‘I was ready to stab whoever tried to stab me’: The ex-gang members waging a war on knife crime
“There’s a code that you don’t speak to the police, so you have to find another way to protect yourself,” says Daniel.
We are in a drill music recording studio in Birmingham. We have come here to talk frankly about why teenagers carry knives.
This is a city with a history of gang violence going back decades. But in more recent years younger people have been drawn into the postcode wars. Battles are fought over drugs and territory.
“A knife is one of the easiest things you can get,” Daniel, 27, says. “Every person has a knife in the house.”
Data reveals a shocking increase in the number of teenagers killed with a knife or sharp instrument.
In the year to March 2024, there were 53 teenage victims aged 13-19 in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics. That is a 240% increase on the 22 teenage victims a decade earlier.
And some of the people dying are even younger.
In January, a 12-year-old was stabbed to death in Birmingham.
Leo Ross was fatally stabbed in the stomach as he walked home from school.
The government says it has a “mission” to halve knife crime over a decade.
These young people are not optimistic. They blame poverty, austerity and a lack of opportunities for driving teenagers growing up in the city to a life of crime.
Devontae
Devontae
Devontae, 19, has witnessed fatal stabbings. He says it’s “very common” for people his age to carry knives.
“You’ve got postcode wars, postcode wars everywhere,” he says, referring to the battles fought between gangs protecting their territory.
“There’s this whole war going on that many people wouldn’t be aware of,” he explains.
“There are kids that, like, can’t even go to the shop without having the worry of getting stabbed… it’s getting beyond a joke.”
He adds: “It’s getting passed down from generation to generation and I don’t think it’ll stop. I reckon it’ll get worse.”
Daniel
Daniel
“My own experience is I’ve been stabbed and I’ve been shot,” says Daniel, pointing to scars – one on his finger, others on his legs.
He says he began carrying a knife at the age of 14, around the time he was first stabbed.
He says it was “for my own protection, not because I wanted to be a gangster and not because I want to hurt nobody or scare anybody but for my own protection”.
He says he saw life on the streets as “it’s me or you and it’s not going to be me”.
“A knife is one of the easiest things you can get. It’s like a fork, right?
Daniel has a scar on his hand
“Everyone, every single person has a knife… Some people might take one out to try to stab someone. Someone might take one out just to make sure that they’re safe”.
He ended up in prison. Since his release last year, he’s been mentoring teenagers, trying to steer them away from getting involved in street crime.
But he understands why so many get drawn in by the money they can earn selling drugs.
“Everyone likes the finer things of life”, he says, adding: “Nine to five is not buying that. And that’s just a simple fact.”
“The youths don’t want that. So when you’re telling the youths to leave the life of crime, you’ve got to give them an alternative”.
William
William
“I carried a knife from the age of 13. I got involved in a local gang growing up in central Birmingham,” says William, who is now 23.
He says he decided to start carrying a weapon after he was stabbed in the leg during a fight.
“The only way I could still be there and not be at risk of getting stabbed again is to be ready to stab whoever tried to stab me,” he explains.
Over the last decade, he’s seen more young people arming themselves.
“Some of it is literally the same as myself – protection. Other people are carrying them because they just simply don’t know how to have a fistfight.
“And then you’ve just got the ones that carry it for the image. And social media and stuff like that has become sort of popular to be sort of the bad kid.”
He believes there’s no one explanation for why more teenagers carry knives but says “the biggest reason [is] the government. There’s no funding”.
“When I was a kid, there was funding, there was youth centres… Now there’s none in my local catchment.”
He says poverty and the cost of living crisis are to blame too.
“Parents having to work stupidly long hours – 40 to 60 hours a week – just to pay rent with the rent prices,” he says. “So children are going home to empty houses.”
Rachel Warren set up Birmingham Says No
‘We weren’t able to pursue the police route’
Rachel Warren set up the charity Birmingham Says No to campaign against knife crime and youth violence after her son was robbed at knifepoint when he was 15.
“Obviously that left me feeling very upset and angry,” she says.
“It was very difficult to know what to do. We weren’t able to pursue the police route, obviously for fear of reprisal.”
She says knife crime is such a complex issue that “for any organisation to say, you know, that they could solve knife crime, it’s not realistic. It’s never going to be realistic”.
A recent report by the YMCA found local authority expenditure on youth services has fallen by 73% in England since 2010.
The report also revealed there are 54% fewer local authority-run youth centres in England compared with 2011-2012.
The vice chair of the Local Government Association’s safer and stronger communities board, Councillor Tom Hunt, told Sky News: “Councils work hard to provide services that help to prevent people being drawn into serious, violent crime, and have a key role to play in responding when it occurs.
“However, ongoing financial pressures have had an impact on councils’ ability to provide services that can help address this issue.
“We are working with the government in developing the Young Futures Programme, but councils need resources to provide youth services”.
Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson told us: “Knife crime has a devastating impact on families and communities across our country. Our mission to halve knife crime over a decade will be delivered through tougher enforcement and stronger prevention.”
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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