Nobody died last time. Half a dozen people got shot. Young black people out for a night clubbing who ended up shocked and bloody, realising only hours later how close they had been to ending up stretched out for good on a Peckham street. This time its two dead, separate incidents. As yet I’m not quite sure if the police eventually found out whom the intended targets were, because a precise target there must have been. Unless, unless London has already got to the stage where, just like in L.A., a couple of guys get inside a car with the sole intention of spraying a bunch of people with bullets in some part of town in retaliation for some other incident involving individuals from that area. In any case, the result is the same: indiscriminate shooting.

Some years back, in the early days of the Yardie-fashion in London, a British TV programme featured a seasoned, street-weary US police officer declaring that the Jamaican gangs in New York were their biggest problem because of their propensity for gratuitous violence. “ If a Cuban or Italian hit man goes after someone who’s eating in a restaurant, he’ll either wait until the guy comes out or goes in, walks up to the table, shoots the guy and walks out. Jamaicans do it differently: they get inside and spray the place with bullets, killing the target and anyone sitting nearby. We think they do it that way so that even the survivors will be too scared to testify…”

Growing up back then, we often used to be told ‘Only the best is good enough for you’. This motto illustrates quite well the mentality we Jamaicans are raised with. This drive to excel in everything you do is instilled into every child in Jamaica. The results of that national preoccupation for greatness speak for themselves if one considers the successes of Jamaican performers, artists, athletes and academics on the world stage compared to the relatively small size of the country. From Marcus Garvey to Colin Powell, the Gulf War US Chief of Staff, they are outstanding achieving Jamaicans, other examples are not lacking. It is sad to say, and some will castigate me for making this parallel but, as gangsters go, we certainly produce the best amongst the best. That particular blend of self-confidence, determination to succeed and thirst for the best in life also works towards giving Jamaican ghetto youths the drive to make it by any means necessary.

However, in the Shakespearian style, I will metaphorically say that, “I come not to praise Cesar, but to bury him…” There is no pride at all in having the deadliest gangsters in the world, even if I have heard statements to that effect more than once, believe it or not. As is the case for most ills, it only becomes real when things reach your front porch. No one wants to raise children in a town where they might catch a stray bullet by just waiting to get inside a club, not one of us could stand to see his son or daughter wrecked on hard drugs or even dealing those substances for a living. For it is life we are talking about, and money to live that life the way we should, owning all the things that make it worth living it in this twenty-first century. I’m not about to say here that all gangsters, Jamaican or otherwise, are driven to crime by poverty, that’s a rehearsed argument that many will decry. But we can’t deny that deprivation does play a major part in the life-vision of youngsters and the solutions they come to devise to escape it. Crime was never nice but drugs-fuelled crime is just that little bit worse, for it is almost certain that the men who do the shooting are under the influence of hard-drugs, most probably crack.

The police investigation will eventually lead to arrests but it is not at all certain that those charged with the shooting will be Yardies. It is clear that crime in London, black crime, is by no means the prerogative of Jamaican nationals. It might have been the case ten years ago but it is clear that British-born youngsters have caught up since and are holding their share of the market. And they are by no means less determined or less violent than their Jamaican counterparts. So let’s not jump on the Yardie-bashing train too fast, but rather let’s admit that a section of the British youth have reached alarming levels of criminal mentality and ply their trade with a ruthlessness and callousness that defies ethnic or national classifications. It’s more frighteningly exotic, and it sells more newspapers, to blame foreign black elements, but let’s give the black British gangster homeboy his due when it applies. Now it’s over to you, the media, to find them a catchy name too.

Victor Headley

Jamaica October 2000