not return. The other is something called managed moves whereby the school works with the parents and says, "Look, I really believe that Delroy would get on much better down the road, and I know that head teacher to be sympathetic. Rather than having to exclude him, it would be better if you helped to move him out of here." That is happening to a very real extent. The Communities Empowerment Network organisation of which I am a trustee handles something like 840 exclusion cases a year. If one looks at the genesis of some of them one gets a sense of how invidious the whole exclusion issue is. As I said in my original submission to you, is important that we discuss it here because of the clear link that even the Youth Justice Board has made increasingly between school exclusions and youth offending. Q385 Martin Salter: In your view are there any structural problems within schools that result in this much higher level of exclusion among young black kids? It has always seemed to me that the existence of league tables and the drive towards improving the standing of individual schools gives the school management the inevitable temptation to wish to exclude the more difficult kids or those from more challenging backgrounds. I just wonder whether one aspect of policies leads to an increase in exclusions which only move the problem from the playground to the street corner? Dr Sewell: As to the notion of triage where allegedly schools to maintain their position in the league table get rid of the problem, which is black youth, there is another question behind it. Schools need to think about the way they operate; maybe they need to do it differently. Is it engaging those students in a positive way? I think that things go wrong on two levels. First, as to the issue of significant adults, I wonder whether there is enough discipline in some schools. Teachers fear to challenge students, or they challenge them when it is too late and that is exclusion. There is almost a fear of those boys on the part of teachers. That fear becomes exaggerated, a crime occurs and then there is a justified exclusion. But second factor is the perception of those boys. I see them as extremely bright and intelligent. What we may have in our schools is a curriculum, or a way of engaging those boys, that is not meeting the needs of that particular group. A few of them end up in the prison system. A good deal of the reporting speaks of how bright and intelligent they are; that constantly comes through. How are we engaging this group? That is the structural problem here. We are not putting on a programme that will teach them the skills that they really need. Q386 Martin Salter: What is Professor John's view on that situation? Professor John: I would add two points to what my colleague has said. First, there is a different tariff of punishment, if you like, as between the misdemeanours and the inappropriate behaviours of black students and white students. That emerges over and over again. As far as concerns schools' zero tolerance of inappropriate behaviour, there was a time when teachers taught children. Teaching children meant understanding how they learnt and engaging with them as they tried to be disciplined learners and dealing with anger, lack of concentration and so on. To a very large extent now, for the reasons given in framing the question, teachers teach subjects. I believe that that is a fundamental difference. If one is teaching subjects for exams and one does not have time to deal with young people who are not engaging at the level at which one expects them to engage in order to get the desired results clearly one will be intolerant of whatever youthful misdemeanours they may be coming with. As one looks at what causes these exclusions there are two things to bear in mind. Quite often, those kids are bright and bored. They also do not believe that the curriculum has very much relevance for them. It is dull; they cannot engage with it at any level. That is not only to do with a lack of black representation in the curriculum, if you like - although that is part of it - but the schooling process tends to go on without taking account of where they are in their own development or what is happening to them within their communities. They are expected to suspend their realities at the gate and come in as people willing to absorb all of that stuff and go along with the school regime without the school interacting with them and getting some sense of what makes them successful elsewhere. To give a brief example of that, we work very closely with voluntary education projects in supplementary schools which over the years have done a great deal to repair the damage that mainstream schools do to black kids. The very children who are suspended, excluded and are thought of as unteachable do the most dazzling things in these supplementary schools. They are the same young people but are subject to a different regime with a different attitude on the part of their learning facilitators. Their parents then become enormously pleased and thankful that this community facility is there to rescue them from criminality because of their exclusion. Q387 Chairman: Is this an area where we know what needs to be done - supplementary schools or changes in the curriculum - and we can point to evidence of what works, or is it an area where Dr Sewell says we need a big idea to do something completely different? The Committee will want to address that issue. What should we be saying about what is to be done about reducing exclusions and improving attainment? Professor John: My wish list for you in terms of big ideas is that you point to the evidence of the damage that school exclusions have caused over time, particularly to this section of the population, and suggest that the government reduce the powers of schools - I know that it will not be popular particularly in view of the things we know - to exclude young people. If they are to exclude they must give evidence of how they consider the learning entitlement of those young people will be delivered once they are excluded. It is a fundamental issue. I believe that we have to tackle the issue of school exclusion if we are to do anything at all about black youth offending. Dr Sewell: I tend to take a different line. From my experience as a school teacher, I am not convinced that that is the approach. This is almost a strategic matter that you may want to look at in terms of a suggestion. For some of those boys who are disillusioned and are outside the framework there is not a real sense that there are many peers in their lives who they can see are doing well and to whom they can relate. This came up in other evidence that you might also have had. One way out of this is perhaps to concentrate more on how we can support peers doing well in those schools and use them as mechanisms to support those students. I think that the issue of exclusion must be addressed in terms of the powers, but many young people are in those situations and given the history some of those are deserving cases. We need to tackle the causes rather than necessarily some of the mechanisms. At the moment, almost by its nature as the criminal justice system tends to be against black boys it is not necessarily because we are giving schools too much power. I believe that what we need to do is empower teachers to challenge students and make decisions and for parents to be more involved in the process. I am more sceptical about whether it is necessarily a schools system problem. I think it is more complex than that. Professor John: I disagree fundamentally, but we shall discuss it later. Q388 Martin Salter: The sense I am getting from both witnesses is that in our recommendations it is critical that we address the issue of exclusions and the reasons behind them. You may differ in terms of analysis, but it is a critical matter; it is the pathway to the root cause of the problem that we seek to address? Dr Sewell: Yes. Q389 Mr Clappison: In a nutshell, do you call for more culturally specific solutions for young black people, that is, ideas and solutions tailored to their backgrounds and needs that you have so clearly described to us today? Dr Sewell: I know that at the moment we tend to follow the United States everywhere, but one of the matters that they seem to be getting right is that crime is falling in a number of American cities, for example New York, particularly in black communities. Why is that the case? What have they done? It is still too high but it is falling. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is the creation almost by way of social engineering of the black middle class. This does not go down too well when you start to talk to some of our social commentators. They do not seem to like that because they feel that it is elitist. It is very strange because Britain is the mother of elitism and yet we seem to be embarrassed by it. I do not mean elitism in that sense. What was clear in the 1970s in the US was that unless that issue was addressed and there was the creation of opportunities for black people, particularly through universities, there would be chaos. In a sense, part of that social engineering has resulted in a strong black middle class which is growing in real terms. They did that on the back of affirmative action. We cannot have that because in England we do not like that, so we have to do it but not say we are doing it. That is how we usually do things in England; we operate on that level. In the usual English way of doing things what I propose as a big idea is that we look at leadership that is specifically targeted as a model among young people. The Race Relations Act allows one to target specific groups so one is within the law in that regard. What I am looking for is something at that level. Professor John: For me, the most important thing is to give young black people a sense that it is cool to learn, to be gifted and successful, and reclaim the sense that historically we are a great people. The typical discourse in this society is about under-achievement, unemployment, being on the margins and so on, which is what young black people hear more than anything else. The causes of that are not put to one side because they have to be addressed, but we ram home the message that we have been great, and we can be great, and there is a capacity on their part to be leaders - they can become middle class, if you like - in the pathway of change. We train people to become change agents within their communities and in respect of their own lives. That is where I meet my colleague on the question of leadership; that is what we are trying to do with our young leaders programme; in other words, how do we instil in young people that sense of their own greatness so they can reach for the stars? They do not have to be mediocre and bully others who are using their natural talents and performing well within the school system. Dr Sewell: I believe that the group X-it came to see you. I heard a clip on Radio 4 in which a young articulate lady said that one of the problems she had was that she could not see any aspiring black people to whom she could relate. That resonated with me because that is the crux of the issue. "Successful" does not necessarily mean a job in the City. What we are talking about are people who are not the stereotypes around her. She could not find many. We have a great opportunity; we can do that differently. In a sense, what we are saying is that the strategy could be to have more and more projects to deal with the vulnerable or, if you like, at the level of high-level criminals, to do work in prisons, which I think is important. There are some interesting programmes and other things that you can do. Alternatively, one can look at it much more strategically; one looks at it as if, say, it is the seventies and one is looking at what issues would arise now. You look at it much more strategically and say that there are groups of young people who have intelligence and potential. What can we do to give them leadership capacity to make them feel that they are more or bigger than gangs? The gang is an interesting analogy. The gang is almost a mirror of society. If one looks at the Italian gangs, they operated almost as an alternative society. They had their own government structures and their own ways of dealing with enemies. In the same way, those boys joined gangs because they could not see their way into the mainstream. We need to provide very clear routes, or what I call longitudinal pipelines, that start at about 13, or even earlier. You work with this group. This must resonate with you. One other point is that, talking particularly about the African Caribbean population, when working in Hackney we were able to name all the students who were from that group. If you put their pictures on a table - I was going to say "mug shots" but I had better not - you would know who those individuals were. You are not talking about a huge population here, so it is do-able. I think that is where we share a sense that there is a strategy here - but maybe the line is going somewhere else - by which we work with a group that can create the leadership model that we are talking about. Q390 Mr Browne: One of my questions is about role models. We had evidence from a previous witness, Lee Jasper - I also read your interesting exchange with him - who referred to the absence of role models in the media and elsewhere. I think that would have been a more valid criticism 25 years ago than it is today. It seems to me there are quite a lot of role models in the media. But when you talk about role models are you talking about Darren Jordon reading the news, or whatever it might be, or the person who lives next door to you who is part of your community? Do both have some value? The other question is about upbringing and single-parent families and the far greater likelihood of black children being raised in that environment. There are successful single-parent families where children do very well regardless of their ethnicity, but there is a correlation between single-parent families and under-achievement. That seems to me to be harder to attribute to effects such as racism in society and the malign effects of white people, because nobody is requiring any family to bring up children in that way. I am interested in both points which are about upbringing, role models and the environment in which children are raised. Dr Sewell: I know that my colleague wants to deal with single parent families because he told me about that beforehand. The question of role models is interesting. One of the things that we do under the Generating Genius programme is to train boys to be science peer leaders. Although we train only a small number of boys because of the expense of doing so over a period of time, it is their duty to go back into their communities, or we invite groups of students to come to us. Recently, I explained to someone that one of our programmes is to show students how to make robots. Those robots are not electric; they are the students themselves. They do that in front of other students younger than themselves. Those students are not what I would call very straight-laced; they are from tough comprehensive schools. Therefore, the discourse they will have, their appearance and how they come across will be the same as you. The only gap here is that you use your brains and with ambition you can go far. That is what we want. We are not interested in playing football or being rappers today; we want to be scientists; we want to go to Imperial College and get a PhD. Their brilliance is also demonstrated because they will teach others how to do it. In a sense, that is the kind of leadership that I am talking about here. It is very practical. That is the power which encourages other students. I believe that that was what the young person from X-it was saying. There was no mechanism for her to see someone doing that. Let us consider Darren Jordon reading the news. To give one anecdote, in the past when a black person was reading the news we used to call upstairs. Everybody would rush down and watch because we never saw a black person on television before. It was an amazing event. Now you have MTV and everything. The presence of black people on television is no big deal; and Darren Jordon reading the news is no big deal either. You will need something that they can really relate to and engage in. That is the kind of mechanism I am talking about. Professor John: I will try to relate my answer to both questions. Young people who grow up in a majority black society have a totally different view of themselves; they have different aspirations from the average young black person in Britain. In this audience we need not go into the reasons for that in any great detail. I say that because the issue of single-parent families and the correlation between that status and under-achievement does not arise to the same extent in the majority black societies that I am talking about. For one thing, it has nothing to do with a particular propensity on the part of black people to have children and be without partners and so on. The year 2007 marks 200 years since the abolition of slavery. Let us remember where those patterns came from: there was some retention of the organisation of the family units in the context of the plantation system and so on. The point I make is that you can use the incidence of single parents and pathologise mothers in a way that fails to take account of all the structural issues around them and their ability or otherwise to support the children's development, whether it be a matter of isolation or economic, emotional or other factors. We should stop bleating on about single-parent this, that and the next thing and the disadvantages of it and say: what does this child or mother need to support her so she can develop her own potential, realise her own ambitions and be a successful parent supporting her child? It means, therefore, that we take it as a reality and find ways to put support systems around such people and their children so they are living in much more organic units and have an organic network around them, as distinct from saying, "This is a single parent", and, "In this school 60% of children come from single-parent families and therefore you cannot expect those children to do well." I was without my father for seven or eight years during my primary school years, not because he was running around giving other women children but because he had to work elsewhere. That was the pattern for many people. But within that we achieved because of what teachers, parents and everybody else expected of our aspirations. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. What you have said has been enormously helpful. We have slightly overrun our time but only because of our interest in what you are saying.
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Ms Sukhvinder Stubbs, Chief Executive, Barrow Cadbury Trust, and Mr Marc Edwards, Founder and Executive Director, "The Young Disciples", gave evidence. Q391 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. Perhaps you would both introduce yourselves briefly for the record. Ms Stubbs: I am Sukhvinder Stubbs, Chief Executive of Barrow Cadbury Trust which is a grant-making foundation. We have a long history of supporting grass roots groups in the Handsworth, Aston and Lozells area of Birmingham which, by coincidence, is where I also grew up. Last year we published a report from our commission on young adults and the criminal justice system which addressed the challenges of the transition to adulthood. Mr Edwards: I am Marc Edwards, Director of The Young Disciples. I am also a Vice-Chair of the national IAG for ACPO. I am also a Commissioner on the Barrow Cadbury Trust for young adults within the criminal justice system. My perspective in this framework is ethnographic in that I come with grass roots and real life experience. I hope that my input will enlighten the Committee. Q392 Mr Benyon: I think that the report is one of the most impressive pieces of work I have seen since I have been here. I came to its launch. All the great and good were there. The Minister gave it the Government's imprimatur. Do you believe that the recommendations in the report have been followed up? Do you still feel optimistic that the hard work which went into it has been accepted by those at the centre of government who are involved in this key issue? Ms Stubbs: One of the key recommendations was the issue of growing up, that kids just do not turn adult over night. On their 18th birthdays they just do not grow up and become mature. This is really a process that takes several years. If you compare university children and the way they are mollycoddled through to their early twenties, you just do not get that with young adults who are at risk. The way to address it is to have flexible sentencing that takes into account the experiences, the life chances and backgrounds of the young adults coming through the criminal justice system. As it stands, that has not been addressed by the criminal justice system. A Home Office review group has been set up to try to address that issue. It looks as if they are having difficulty making a specific recommendation to achieve flexible sentencing. We are doing some further work based on European models where flexible sentencing is in place to see if we can keep knocking on that door and press for change. We are also setting up what we call Transition to Adulthood (T2A) teams. We are piloting them ourselves with the criminal justice agencies in the West Midlands and West Yorkshire. By that means we trying to see whether, at least at the intermediate stage, we can make some stronger links between youth and adult justice and ensure that more intensive support available through key workers is given to those young people. Q393 Mr Benyon: I think it is important that the recommendation on page 23 of your report is on the record. You recommend that, "T2A Teams and the T2A Champion should give special attention to the needs and special circumstances of young black and minority ethnic adults. This should include ongoing scrutiny of programmes and policies to ensure they do not treat young black and minority ethnic adults with disproportionate severity, and sustained efforts are made to develop culturally appropriate interventions for distinct groups of young adult offenders." Clearly, you identify what we are looking at in this piece of work as a very important subject. Would you like to comment on how you feel that young black males in particular are so important as distinct from other groups in your work, looking at the criminal justice system? Ms Stubbs: Black kids are disproportionately affected by the risk factors which include poverty and their experience of coming from families subject to stress. They include qualification levels and also unemployment. There is a cumulative disadvantage that impacts on their life chances which is compounded by what is at least prejudice and at worst racism within the criminal justice system. We believe that black kids are not predisposed to crime but they are predisposed to the factors that lead to crime and that the criminal justice system does not adequately redress that. Mr Edwards: Even though you have already defined "black", my definition of "young black males" would include other elements of sub-cultures. If you look at young people in inner city areas, whether they are poor white kids or poor black or Asian kids, most of the trends and traits and their experiences are the same. Young black males have a prevalent culture which protrudes into other sets of young people. It is very influential as a peer influence among others as well. That is something which can be utilised in a positive way; it can divert young people in a positive way. At the moment it is utilised in a negative way. If one looks at poor inner city children, their behaviourisms, their dress and the way they act and speak and the places they hang out are quite similar. If you are to look at young black adults you will also have to look at the experiences of other similar sub-cultures within that context. Q394 Mr Benyon: Ms Stubbs, can you tell us how far young black people in particular are the focus of Barrow Cadbury Trust's funding strategies and give specific examples? Ms Stubbs: It is interesting that this Committee focuses specifically on blacks in the sense of African Caribbean. Our research shows that black people are six times more likely to be stopped and searched. They are more likely to be arrested and be in prison than whites, but our research also shows that Asians, in particular Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men, are being disproportionately affected as well. We are interested in having a socially just criminal justice system. We have an interest in having social justice before young people are incarcerated and are caught in the criminal justice system. That affects children of all races. It is just that white working class kids are less easily segmented and studied and stereotyped, so they are not stigmatised in the same way. We are interested in improving the criminal justice system across the board but we recognise particular discrepancies in the use of powers that affect black youngsters and also increasingly Asians. Q395 Mr Benyon: We received evidence from previous witnesses who said, putting it in basic terms, that in some communities if one was not feared one feared. How far is victimisation among young back people in particular a concern to you? Do you feel that being a victim of crime is also a link in some cases to those who commit crimes? Mr Edwards: I think that it starts at childhood. A lot of people who are involved in crime were at one time were the victims of crimes. Would you repeat the last part of the question? Q396 Mr Benyon: Do you think that in many cases the culture in certain communities where one must be either a fearing person or a feared person draws certain people into the commission of crime? Therefore, is being a victim as much a contributory factor as the commission of crimes? Mr Edwards: I would also look at the policies, for example Every Child Matters. One of its key frameworks is Staying Safe. A lot of people to repel fear arm themselves or make themselves look fearful to other people. Somebody mentioned something like that earlier in connection with gangs. Gangs subject communities to fear. In the realm of youth crime young people use that as a facilitation to perpetrate some of their negative behaviourisms on other young people. To me, that is a spiral of negative peer influence which propels young people into crime. I believe that perpetrated fear is something to be looked at. Q397 Chairman: One point I pick up from the report is the foremost idea in the criminal justice system that the punishment should fit the offender rather than that the punishment should fit the crime, in the good old Gilbert & Sullivan phrase. How do you maintain public confidence when you do that? Just before Christmas a young man gave evidence. He had been involved in one of the gang exit programmes. He had been given a three-year sentence for street robbery. He made the point that that was to some extent, if not unfair, inappropriate because by the time he came to be sentenced he had already got involved in the gang exit programme and taken the decision to change the direction of his life. But in those circumstances it is quite difficult to see how the person who was the victim of his street robbery could be persuaded by the criminal justice system that it was just to give him a different type of sentence because he was changing his life. When you looked at these issues did you explore how one could have a sentence that fitted where the offender was in his transition to adulthood but still maintained the confidence of the public at large and victims in particular that the system was just? Ms Stubbs: I think that is an important point, but it is also important to remember that the perception of certain communities is that they are not being protected but policed, so there is a sense that the powers are being used to ring-fence and control communities rather than protect victims who may or may not be part of the same community. We also know that the current criminal justice system is not working. Something like 75% to 80% of offenders re-offend. Q398 Chairman: That is a big debate, but in a court case we are usually talking about the victim and the question is whether if you give the offender what is perceived as a lighter or alternative sentence in the way you propose you can persuade the victim that justice has been done. There may be all sorts of faults with the criminal justice system as a whole, but you need to be able to answer that question. Have you examined that in the course of your report? Ms Stubbs: We looked at certain models. We viewed Red Hook in the States, for example - that uses community courts - and sentencing practices there. When the sentencing is closer to the community and more sensitive and responsive to the locality the public perception can be much more readily moderated. We are going on to look at experiences in other European Member States to see how they practise flexible sentencing in a way that not only works for the person who has committed the crime but also for the victim. Q399 Martin Salter: We have received considerable evidence. Your own commission report highlights the fact that young black people face more general risk factors which are known to promote crime: poverty, family breakdown, drug use and so on. We are also aware from evidence we have received of issues to do with lifestyle choices. There are lots of pressures and cultural images coming from America and elsewhere that glamorise and to some extent promote crime. What do you think is the balance between these two sets of factors that lead young people to become involved in the criminal justice system? Mr Edwards: I think that it is more to do with primary education. I have heard a lot of theories about the MTV and hip-hop youth culture that influences young people to go down the road of crime. I somewhat disagree with that perspective, for the reason that if you look at the consumers of hip-hop music most of them are working-class affluent people who contribute to the mass sales of those records. In particular, young black persons in inner cities download music from the internet and copy it; they do not go into HMV or buy the music. Therefore, when we look at the beneficiaries of this type of musical phenomenon why do we not see the buyers and consumers of hip-hop running around shooting each other and committing crime? We do not. I say that the reason is their primary education and value base which is different from that of someone coming from an inner city area who has not had that initial virtuous input. Further, growing up in a stable family unit in a resourced area has some benefits when it comes to the development of a person's character and personality. A lot of people in inner city areas lack emotional intelligence and are deprived educationally. Therefore, the manifestation of their behaviour and outputs will be quite different. Ms Stubbs: I would stress the cultural incompetence of the agencies that are supposed to engage with youngsters. This goes all the way up from the police. In our evidence we said that stop and search was the gateway into the criminal justice system. The fact that stop and search is disproportionately targeting black young men contributes to that over-representation, but it also goes across other agencies, including the welfare agencies, for example even the ability or inability to deal with mental health problems. I think the 1997 ONS survey revealed that 90% of 18 to 21 year-olds in prison had at least one form of mental illness, often linked to drug misuse. That sort of dual diagnosis is not readily factored into the analysis and the treatment available for young people. Q400 Margaret Moran: In the very useful report and summary that you submitted you indicated that stop and search was a major factor in the involvement of young people in the criminal justice system. How much of that is the reality for the young people in your project, for example, as opposed to perception? I say that because in my constituency of Luton I held a meeting with all of the black youth organisations and the facts as presented by the police compared with the perception among youths of the extent of stop and search were radically different. Do you have any experience of that? Mr Edwards: From my perspective, based on direct communication with young people who have been stopped by the police a lot of them feel that they are being victimised. You have to understand what that does psychologically to a young person, especially how they perceive the criminal justice agencies. If at a young age one perceives oneself as being victimised by an agency it will create a barrier between oneself and that agency. That is where police and community relations are severed; that is the point at which young people start to turn away from the positive framework of living. Obviously, the law enforcement agencies are not just there to police communities; they are also supposed to represent peace, safety and a harmonious community so that people can feel at ease and not be in fear. But if they are victimising these young people and it is felt that police officers are against them what type of influence will those officers have on those young people to try to turn them away from crime, even though their role is to police? What message is that giving to young people? Ms Stubbs: A couple of years ago I chaired a race inquiry for Greenwich which was 10 years after the murder of Stephen Lawrence. As part of that inquiry I spoke directly to some of the young people in Eltham and different wards of Greenwich but also to police officers. I do not know whether you have taken evidence from police, but the officers we spoke to felt quite justified in targeting black people; they felt that the statistics bore them out, but what they did not recognise was the way in which their behaviour contributed to that breakdown in community, loss of trust and feeling of harassment. The response is almost what you might expect; it generates the sort of thing with which they are starting off. They are to some extent stoking the problem. Mr Edwards: Operational officers were quite honest in stating their position. There are a number of traumas in Birmingham at the moment with lots of stops and searches because of violence in the community. The police officers who are doing the stops and checks - this comes from their own mouths - say that when they are looking into cars and at the ethnic make-up of the occupants, whether they are white, black or Asian, they decide on that basis whether or not they stop individuals. It is not done according to whether they look suspicious or anything like that; it is more to do with the colour of their skin. That is troubling. If police officers have that mindset and perception I wonder what the wider society is thinking. I know that that is fed by the media. Obviously, police officers are saying that they might find some guns in a car with black guys but if they stop white or Asian guys they might be wasting their time. Obviously, young black adults are being victimised when it comes to stop and search and that contributes to other factors. If more of them are being victimised and stopped and searched they will contribute to the statistical register of crimes. Ms Stubbs: Referring to the statistics, if one takes section 60, which is the catch-all stop and search power, nationally 24% of them are carried out on black people. There is a particular problem in the West Midlands. Therefore, there is specific targeting of black communities that is not borne out by the number of arrests that ensue. Q401 Margaret Moran: You referred to the way in which it was done. Is the issue to do more with the way in which it is done? Obviously, people want to be protected in their neighbourhoods and if there is a lot of gun crime associated with black youth in a particular area you may justifiably say that the police ought to do more and the wider community would be asking questions as to why they were not focusing on it. Is the problem the way in which stop and search is dealt with or the fact of stop and search itself? Following on from that, we heard earlier from Dr Sewell that in a sense it was a self-fulfilling prophesy: a lot of black youth might be committing "street crime" and therefore, being on the street, would be more visible. Surely, if that is the case is it not more likely that they would be picked up? Mr Edwards: I would say that it is more to do with the circumstances and what is happening in the particular areas; it is also to do with contextualised scenarios. You are looking at street robbery and stop and search. Obviously, the police will target young people if they see them hanging out, but that is another argument. Socially, there is a generic problem within inner city areas of exclusion, social isolation and the facility for young people to be engaged. There is a strong presence by young people when hanging out on the streets. To some people in the community that is very intimidating. Whether they are black or a bunch of white kids is irrelevant. Who is to blame? First, we have to try to create some engagement mechanisms so that young people are not on the streets. Second, the way in which the police approach young people and the etiquette they use in stopping and searching them is very demeaning. We live in a slightly ageist society where adults tends to look down on young people. In particular, where people with authority have a legal framework to function in their jobs they have power to say to a young person, "Can you stop there, please, and empty your pockets?" I am not sure it is right for a police officer to stop and search a young person in front of the public. I do not think that is the way forward. I have spoken to young people directly and I have been at consultation events with police and young people. The feedback from young people is that they feel as though the police are taunting and aggravating them. They feel that the police can search them but in a more appropriate fashion. They would feel better if they were taken to the police station and searched behind the scenes. Q402 Margaret Moran: It is the way in which it is done? Mr Edwards: Yes. To empty out your pockets in front of people is very embarrassing. If you are stopped on a street corner and some of your mum's friends are walking past that is the start of criminalisation. Remember, there are onlookers in the community who will say, "There's another bunch of black guys being stopped." It will fulfil the stereotype. Q403 Margaret Moran: I fully commend recommendation 4.1(b) of your report about community forums for youth. I think that is an important way forward, and perhaps we need to put it on record. How do you think that proposals for the increased use of ASBOs, or super-ASBOs, will impact on any of this? Mr Edwards: I work with a lot of young people who are subject to ASBOs at the moment. I think that in the right hands ASBOs are a very useful mechanism to divert young people away. At the same time, in the wrong hands it can be very discriminatory. You have to look at the different cultures of young people. Some young people hang out on the street but they are not necessarily criminals. There are some who are criminals, but all young people are being categorised and labelled under the same framework, which is not really fair. Some police officers use the framework of ASBOs to move young people on and disperse them away from areas of congregation, but at the same time some young people say, "We haven't done anything wrong, so why are we getting ASBOs?" To me, it is a subtle way of criminalising young people. It may not be a custodial sentence, but at the same time it is still something that appears on their record. We need to look at other mechanisms to divert young people away from crime rather than criminalise them. Ms Stubbs: I agree with that. I think that it is a form of legislative creep. One can now be committing a crime for not turning up for the order. It is a form of criminalisation. Referring to the previous point about stop and search, some of the projects that we support are doing things like helping youngsters to understand their rights when they are stopped and searched. One project in which we are involved is to make sure that youngsters have cards to let them know their rights under those circumstances so they do not get into more trouble from either just resisting or not behaving appropriately. Q404 Mr Browne: You were here during the previous evidence session when Professor John's report was discussed. One particular point raised by Mr Winnick was that in one in three gun murders both the victim and suspect were black. Therefore, on top of that one has to put the gun murders where the perpetrators are black but the victims are white, Asian or any other ethnicity. The black population of Britain is about 3% or 4%. Are you seriously saying that the police, even if they know that one third of all gun murders are black people killing other black people, should restrict themselves only to 3% of stop and searches of black people? Are you even certain that black parents who are worried about the safety of their children would be reassured to hear you make that case? Ms Stubbs: You can have these blanket statistics which sound very grand, but you have to link them to the location. Q405 Mr Browne: Do you dispute them? Ms Stubbs: I do not dispute it; I say that one should contextualise it. If you think about crimes committed in Handsworth where the majority of people are black or Muslim the majority of those committing them will be of that ethnicity. The first thing to do is think about the areas where these people live. That is where I take issue to some extent with the evidence of the previous witnesses. I believe that the local environment and poverty of the area are an issue, so to take those statistics out of context in an area where people live does not do justice to the circumstances. Q406 Mr Browne: That is not the question. Ms Stubbs: It is related to it. Q407 Chairman: To press the point, you have a situation where gun use appears to be - I do not think anyone has challenged the statistics - much more prevalent among young black people than other groups in the community. If the police are trying to keep other young black people alive by getting those guns I am not quite clear whether you are saying that, nevertheless, for the sake of the statistics a large number of non-black people should be stopped and searched to get the statistics right, or whether you are saying that despite the high level of mortality from gun crimes it would be better not to do the stops. What do you say would be the acceptable strategy? Ms Stubbs: I think you need to let me finish this point. Maybe I need to draw a picture for you and make it more anecdotal. In a place like Handsworth, Aston and Lozells there are lots of groups like Mothers Against Gangs. There is a lot of activity in that area which is trying to create a safe environment. Those same people do not necessarily turn to the police; they do not necessarily see the police as their protectors. This was the point I made earlier. Certain communities do not feel that they are being protected by the police; they feel that they are being policed by the police. One tiny example of the complete breakdown of relations between the police and community is a meeting that Marc and his young people organised for us as part of the evidence for our commission. These were young people who were at risk of offending and were potentially involved in the sorts of crimes that you are talking about. The police turned up in full uniform and referred to each other by their formal titles. There was no effort to relate to or understand the community and to deal with the problem. Q408 Chairman: It would be of use to the Committee - we have touched on the point in several evidence sessions - to know what type of policing strategy, whether or not it involves stop and search, that targets a real crime issue and also produces the community and police relations that you are looking for you think would be acceptable? Mr Edwards: In a nutshell, it would be equality in operational policing. When I say that I mean that the police force in the context of the community serves various compartments within that community but not in the same way. If a white family phones the police - this is not necessarily reality; it is sometimes the perception - the response that it gets will be different from that of a black family. The black community believes that it is not protected by the police. I am probably one of the lead experts when it comes to gun crime and community intervention around that, so I will give you some history. Ten years ago when we started to see the new phenomenon of gun crime in relation to black on black the police presence was quite different from what it is now. Because of media attention and the noise made in the community regarding these shootings we have seen a change in the dynamics and how the police are depicted. In the past we have seen shootings between the black communities and no type of intervention. We have seen convictions that have not been sustained. This has made young people say that the police will not protect them and so they will protect themselves. That was why in the mid-1990s and up to 2000 we saw a lot of young people walking around with firearms, especially within the black community. Q409 Chairman: Whilst that history and those failures may well be true - I do not want to challenge your account of them - it does not quite answer the question about acceptable police strategies now. Mr Edwards: The paradigm change would have to be by the police; it would have to be seen by the community. It cannot be a document or policy; it has to be evidenced in the life of the community. The black community would have to see the police on their side as an agency of assistance for them to be stakeholders or partakers of that dimension. They would also have to feel protected so that if they phoned the police and told them about an incident to do with firearms the police would respond in an effective way according to their cultural needs. Another issue is that the police are there but they are not dealing with sub-communities in a culturally sensitive fashion. It is nothing to do with the ethnic background of the police officers; I am talking about cultural understanding of the communities that they are serving. Q410 Mr Winnick: We are looking at the question of how far we as a community, of course including blacks, can prevent young black people with whom this inquiry is concerned from becoming involved in the criminal justice system. Ms Stubbs, you said that you had some differences with the two witnesses who gave evidence earlier, but do you question the fact that in one of every three gun murders both victims and suspects are black? The answer is really yes or no, is it not? Ms Stubbs: What I am saying is that neither the victim nor the perpetrator trusts the police to help. Q411 Mr Winnick: One is aware of the allegation that the police are not fair. I am sure that both of you take the view that there should be more black people involved in the police, which would not do any harm by any means. Do you also accept what Professor John said in his written evidence, about which we asked him, that very often black people, although obviously not exclusively - as he pointed out, there are enough white people in gangs - decide to be in a gang in order, in his words, to enjoy the power, the thrill, the danger and rewards? Ms Stubbs: My colleague is probably better placed to answer that. Mr Edwards: I would say that young people are involved in gangs because of a sense of belonging, but it also has to do with the dimension of social exclusion. If young people are socially isolated - young people involved in gangs are - they create their own network and function with their own groups. Obviously, because for most of the time these youngsters are outside school and the services they are not getting the assistance and education they need, so normally they are economically and socially deprived. That leads them as groups, not as individuals, down negative routes. Therefore, gangs can be numerically diverse, but at the same time they function with a common purpose. All members come from the same background; all of them are socially and economically deprived. Their aim is to function as a unit and why they operate in that negative, criminal lifestyle is more to do with their circumstances. Q412 Mr Winnick: In the main, it is a fact of life that the black, white or Asian children of prosperous parents do not go into gangs, for very obvious reasons. Are you saying in effect that deprivation is the basic reason why they join gangs, or do you accept the viewpoint that very often they see rewards that they would not be able to get by legitimate activities? Mr Edwards: You are totally correct. The fact is that the opportunity presented to them is to gain economic welfare but they have chosen to go down an illegal route. The onus is upon us to create an opportunity for them to have a lifestyle like anybody else. We are living in a consumerist society where the media and everyone else tell people that for an individual to be respectable he needs to have decent clothes to look the part and have a good, decent job. That is the information which is fed to young people, so they act upon what they are fed. When you talk about black crime, there are a large number of cases involving victims and perpetrators and black people shooting each other. I have spoken to young people who have come in contact with the criminal justice agency around the gangs. You have a young person who has never been in trouble with the police before but for some reason his first contact with a criminal justice agency is for a firearm. It is not shoplifting or anything to do with violence; it is just a firearm. When questioned, many times the individual says that the reason he has the firearm is not that he wants to kill anyone; it is to protect himself from other persons who have guns. These young people whom we are supposed to be protecting feel that they have to protect themselves. That is wrong. If they were white young people walking around with guns and they were giving the same reasons something would be done. We have gangs across England. If we look at football hooligans, they do not walk around with firearms shooting one another. They will have fracas but you do not really see them shooting each other. Therefore, there is something troubling about gangs within inner city areas which feel they have to arm themselves to be protected. Q413 Mr Winnick: Ms Stubbs, you mentioned in passing Mothers Against Gangs. Am I right in saying that most of those engaged in the campaign in our part of the world - the West Midlands, in particular Birmingham, although I am more familiar with the Black Country - are black people who are making it clear how much they oppose the violence which so often means that the victims are black? Obviously, they would be opposed if the victims were white or Asian, but am I not right that what they are trying to do is establish a situation in the community, certainly in Birmingham, where gun and knife violence can be dealt with? Ms Stubbs: It is important to recognise the amount of work that is done within the black communities to address the challenges. I would say that the issue of relative poverty is also one that needs to be understood. I would like to make two points on this matter. Q414 Chairman: Could you please try to answer David Winnick's question directly? Ms Stubbs: I am trying to do that and to be specific about the locality and what happens there. The Holy Trinity church in Handsworth was a safe haven when two girls were shot two or three years ago. The vicar there is white. The mothers would have gone there before they went to the police. It is not that people are not prepared to turn to their community; it is who they see as being able and willing to help them. They see the police as part of the problem rather than the solution. Mr Edwards: The reason you see a lot of community intervention within the black community on that specific issue is that people feel that if crimes and traumas of that magnitude happen in other sub-communities there is a different holistic response. There is a different response within the media; they give different coverage; there is a different response with policing and, following that, when the matter comes to the court there is a different process. They also feel that the agenda of black on black crime is not at the forefront of the mind of the rest of the community. As a community we should holistically embrace whatever happens within it; we should not distance ourselves because it is another sub-community. If it was the other way around and young whites were shooting each other in my community I would still be running The Young Disciples project and intervening to divert them away from that lifestyle. Therefore, ethnicity has nothing to do with the victims or perpetrators of crime because crime has no colour. Q415 Chairman: Quite a number of the witnesses in this inquiry have in one way or another said that the way we stop young black people becoming involved in the criminal justice system needs to be specifically tailored to the needs of young black people, so to some extent the response, whether it is in schools or the criminal justice system, should be specific to that group. Are you suggesting that that is not the right way to do it and that the intervention should set out to be integrated, or is there a case for having responses that are specifically tailored to the needs of young black people? Mr Edwards: What I am about to say may sound a bit contradictory, but I think that if you are to have an intervention process it needs to be one that links in all young people. It should not be specific to ethnicity; if it is it will be under-resourced. Because of the way that the country is at this point it will not be taken seriously. It should be a strategy for all young people. Within that it should have competent, intelligent packages that can deal with all of the multi-faceted and complex issues faced by the communities, whether they are young white or black lads. As I said at the beginning, the experiences of young black adults and young poor white adults are exactly the same. If you went to a prison and interviewed a young white prisoner about his experiences and background and then interviewed a young black adult it would be the same. I would classify it as the poor people's experience. The two black men who sat here previously are not the kind of people who enter the criminal justice system. We are not talking about people like that; we are talking about young black people coming from deprived communities. Affluent and upper-class white people like yourselves are not the ones who come into contact with the criminal justice system; it is poor white kids from deprived estates and inner city areas. Therefore, one's strategy should be designed around that client group. Q416 Chairman: Ms Stubbs, I should like to ask you a quick question about the commission's report. You talk about a unified criminal justice system to deal with the separate treatment of young people. Many people think that reform of the youth justice system and the creation of a youth justice board was a very good thing because it enabled appropriate interventions and there would be a danger of that being lost. Is it not the case that you want something like the Youth Justice Board just to follow up the 18 to 24 group for the next five or six years rather than have a purely unified system? Ms Stubbs: Absolutely. The youth justice system may well have its challenges, but it is considered to be a good system. We would be looking for an extension of some of the support that it provides rather than the cliff edge at age 18. Given that young adults naturally grow out of crime through God, a job or a woman - by the age of 23 the bulk of them have grown out of crime - it makes sense to extend that support as appropriate to youngsters and help them naturally to grow out of crime. Q417 Mr Clappison: In a nutshell, can you tell us what specifically would help your projects to work more effectively? We are looking for solutions and ideas that we can take forward. Is there something that would help you work more effectively? Ms Stubbs: Referring to the work we do, it is hard to get other funders to fund the sorts of projects that we do. It is just seen as risky, edgy, controversial and even dangerous. I do not think there is recognition that these youngsters can be helped and that there are interventions and ways of working that can take these people out of crime, so the solution tends to be just to try to contain them in prisons, or wherever they are, rather than genuinely try to help them out. The sort of work that we are looking at is about better mentoring and role modelling; it is about how one customises support in a way that is meaningful to young people rather than a set of tick boxes that agencies have to complete; and it is also about rehabilitation to make sure that accommodation and employment - all the needs that youngsters have to help them not to commit further crimes - are provided in the communities to which they return. Mr Edwards: I would add that there needs to be some type of exit strategy for young adults within the criminal justice system. I do not think that at the moment we have yet designed a programme or initiative which looks at that. At the moment there are prototype programmes in the voluntary sector which could be harnessed as good practice or looked at by the government. There are some programmes in Birmingham that I can name. The Young Disciples project provides evidence of young people who have been engaged in the criminal justice system but have been assisted to turn away from that. That needs to be looked at. How do we look at that model and develop it? Chairman: This has been a really useful and lively session. Thank you very much. |