London’s Metropolitan Police Service is warning that gangs operating in the capital are spreading their criminality across the UK. Officers say 54 gangs have so called ‘tentacles’ in other towns and cities where they sell drugs. VoR’s Juliet Spare reports.
The UK’s largest cities are no stranger to gang-related crime: London, Birmingham and Manchester. Add Glasgow and Liverpool to that list and you have a group of the cities in the UK that are identified as having the most serious of gang problems. Six years ago, 65% of all gun deaths in England and Wales took place in and around these areas.
The Met Police recently searched twelve addresses across London in an attempt to arrest some of the city’s most notorious gang leaders. Officers also raided nine properties outside of London and two in Scotland. Officers believe the London gang is operating all around the UK – and not just in the big regional cities. A Detective Chief Inspector at the Metropolitan police says gangs are spreading their wings and going into other counties to deal drugs. But this, according to one former London gang member, Sheldon Thomas, is nothing new: “They’ve been doing it for a long time.” People in the community know this, and government and police need to listen more to the locals, he believes.
Sheldon Thomas now runs GangsLine, a charitable organisation that helps young men and women involved in gang culture.
“A young kid aged 12 is being paid £40-50 a week – no parents have got that kind of money, most of these kids are living in a single household, their mum ain’t gonna be giving them 40 quid pocket money, that’s the problem – gangs can afford to pay them to do this kind of work, that’s when you find kids not coming into school, leaving school…”
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