'That was it — I never saw my son again': meet the Londoners at the heart of the capital's knife crime epidemic from heart bmj online Watch Video

⏲ Duration: 9:41
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✓ Published: 23-Apr-2024

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Walking to the first interview for this project, I noticed a young boy sitting on a wall a few roads down from my north London flat. He had his head in his hands and his body shook gently, quiet sobs erupting as his feet dangled above the ground. Opposite him lay a sea of flowers, some wilting, others fresh, weather-worn cards, their rain-defeated ink fading into illegibility and candles laid out to form the initials ‘JH’. When I came back home five hours later, he was still there.It’s a memorial Londoners have walked past countless times since it appeared in early January, at the site where 24-year-old Jonah Ho-Shue was stabbed to death. He was the first person to be killed on London’s streets this year.Around the capital, it is not uncommon to see shrines like this — tributes to lives cut tragically short. In many ways, knife crime is a hyper-visible problem in London. It is a fear which can sometimes lie dormant, and then be lit ablaze when a particularly senseless tragedy hits the headlines, such as the killing of 15-year-old schoolgirl Elianne Andam, or 16-year-old Harry Pitman at the end of last year.Until 2016, youth violence in the capital was widely understood to be falling — down from a peak in 2009. Then the numbers started climbing again. The 2020 lockdown seemed to provide some respite, as rates of stabbings decreased for the first time in half a decade, but knife crime in London has risen each year since the pandemic, with a 22 per cent increase in Met Police recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the last year (up to September 2023).