Knife crime in London: Shakilus Townsend

In the news last week was the depressing story of a honey trap involving young adults in South East London. The plot was incredibly well thought out and executed with cutthroat precision.

Before I deal with my own perceptions of the story, I should briefly explain who the actors were and what actually happened. There was a sixteen-year old called Shakilus Townsend, an ordinary young man who also happened to be a member of a South-east London gang, “DSN” (Don’t Say Nothin’).

He was involved in a relationship with a girl a year “wiser” than him. Her name was Samantha Joseph and Townsend had become progressively smitten by her. He had told his mother that he was in love and had planned to marry the girl one day.

Joseph, at the time, was also seeing eighteen-year old Danny McLean. He has been described in the mass media as a fully pledged gangster and the flagship face of the rival “Shine My Nine” gang (the number nine alluding to a 9 mm pistol). When McLean discovered that Joseph was already in a relationship with Townsend, he dumped her.

There are hazy accounts of what McLean had planned in retaliation but scared of his gang status, Joseph pledged her allegiances to McLean. And to prove her worth to him, she promised to seduce Townsend with a see –through flowery dress and lure him back to Thornton Heath on the bus where he would later be met by rival gang members and murdered.

As I continued to read the article online at BBC.com the nature of the story almost seemed theatrical. It shared uncanny resemblances to Jacobean and Shakespearean tragedies; the very type you would act out in school plays as a child. This was no play however, this was real life and a sad reminder that youth violence in London and other major cities of the UK is now a serious issue that police authorities struggle to control.

The lowest point of the report for me was not even that Townsend was murdered but the abstruse nature of how he was killed and the manner in which his peers colluded together to plan out his death.

The role of the girl, Samantha Joseph, was chilling as she permitted the homicide to go ahead. Her participation however was in defence of her own life and she was prepared to “get beats” if Townsend was not hunted down.

Therefore, even though she played a fundamental role in the execution, it would be wrong to suggest that Joseph was the principal culprit in this frightening tragedy.

Instead that title should be gifted to McLean, who had dumped Joseph and had “beef” with Townsend since he was a member of a rival gang. McLean’s desire to gain revenge on one of the parties, either Townsend or Joseph, led to former’s untimely death.

However, while it is important to identify the perpetrators in this murder, it is essentially more vital to comprehend why it happened. There are many questions one should ask in this case but the following four I feel are a good start:

• What would possess a sixteen-year old girl to perform a honey trap on a young man in love with her?

• Did McLean want to kill Townsend or did the beating get out of hand?

• Was Joseph aware of the extent of the beating Townsend was to receive?

• Why would Danny McLean want to murder Shakilus Townsend simply because Joseph and Townsend previously dated?

The first question should be answered in context with how Joseph has been portrayed by the police and the media. According to Chris Summers, who reported this story on the BBC, he claims “Shakilus Townsend would still be alive today if it had not been for a teenage temptress who toyed with his emotions and then betrayed him” at the very start of the article.”

Detective Inspector Barney Ratcliffe reiterated these sentiments by saying Joseph, “very calculatingly brought Shakilus to the scene, knowing that he was going to get beaten up. Ever since, she has been very cold and callous about the whole incident, with no signs of emotion…She made various phone calls during that journey bringing Shakilus to the scene, updating the gang through McLean as to where they were going to go and what was going to happen…She was an integral part of what was going to happen - if she hadn't been involved it wouldn't have happened.”

It comes across as amateurish for neither of these two individuals to consider the position Joseph was in at the time. Had she not plotted against Townsend, they might both have been dead. I am not advocating what Joseph did but for both reports to imply that Townsend would still be alive if it was not for her seems a tad naïve. I personally believe it would have led to a dual murder.

They fail to also recognise that Joseph was also living in fear at the time and remained anxious, expecting retribution of some sort on McLean’s behalf. She did not want to be beaten up so helped McLean attain vengeance on Townsend. I could pose a question of morality here and say Joseph was responsible for betraying Townsend but placing the utmost blame on her for the murder is failing to identify the profound intricacies of her situation then.

Question two and three are very much linked and will therefore be treated jointly. I am not really sure either Joseph or McLean really knew what would happen to Shakilus Townsend. He was stabbed several times and beaten with a baseball bat so members of the rival gang were intentionally hurting him.
To what extent they wanted to harm Townsend has not been widely discussed in the papers and the term “beats” is broad but in my experience, has never signified a desire to kill but to injure instead. Whether Joseph thought she was actually going to be murdered then (since she was concerned of receiving “beats” to) remains to be questioned but to go to the lengths she did for McLean either suggests a desperate plea for forgiveness or a subconscious hankering to see Joseph suffer. The latter would be strange given she actually enjoyed being with Townsend so fear could have been the overriding factor.

McLean was known to be ruthless by his fellow peers and the simple fact that Townsend represented a rival gang could have toppled his and his gang peers emotions to the very extent that they ended up slaying Townsend to death. Of course all these hypotheses beg to consider the psychological state of the youngsters involved. This can be highlighted not only from the coy cameo Joseph played to the retributive nature of McLean’s response but also how Joseph saw it proper for her to play the role she did in order to gain the respect and forgiveness of Danny McLean.

If one was to assume McLean wanted to murder Townsend, then the question of what specific criteria could McLean have ruminated in prior to his execution should be mulled over.

First and foremost he was a rival gang member and from reading up on gang literature myself, territory and association are two intrinsic elements of a gang that all members adhere to. In countries where gangs are rife and play an integral role in society, there can be opposing gangs that brothers join and look to murder each other in protection of their created families in a gang.

Secondly Townsend had relations, albeit nothing sexual (as Joseph has reiterated in court) with the same girl McLean casually used for sex. The woman’s role in a gang is normally always subservient and she is usually given tasks in the form of odd jobs; the dirty work the real gangsters cannot be bothered with dealing. The fact that Joseph was “used” for sex is inherently normal but what one should worry about is how she allowed this to happen and why she felt it was right to fulfill McLean’s desires.

When describing the characteristics and trends of any gang, it makes sense to draw comparisons with other gangs in countries around the world. Nonetheless, it does not always come across as logical when one considers peripheral factors, like the political and social nature of the individual country. The gangs I have been drawing comparisons with throughout this blog reside in pockets of the United States and large parts of some countries in Latin America. Both the United States and Central America share the greatest gang culture in the world.

They are a far cry from suburban London with its housing benefits, free state education, free healthcare along with a whole host of local initiatives to get kids off the streets and provide them with a function in society. Cherie Blair and the Street Weapons Commission further boosted these ideas: (http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/S/street_weapons_commission/index.html).

It serves as group of people from various sectors of the government and Scotland Yard, who decided to tour the country and speak to various people on the rising figure of guns and weapons on the streets of the UK. They then gathered the information for a report and have continued their work this year, meeting up with communities to try and tackle the problem. London has paid particular attention to the rising issues: http://www.london.gov.uk/gangs/news/reducing_gun_crime.jsp and many of the boroughs where these crimes take place and have been active in attempting to curb the violence.

Shakilus was the 18th victim of teenage violence in London in 2009, which may not seem a high number to some of you but for us, Londoners, it is an extravagant figure. The reason why his story received a great deal of press coverage was the nature of the murder rather than the homicide itself.

Another aspect of the whole ordeal is the fact that, realistically, we are not dealing with a group of gangsters for the most part. Instead we are talking about youths from comparatively affluent backgrounds of those associated with gang youths. For example: “Andre Johnson-Haynes, one of the youths involved in Shakilus's death, who was "insistent that he never wanted to be part of this gang culture" and attended the £14,000-a-year Emmanuel School in Clapham, south London, but became involved due to his friendship with McLean”.

Since the trial ended, Samantha Joseph and other members of the SMN gang have been convicted of murdering sixteen-year old Shakilus Townsend. None of these young adults are older than nineteen and all of them face substantial prison sentences.

Some of these kids are confused, some are forced into the gangs, some are “wannabe” gangsters that aspire to a life conveyed in rap songs written by the likes of Tupac Shakur, Big L and Notorious B.I.G to name a few. Why, one has to ask, when all these rappers died in gang shootouts? What is so incredibly dull and empty about these kids’ lives that make them want to pursue a life of danger and maybe eventually even death?

Is it the respect, the drug money, the lifestyle, the family they re-create within the gang or is it just a recalcitrant response to the mundanity of their lives? It is perhaps a combination of all the aforementioned possibilities. Regardless, the opportunities available to these youths in London (it is all relative of course) supersede a huge portion of the global population. Calling these children complacent would be wrong; the system has failed them as much as they have failed themselves. But from every disaster comes opportunity…to reflect and ameliorate. Youth weapon crime is a major concern in London and the rest of the UK and microanalyses of each town is definitely the best way to deal with the crime epidemic.

Considering this, I have respect for the peripatetic Cherie Blair. The country required a household name with political association to get the ball rolling and she appeared at a moment when the media were throwing jibes at our youth, labelling and stigmatising the future of our society. Hopefully the Street Weapons Commission will serve as a worthwhile endeavour and prevent young hopefuls like Shakilus Townsend from dying so young in the future.

If you are interested, this is a link to a tribute page on bebo in memory of Shakilus Townsend and this is a list of those that have been unfortunate victims of knife crime in London this year.