This isn’t the first time the Harlem-born rapper and the Queens-raised President have crossed paths. When Mayers was detained in Sweden in 2019, facing assault charges after a street brawl in Stockholm, help came from an unexpected quarter. At the urging of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Trump, then in the midst of his first term, dispatched his hostage affairs envoy to attend the trial and publicly pressured the Swedish government for the musician’s release. This curious episode exemplifies the complex, often contradictory relationship between the President and African-American pop culture, particularly the strange world of the “rap game”.

Never was this clearer than earlier this month, when Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. The headline act for the coveted half-time show was West Coast rapper and Pulitzer Prize-winning wordsmith Kendrick Lamar. Playing to a US TV audience of 127 million, Lamar mixed jabs at rap rival Drake with political commentary in the form of a mocking cameo by Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam. The point of this, as The New York Times put it, was to “indict America and white hegemonic power”, and some have praised Lamar for the “hidden messages” aimed at America’s new Right-wing regime.

Before Lamar had paid his ironic homage, however, rap stars Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Soulja Boy and Nelly were derided by black Americans as “sellouts” for performing at a pre-inauguration event. In 2017, Snoop had called out his fellow black artists on social media, accusing anyone planning to perform at Trump’s first inauguration as an “Uncle Tom”. “I’m gonna roast the fuck outta you,” he warned eight years ago — yet here he was in 2025, happily performing for the President.

In recent decades, the rap game has become a global entertainment industry powerhouse that goes to the heart of the American Dream, with ex-crack dealer Jay-Z now worth an estimated $2.5 billion. There is therefore a peculiar irony in how Trump — arguably America’s most polarizing political figure — was once hip-hop’s favorite billionaire, then fell out of love with black America, but is now bouncing back as the rap game’s King of Bling. This transformation, spanning the glittering excess of the Eighties to the present-day culture wars, offers a fascinating lens through which to examine America’s complex relationship with wealth, race and power.

The Obama years saw the Democrats solidify hip-hop’s meta-narrative of black empowerment as a political campaign weapon. From his bromance with Jay Z to hosting Nas at the White House, Obama’s hip-hopification of his party paved the way for rappers such as Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B and Eminem to appear or perform at Kamala Harris’s rallies. But while liberal America, and much of the hip-hop community, has assailed Trump ever since he turned his back on the Democrat establishment in the early 2000s, their opprobrium counted for little at the polls. After all, the Trump rap brand has been decades in the making.

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By David Samuels

Long before he descended that golden escalator in 2015 to launch his presidential bid, Trump’s name rang out in countless rap lyrics — not as a political hate figure, but as a shorthand for wealth, ambition and ersatz status symbolism. The ultimate embodiment of capitalist success, in other words. Having become a prominent figure in Eighties New York City real estate and business circles, he was a natural reference point for NYC rappers such as the Beastie Boys, who namedrop him on “Johnny Ryall” from their 1989 album Paul’s Boutique.

Trump took off as a rap phenomenon in the Nineties, when he was mentioned in lyrics by the likes of Raekwon and Ice Cube, yet it was the 2000s which really cemented his status as a central hip-hop reference point. Lil Wayne vowed to “get money like Donald Trump”; Diddy rhapsodized about “that Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Bloomberg money”; Yung Joc boasted that “boys from the hood call me Black Donald Trump”. You get the picture.

These name-checks inevitably carry an element of braggadocio, but Trump takes such eulogizing seriously. Indeed, his reputation among rappers has been a key part of his development as a near-mythic figure, above the mundanities of regular politicians. For instance, Mac Miller’s 2011 song “Donald Trump” makes the businessman a central metaphor with lines such as “Take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit / Look at all this money, ain’t that some shit?”

Trump has frequently returned the favor. Aside from lending A$AP Rocky his support, in 2021 the President pardoned Lil Wayne, who was facing up to 10 years in prison; commuted Kodak Black’s sentence for making a false statement to buy a firearm; and pardoned the co-founder of legendary rap label Death Row Records, Michael “Harry-O” Harris, who served 32 years for attempted murder and drug trafficking.

On the face of it, though, these dynamics weren’t merely transactional. They represented a shift in American racial relations, through which successful black figures could access white power structures while simultaneously maintaining their cultural authenticity. Trump seemed to understand this intuitively, playing the role of the white businessman who was “comfortable” with black success in a way that many of his peers weren’t, and even making cameos in rap music videos as far back as 1989.

Trump’s own legal troubles have found an unexpected resonance with America’s black community, particularly within hip-hop culture. His numerous indictments and ongoing battles with the justice system share parallels with the experiences of numerous rap artists who have faced prosecution — from Meek Mill’s probation struggles to Young Thug’s RICO case. This shared experience of what Trump calls “prosecutorial persecution” has created an unusual form of cultural empathy among a growing number of black Americans who see him as an ally.

Trump’s rhetoric about a “rigged system” and claims of selective prosecution echo longstanding critiques from within hip-hop about the bias of the justice system. When he describes investigations as “witch hunts” and prosecutors as politically motivated, he’s employing language that resonates with communities long familiar with discriminatory law enforcement practices. But, crucially, Trump leverages this victimhood by also presenting himself as a strongman. As Ice Cube, an ex-gangsta rapper, said of Trump almost a decade ago: “Rich, powerful, do what you wanna do, say what you wanna say, be how you wanna be — that’s kind of been like the American dream.”

This parallel extends to specific cases. Trump’s criticism of Georgia prosecutors in his RICO case echoes complaints from Young Thug’s defenders. His attacks on the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid employ rhetoric similar to that used by hip-hop artists to critique law enforcement overreach. Even his social media posts about “prosecutorial misconduct” mirror the language used by rappers from Tupac to Jay-Z about systemic bias in the criminal justice system.

Trump’s political strategy has shown awareness of this unexpected alignment. His campaign’s outreach to black voters emphasized themes of systemic persecution and fighting back against establishment forces — mainstays in hip-hop culture. His social media posts often adopt the defiant stance of a man battling an unjust system, a pose familiar to anyone versed in hip-hop’s narrative traditions. And his frequent references to being a “political prisoner” and facing a “two-tiered justice system” resonate with communities which have long made similar arguments.

However, this alignment remains deeply complicated. Critics argue that comparing Trump’s legal troubles — stemming from allegations of election interference, classified document mishandling, and business fraud — to the systemic racism faced by black Americans in the criminal justice system is false equivalence at best and cynical manipulation at worst. Yet the cultural resonance persists, creating an uncomfortable convergence of narratives between unlikely bedfellows.

Of course, mainstream black America is still less than enamored with Trump. For every Ice Cube, there are 100 Kendricks willing to stick the boot in. But the political implications of Trump’s cultural alignment with a subculture that has massive domestic and global reach are profound. His ability to position himself as a fellow traveler in the fight against systemic persecution — despite his vastly different circumstances — demonstrates the power of the rap game’s narrative in American political life. His ongoing legal troubles, rather than undermining his appeal for certain segments of the black community, reinforce it by creating an unexpected cultural solidarity. As Kanye West, Trump’s biggest hip-hop ally, vividly puts it in “So Appalled”: “Balding Donald Trump taking dollars from y’all.” What could be more gangsta than that?

The incident was not unusual. Last year, 244 people were murdered with knives in Britain, an 8% jump from 2022. That’s shadowed by countless private tragedies. In August, two 12-year-old boys were convicted of killing Shawn Seesahai with a machete at a park in Wolverhampton. The 19 year old was struck with such force that the blade almost passed through his body. 

Days earlier, 15-year-old Daejaun Campbell was stabbed to death with a zombie knife in the London suburb of Woolwich. Turning on the news recently, I saw Dr Olumide Wole-Madariola, whose son Malcolm was stabbed to death with a blade outside Clapham South tube station in November 2018. I remember the incident well: I passed the taped-up crime scene a few hours after the tragedy. 

Our country, in short, is suffering a plague, an orgy, of knife crime. Yet if the violence feels pointless, a howl of bloodstained nihilism, stabbings in Britain are far from incomprehensible. From shuttered police stations to culture to health, our current emergency has causes. If our political class has the will or ability to do anything about them are different questions altogether. 

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When locals heard the chaos on Sunday morning — the revving cars, the screaming men — the police would have responded to their 999 calls almost instantly. Lavender Hill Police Station is on the very same Wandsworth Road where the violence kicked off, and thus minutes away from the crime scene. 

Somehow, Lavender Hill nick has managed to survive a cull that’s seen the number of police stations in the capital plummet from 160 in 2008 to just 36 today, despite covering a city of nine million people. You don’t need a calculator to figure out that something doesn’t add up here. If the powers-that-be get their way, moreover, the plan is to whittle this down to just 32 stations, or one per London borough. Across England, more than two-thirds of stations have closed in recent years. 

Talk to any copper of the old school and they’ll tell you that the closure of police stations, and the loss of bobbies on the beat, has had a major impact on local intelligence gathering and police visibility. The inexperience of young officers hardly helps either: as one officer complained to me recently, new recruits can’t navigate without the assistance of Google. Bobbies, like black cab drivers, once did this all from memory. 

Dovetail all this with the numbers, and you have a plausible argument that fewer police stations means more crime. According to the Office for National Statistics, after all, the year to December 2023 witnessed almost 50,000 violent and sexual offences involving a knife or sharp instrument nationwide. That’s a rise of nearly 14,000 from March 2011, even as stabbings have soared in London too. While Sadiq Khan is habitually blamed here, recall too that Boris Johnson ran the capital before him, and that both mayors were anyway hamstrung by years of Whitehall austerity.

Yet if the mass closure of police stations over the last 15 years clearly hasn’t improved the crime stats, we also shouldn’t exaggerate. For one thing, it’s easy to romanticise policing as something out of Dixon of Dock Green when, for decades, many in Britain saw the police as an army of occupation, their stations were fortresses, and the Met was a “force” not a “service”. As one veteran cop told me: “I’m not there to ‘serve’ the public, I’m there to enforce the law and fucking nick bad guys.”

And if you examine the numbers in detail, our straightforward tale of austerity and cuts becomes rather more complex. As the largest police force in the country, the Met currently employs 33,631 officers — nearly a quarter of all coppers in England and Wales — and gobbles up 25% of the nation’s police budget. As senior figures such as Mike Cunningham, former chief executive of the College of Policing, have pointed out, boots on the ground aren’t a panacea here. Quite aside from the fact that the law and order budget for England and Wales actually rose last year, jumping by more than £550 million, the nature of crime is changing. From targeting violent criminals ahead of large-scale events like the Notting Hill Carnival, to diverting social spending to vulnerable neighbourhoods, policing in modern Britain is about far more than foot patrols. 

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More to the point, I think focusing purely on numbers misdiagnoses a problem that’s multigenerational and systemic. Let me put it differently. What both sides of the knife debate fail to understand, whether that’s the Tory press or liberal anti-violence activists, is that carrying a knife has become so much more than the cliched “fashion accessory” or even misguided means of self-defence: it’s morphed into a weapon of urban destruction. 

I know because I’ve been there, done that, made noise, and yet seen nothing change. Knife culture, after all, is part of a lore that stretches back decades: through subcultures and ethnic groups, as well as via gangland brawls and “lone wolf” terrorism. And yet, I’m sad to say, our old friend political correctness dictates that those worst affected by the fear, stigma and brutal reality of knife crime are often too afraid to speak in the media about it. Why? Because being accused of “airing our dirty washing in public” — or fuelling the far-Right’s rhetoric around race and crime — makes it, for too many, a fool’s errand.

To that extent, then, Labour’s recent promise to cut knife crime in half feels totally delusional, especially when you recall that we’ve had the same debate for decades. Twenty years ago, I presented a BBC documentary series called The Trouble With Black Men, which explored the myriad racial stereotypes faced by Afro-Caribbean men. Ranging from lawyers and schoolchildren to reformed criminals and advertising executives, contributors emphasised that these stereotypes — in attitudes, behaviour and culture — were sometimes self-perpetuated. 

To say the show was controversial would be an understatement. The title alone was enough to send a vocal minority of self-appointed “community leaders” into a spin. I was accused of “internalised racism” and being an “excellent gift to the BNP”. By failing to produce yet another diatribe on race and racism, I had somehow put myself in the camp occupied by the likes of Tony Sewell or Shaun Bailey, two examples of compliant black men ennobled in recent years for toeing the Conservative Party line on race.

Undoubtedly, and as my show explained, black men have long been a national bogeyman. Just as I did in my documentary, I could cite numerous reasons for our pariah status — the overwhelming majority of which are wholly unjustified and, yes, racist. Yet it’s also true that a disproportionate number of black men are languishing in jail for knife crimes, and not all because they’ve been “set up” or faced stiffer sentencing than their white counterparts.   

That’s indisputable when you consider the numbers. In some of Britain’s most deprived inner-city estates, more black males wind up in prison than university. In 2022, the London Assembly found that despite making up only 13% of the capital’s population, black Londoners accounted for 45% of London’s knife murder victims and 61% of its perpetrators. Across England and Wales, the Office for National Statistics reports that black people are four times more likely to be murdered than white people, a disparity that has worsened in the past decade. In the three years to March 2022, there were 39.7 black murder victims per one million people. That’s compared to just 8.9 white victims per million. 

A welter of academic researchers, including my old friend and mentor Professor Lorraine Gamman, are unequivocal about the correlation between poverty and crime — regardless of race. There’s certainly enough crime in poor white areas to support that point, and enough “white-on-white” violence to back the theory that poor white males are in crisis, too. And before anyone “whatabouts” me, yes, rich people also commit all sorts of crimes — they just tend not to stab each other or random strangers to death with zombie knives

Yet my focus, perhaps inevitably given my background, is the sort of internecine violence among young black men that points to a multifactorial problem, notably around culture, that the Labour government doesn’t seem willing to address. Mental health, for its part, is surely an under-explored issue here too, as is self-medicating and drug dealing, to say nothing of the added dearth of knowledge, opportunity, aspiration, family, and hope. Add the toxic wasteland that is social media, and personal attacks on those trying to address violent crime within corners of the black community are just as common now as they were when I made The Trouble With Black Men. 

Likewise, liberal voices such as Idris Elba, who has thrown his considerable weight behind Labour’s anti-knife crime agenda, or Martin Griffiths, the surgeon waging his own war against knife crime, have generally proved strikingly reticent about drawing any attention to the link between rising knife crime and ethnicity. And who can blame them? If you highlight the disproportionality of knife crime among sections of the black community because you actually give a shit you get called a “sellout”. But if you say nothing, or speak in general cultural terms, you stand accused of “lacking solutions”. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Whatever disingenuous critics say, I put it to the Labour government that unless it’s prepared to get its hands dirty and confront knife crime in all its complexity — rather than air inoffensive but ultimately pointless soundbites — the epidemic we face will cease to merely be a marginalised or poorly addressed “black problem”. It’ll be Britain’s problem. 

Rather, what the prison system has a major problem with is retention. According to the Prison Reform Trust, half of officers who left the service in 2021 had been in the role for less than three years, with more than a quarter leaving after less than a year. And while there are many reasons for this, one in particular has been thrust into the spotlight as of late: the curious phenomenon of female staff falling for inmates.

Let’s start with the most recent, and no doubt most infamous, case to date.

We’re inside what appears to be a prison cell in HMP Wandsworth. The camera shows a well-built tattooed man, legs akimbo, receiving oral sex from someone on their knees. To add more context, the cameraman pans around the cell. We catch sight of the grinning cameraman smoking a spliff, before he cuts back to the couple. Then comes the big reveal: as the pair start to have sex, we catch sight of a woman’s uniform. She’s a prison officer.

For the next two minutes and 59 seconds, what transpires is essentially a porn movie set in a real-life prison cell, involving real-life inmates and (former) real-life prison officer Linda De Sousa Abreu, 30, from Fulham. “Guys, we’ve made history,” says Wandsworth’s answer to Cecile B. De Mille before going straight to camera: “That’s how we live in Wandsworth, bruv.”

It remains unclear what will happen to this still unidentified character and his cellmate, 36-year-old burglar Linton Weirich. Likewise, senior management heads are sure to roll at the prison, which was just handed another £100 million of funding following a “catastrophic” inspection. Only last week, a prison officer was suspended after being filmed on a contraband mobile rolling a joint in a cell with two prisoners.

The focus of the fall-out, however, has fallen on De Sousa Abreu, who it turns out “models” on OnlyFans, has appeared in a Channel 4 show about swinging, and is in an open relationship with her husband. The Portuguese national, who was apprehended at Heathrow airport attempting to flee the country, pled guilty last week at Isleworth Crown Court to one charge of misconduct in a public office.

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When she receives her sentence later this year, her name will be added to a disturbingly long list. In the three years to March 2023, 31 female prison staff working in male prisons were busted for having intimate relationships with prisoners, including one who gave birth to her lover’s baby and another who had his cell number tattooed on her thigh. This represents a 61% increase on the previous four-year period, but only covers male prisons run by the HM Prison Service — and not the 14 private institutions contractually managed by companies such as G4S Justice Services, Serco Custodial Services and Sodexo Justice Services.

If prison sources are to be believed, however, the number of female staff sacked for having affairs with inmates is significantly higher. To save face, I’m told, prison governors prefer to have a member of staff resign rather than go through the ritual humiliation that comes with a full-blown investigation.

As a fellow at the University of the Arts’ Design Against Crime Research Lab, I’ve visited numerous prisons in the UK and abroad, including HMP Belmarsh. I know first-hand the high-level security measures that are put in place to stop inmates from gaining access to contraband — from mobile phones to drugs — via visitors who typically attempt to smuggle goods orally or via other cavities.

One member of staff inside Belmarsh told me that a mobile phone could change hands inside for up to £5,000. For the benefit of co-workers and official visitors alike, staff created a glass display containing assorted items, from electronic devices to knives, which have made their way into the category-A prison.

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But with increasingly sophisticated surveillance equipment stemming the flow of contraband coming through prison visitors’ centres, vulnerable female prison staff have proven to be a useful conduit for funnelling illegal items into the prison black market. “You can spot them a mile off,” says Lee, a reformed criminal who’s spent time in HMP Wandsworth for serious drugs and robbery offences. “You see them on the wing with the hair, the nails, being all familiar and that, and you just know they’re an easy touch.”

Lee says that he managed to manipulate female prison officers by “putting it on them” — either by relentlessly working on them or by having criminals on the outside find out information about them via social media or interconnecting networks. As well as exploiting weaknesses, Lee says inmates are often looking for “pleasers” — women who want to help prisoners after buying some sob story, and then find themselves making a very human yet damaging connection with someone who’s in jail for a good reason: they’re a liar, a cheat and a manipulator.

On the one hand, it’s obvious that these women are often in emotional turmoil. As a judge remarked in a recent case of a female prison officer who started a relationship with a convicted murderer: “You have shown remorse, your motivation is not financial, but emotional. You are, and were, acutely vulnerable.” Or as Lee says: “People think screws are smart cause they’ve got a uniform on and a little power, but they’re just fucking glorified security guards.”

Following the HMP Wandsworth sex tape scandal, The Guardian dragged up an ex-prison officer to blame De Sousa Abreu’s behaviour on 14 years of Tory cuts. While decreasing staffing levels and an increasing prison population have led to a raft of problems within the prison system, my ex-lag Lee is dismissive of economic fingering. “Fuck The Guardian, and fuck the Tories,” he says, dismissing the notion that female prison officers who fall for prisoners have anyone to blame but themselves. “Screws get paid a chunk of change [starting salaries range from £30,000-£40,0000, plus overtime]. And for doing what? Most of the time you’re either doped up or banged up in your cell. Being a screw is easy money.”

As a result, when De Sousa Abreu learns her fate later this year, there will be many clamouring for the book to be thrown at her. She has, after all, made a mockery of the prison system and feeds into a narrative that the authorities have lost control of the public realm. But by putting her hands up she saves the sordid details of her infamous video being bandied around in open court. While I doubt it will save her a jail sentence, there is one silver lining: it will allow the prison system to move on and get back to the business of putting people behind bars — for all the right reasons.

The rule of sub judice dictates that little can be said about the case against the defendant, whom we only know as NX121. But this hasn’t stopped Braverman from publicly stating that firearms officers have to make “split-second decisions” and must not fear “ending up in the dock for carrying out their duties” — words that one legal expert told me sound uncomfortably prejudicial.

Hot on the heels of her announcement, Rowley strategically published an open letter in which he “welcomed” Braverman’s support and argued for “the need to let the police police”. At best, open letters are like newspaper crosswords: coded for a particular audience but easily figured out by the average bus passenger. At worst, they can read like a career-suicide note, were circumstances change radically for the author. In this case, should NX121 go down for murder, Rowley’s reputation will take a dive with him. No Met commissioner wants that kind of publicity on their watch.

That said, it is too early to say what the effect of Braverman’s intervention, and Rowley’s tacit support for it, will be. For his part, Rowley’s hastily written gesture only came after more than 100 Specialist Firearms Command officers handed in their blue authorisation cards in protest. As for Braverman, it is unclear what the strategic review she has ordered will achieve.

Tony Long, a former police marksman, is sceptical that the proposed solutions are anything more than a sticking plaster. “The powers that be were talking about bringing the army in, but the only thing that squaddies can do under the circumstances is stand on doors with weapons that aren’t even loaded,” he says. “The aim is to take all the DPG [Diplomatic Protection Group] crews that have been standing on these doors, and redeploy them to do the job currently being done by ARVs [armed response vehicles].” The problem, he says, is that a DPG officer is only trained for four weeks, as opposed to the 14-week initial training course for ARV officers. “Once you’ve done your 14 weeks and been on the team for about a year, only then can you apply to do the CTFSO [Counter Terrorist Specialist Firearms Officer] course which is an additional 21 weeks.”

In the acronymic world of armed policing, where the Met’s specialist firearms unit SCO19 reigns supreme, taking out drug dealers, bank robbers or jihadists requires a skillset that your average embassy cop simply doesn’t have. As far as Braverman and Rowley are concerned, sending in unarmed soldiers or under-trained officers to protect the capital is once again about optics rather than operational capability.

By contrast, few understand the Met’s operational strengths and managerial weaknesses better than Long. A highly commended veteran of 33 years, 25 of which were spent in the force’s ever-evolving specialist firearms unit, he shot five suspects in the line of duty, killing three. He is also acutely aware of the politics surrounding NX121’s situation, having stood trial at the Old Bailey for murder in 2015 following the fatal shooting of Azelle Rodney — who, like Chris Kaba, was aged 24 and sat in a car when a police operation culminated in a “hard stop”.

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Ultimately, Long was acquitted by a jury of his peers. Unlike NX121, however, he didn’t have the luxury of anonymity, something that Chris Kaba’s family, understandably, has questioned given the seriousness of the charge against him. One can only speculate as to why NX121’s continued anonymity was granted during his brief court appearance last week, but the secrecy only adds to a sense of distrust in a police force mired in scandals.

Perhaps sensing this weakness, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has also jumped on the bandwagon, saying somewhat conspiratorially that “nothing is off the table” regarding the potential break-up of the Met. Khan knows all too well that 4,000 armed operations are carried out by the Met each year, resulting in just one or two fatalities. For a city of 8 million, that is a fairly low hit rate.

So why the call for drastic action? Like Braverman, who has failed to impress the electorate on immigration, and who is hoping to turn a human tragedy and an institutional crisis into political capital, Khan’s implied threat is a well-timed exploitation of a family’s grief, voter concerns, a police force’s weakness, and, as Tony Long points out, individual officers’ vulnerability.

“The officers who have downed tools are only taking this unprecedented stand because the suits haven’t had their backs,” he says. “Now that they’ve forced their hand, they’ve changed their tune.” Long is keen to stress that armed officers take on the role voluntarily, for no extra pay, and thus are not striking but using an agreed 10-day period of reflection — a policy designed to make sure that armed officers can get downtime if their “heads aren’t in the right place”.

“Senior management see firearms officers as expendable,” Long says, with more than a hint of personal animus. “They know they’re enthusiastic, keen and professional about the work, despite knowing that, if they shoot somebody, they’re going to get slaughtered in the press, charged with murder or suspended from work for up to five years. But management couldn’t care less. So, you know what? The lads don’t have faith in them, which is why the Met’s now in a bind.”

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While Braverman and Rowley talk a good game about giving armed officers the “support” they need, and while Sadiq Khan cynically suggests that the Met may need to be carved out into various controllable fiefdoms, you can bet they are all working behind the scenes to “bring into line” what one insider describes as a “force within a force”. The wider issue, however, is how to muzzle a minority of armed police officers whose power lies in their high profile rather than their ballistic weaponry.

One way to do this would be to remove the voluntary aspect of armed policing and indeed create a genuine “force within a force”, with a completely different level of accountability that removes the potential for “reflection” to be used as de facto industrial action. Yet one serving firearms officer from another force, whose unit is considering downing tools in solidarity with SCO19, told me that he and his colleagues would balk at the idea of being “professionalised” in such fashion. He pilloried the idea that a separate, dedicated, national armed police force could ever become a reality, so potent is the notion that Britain “polices by consent” rather than political diktat.

Whatever the solution, the fact that we are having this debate at all — regardless of the political posturing at play — is remarkable. Striking doctors, like striking tube and train drivers, may be an inconvenience, but the rise of refusenik police officers smacks of a society-wide existential crisis. When the time comes for NX121 to account for his actions, it won’t just be him in the dock, it will be the Met’s management and the government’s leadership on trial, too.

Hear me out. After descending on Oxford Street last Wednesday, scores of “troublemakers” urged a bunch of copycat looters to shift their focus to the careworn seaside town of Southend and “get lit”. In response, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, ordered the Met to “hunt down and lock up” the culprits, as though they were the Krays.

Obviously, crime is part of Braverman’s brief; and the Tories are desperate to regain their status as the party of law and order, not least because too many of their own (prime) ministers have been on the wrong side of the police. But the Oxford Street flash mob was no Cable Street riot; and the events in Southend turned out to be far tamer than anything previous generations of mods, rockers and sundry other yobs had brought to the Essex town.

This isn’t to excuse the sort of mass, wanton disregard for the law that we’ve seen of late. But it is hard not to conclude that the same vote-grabbing politicians who whipped up moral panics over ram-raiders, Rolex-robbers and other media-hyped miscreants now want looters to as the bogeyman du jour — even if, in reality, these wayward youths are part of a more complex criminal profile that can’t be easily dismissed as a (largely black) youth problem.

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It’s easy to blame absent fathers, again because this is a well-honed stereotype, but the frequent promotion of this dead cat fails to address the real problem here: Britain’s lack of leadership or adult responsibility. Whether it’s pederastic TV presenters or man-child prime ministers, Britain’s culture of role-modelling and leadership makes the average package-tour rep look like Shaka Zulu. How can we expect bored, feckless, confused, constantly castigated and pandemic-traumatised young people to cosplay as upstanding citizens when adults in positions of responsibility can’t even be bothered to do so themselves?

But perhaps that was never the point, given the degree to which conspicuous youth crime and deviant behaviour is imbued with media and political capital. Looting makes for a good story because it conspicuously feeds into our subconscious biases about “the other”. It’s a form of mass projection. Better to blame other parents for their errant brood, who we can see on TV and social media, than wonder why your own children might also be suffering from any number of modern malaises at home — eating disorders, self-harm, anxiety — all of which are expressions of a looting of the self.

And this is always the way with every moral panic. Whether it’s Jews, Italians, West Indians, Pakistanis, Somalians, Albanians, Polish plumbers, acid house ravers, radical feminists, Black Lives Matter or Gary Lineker, there’s always some bogeyman hiding in plain sight, trying to usurp the British. Every manifestation shares one thing in common: a sense of disenchantment, of losing control. Today, it takes the form of a pandemic generation of internet-impressionable and vulnerable youths who have all but given up on the idea of youth being “the best days of your life”. For many, these are the worst days.

Despite this, Britain’s politicians seem content with dismissing the nation’s arrested development as “the kind of lawlessness seen in some American cities”, blind to the fact that the causes, and solutions, lie closer to home. During the UK’s 2011 riots, which had nothing to do with “American lawlessness” and everything to do with “broken Britain”, the general consensus was that a “feral underclass” of looters deserved the draconian sentences they received. The logic here was that the riots were not a political act but a mass criminal enterprise — and, as such, Westminster could shift responsibility away from its policymaking and let the courts deal with the problem.

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The British police need guns

By David Matthews

Fundamentally, the rioters’ behaviour in 2011 was criminal, as is today’s looting. But visit inner-city Britain or its less-than-picture-postcard rural and suburban wastelands and you will witness the real conditions people are living under. We know that poverty isn’t just about a lack of money. It’s about a lack of opportunity, prospects and hope. As Thatcher and Cameron, then Blair and Brown, mortgaged British society, economically and morally, today’s political leaders are squandering what’s left. Riots and looting and recession are their legacy.

In 2011, one of the rioters sent out a Blackberry message in pidgin text-speak that illustrated the mentality of this disorder: “What ever ends [area] your from put your ballys [balaclavas] on link up and cause havic, just rob everything. Police can’t stop it.” David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, remarked at the time that this was freedom “without any sense of duty”. “Our society needs to reconnect with other important, informal regulators of behaviour. Notions of decency towards others. Pride. Shame. Admiration. Scorn.” More than a decade later, plus ça change.

While my relative’s case involved an international business deal gone wrong, and bizarrely the middleman who brokered the hit became the gunman’s new target after his client reneged on a $2,000 payment, the reality of the average contract killing is very different. More often that not, it takes the form of a free-for-all in which innocent people die and morally repugnant paymasters get away with murder. As Olivia’s death in Dovecot, Liverpool, last August made clear, the world occupied by hitmen is underscored by nihilistic chaos.

Cashman, himself the 34-year-old father of two young children, had reportedly been offered £100,000 by his underworld bosses to kill Joseph Nee, a rival villain who Cashman’s associates claimed had stolen a sizeable drugs stash. During the botched hit, Nee, chased by Cashman, barged through the Korbels’ front door just as Olivia’s mother opened it to investigate the commotion outside. As Cashman continued to fire indiscriminately, a bullet hit Olivia in the chest. According to the front page of yesterday’s Sun, “gangland figures” have placed a £250,000 bounty on Cashman’s head — not as payback for murdering an innocent child, but to prevent him from revealing their identities in a feeble attempt to reduce his sentence.

Whether it’s an East End thing, a tabloid hack thing, or simply a morbid fascination with organised crime, I’ve never been too far away from the shadowy world of the contract killer. As a kid in the Seventies, when my family lived in New York, my mother worked for an Italian family who had a “connection” to those responsible for “whacking” mob boss Carmine “Cigar” Galante. More recently, I interviewed an ex-soldier who used to do some “work” for a notorious North London crime family before the nightmares became too much and he packed it all in. The activity of his bosses had been an obsession of the late crime writer and reformed gangster, John McVicar. John told me that he’d been warned by one of “the family’s” consiglieres to watch his back after their name kept cropping up in the column he wrote for Punch magazine. Not long after, said consigliere wound up getting whacked by a hitman on a motorcycle.

Such murders are, in criminal terms, at the Premier League-level of contract killings. Many of these hits go unsolved because the bike-riding masked assassins know what they’re doing, thanks to training, practice and experience. But such characters are few and far between. More often than not, lower-league criminals recruit hitmen from among the even lower-league “mandem” or assorted gangs that crop up all over poverty-stricken Britain. This recruiting ground has a constant supply of young, desperate, violent and, importantly, cheap contract killers.

Today, they are only getting younger and more desperate. Right now, a 15-year-old named Santre Gayle, jailed in 2011, is believed to be Britain’s youngest contract killer. He’s certainly the youngest that we know of. But several organised crime sources have told me — all with the same sick, macabre pride — that they have groomed 12, 13 and 14-year-olds to do their dirty work for next-to-nothing. When I mentioned to one that Gayle was paid a measly £200 to shoot dead a woman on her doorstep, apparently as a revenge attack sanctioned by an ex-partner with connections to London’s Turkish underworld, he joked that he “got over the odds”.

While politicians and the media fulminate over Muslim grooming gangs because it is an obvious, reactionary vote-winner, far less attention is paid to the other more organised, and often culturally removed, criminal subgroups involved in grooming young black boys as junior hitmen. Much of what passes, dismissively, as internecine street gang warfare in London, Birmingham and Manchester belies a grimy underworld in which black boys and white working-class boys are spotted, recruited, groomed and then exploited — not just as tools in the more commonly reported phenomenon of “county lines” drug dealing, but as urban boy soldiers.

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It is, after all, a tried and tested method. As Issa Sesay, the jailed leader of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF), once told me, the modus operandi of the RUF had been to recruit boy soldiers barely into puberty because they were desperate, impressionable, and, crucially, loyal. It is this modus operandi that now plays a key role in the new breed of amateur hitman — kids who one minute are playing Call of Duty, and the next are looking at a life sentence for killing someone for £200. They are often forced into it by “olders” who bully, intimidate and even strong-arm family members into supporting them. Most vulnerable are single mothers, who can be easily targeted if their son doesn’t step up and do his master’s bidding.

And increasingly, this bidding is no longer confined to the criminal world. In this secular, morally relative world, it’s not just drug dealers and racketeers who “need someone taken care of” when things go sideways. The news is now filled with tawdry tales of foolishly desperate people — a property developer in debt; an obsessive work colleague; rumours of a jilted family member — who resort to backstreet hitmen to settle their scores. It’s a telling metaphor of modern Britain, where the dark side of social mobility dictates that shifty middle-class types, like traditional gangsters before them, now think they can buy their way out of trouble by getting someone else to do their dirty work.

Perhaps the most revealing example of this took place in 2002, when property investor Nicholas van Hoogstraten was jailed for manslaughter after paying some muscle to rough up a business associate, Mohammed Raja. While the courts accepted that “there is no evidence that he had intended Mr Raja to be murdered”, Raja was stabbed five times and shot in the head by two hitmen. That is the trouble with hired killers: as they are generally psychopathic, there is no legislating for what they might do on the job. This key detail is a point that even Boris Johnson overlooked when, in the Nineties, the Daily Telegraph’s then  Brussels correspondent reportedly conspired with an old Etonian buddy to have News of the World reporter Stuart Collier roughed up.

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All too often, bourgeois types who enter into the murky world of contract killing swiftly find themselves in hot water. Patently, anyone who is prepared to kill someone for money is not only criminally minded, but criminally naïve. After all, professional hitmen don’t think twice about turning the gun on their client if they don’t pay up, or if bumping them off removes one key point in the evidential trail.

That’s probably why the wealthier gangs in Britain tend to outsource their dirty work. When I interviewed former North London gang leader Bobby Cummines for Channel 4’s Secrets of Police Marksman, he told me that one of the most fool-proof methods for contracting a hit involves setting up a reciprocal arrangement with foreign gangsters. If, for argument’s sake, your “firm” had a long-standing arrangement with a gang in The Netherlands and you wanted someone taken care of in the Midlands, you would fly one of their team over (all expenses paid) and supply them with necessaries, including firearms. They would then do the job and fly home the following day, making the hitman virtually untraceable.

But such cases make up a small minority. Far more common is the disordered, anarchic style of hit carried out by Cashman, whose gun initially jammed before he killed an innocent nine-year-old. In this way, Olivia’s death was of course a tragedy. But it was also an expression of nationwide nihilism: of the disregard some criminals have for innocent life, of the atomising chaos that inevitably follows, and of an anaesthetised society and political class that witnesses such violence before quickly turning the page.

The only facts we have are these: on 5 September, 24-year-old Chris Kaba was being pursued by police after an automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) camera linked the car he was driving to an earlier firearms offence. After being stopped on Streatham Hill in South London, Kaba was killed by a single shot fired through the driver’s side of the car’s windscreen by a Met police officer.

That officer, who remains unnamed, has been suspended from frontline duties — a routine procedure under the circumstances. But the police’s view of the incident, according to sources, is that their unnamed employee acted in defence of himself, his colleagues and the general public. It’s a line that’s hard to argue with, if one makes a clear case that the individual feared for life or limb.

Faced with a lethal threat, police officers have, under English law, the same right to self-defence as the rest of us. The application of a layman’s “reasonable force”, though, might be augmented by a professional order to “shoot to stop” any suspect engaged in armed violence or life-threatening behaviour. And in practice, shooting to stop often amounts to shooting to kill: police marksmen are trained to aim for the torso — the easiest part of the body to hit — and a single well-placed round, let alone five or six, frequently proves fatal.

The public’s understanding of marksmanship, ballistics, perceptual distortion, perpetrator behaviour and human anatomy is largely based on far-fetched cop shows and disbelief-defying Hollywood beat ‘em ups. The naïve belief that a violent suspect can be easily immobilised by a good “winging” is ubiquitous — and ridiculous. Most people couldn’t hit their own front door with a football from six feet, yet we expect armed police officers to shoot a knife-wielding terrorist in the hand, or aim for the arm of a driver who’s weaponised a vehicle. We suppose that a violent suspect would just shout “Ouch!”, stop what they’re doing, and go quietly into custody. Well, good luck with that.

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As former Met marksman Tony Long told me, when I interviewed him for the Channel Four documentary, Secrets of a Police Marksman: “If they pose an immediate threat to you, they cease to be a human being. They are a target. They have to be shot and you shoot them.” The reality is, an armed confrontation with a police officer isn’t meant to a fair fight. The shock and awe tactics employed by the service, particularly in vehicular hard stops, are designed to intimidate, destabilise and immobilise a suspect by using superior force. As one armed officer told me: “If you don’t want to get killed on the streets of London by someone like me, don’t go out there with a knife or gun thinking you’re fucking Charlie big potato.”

Now in his sixties and retired, Long is a highly commended Met veteran of 33 years, 25 of which were spent in the force’s ever-evolving specialist firearms unit. He knows all too well what it means to shoot to stop a “target”, having hit five suspects in his career, killing three. (“I’ve got a real problem with bullies,” he says.) The first was Yardie police informant Errol Walker, in Northolt, North West London, during the Christmas holidays of 1985. I remember the incident well: it followed the siege of a flat on a council estate, and in those days of scant TV offerings, the unfolding drama made for gripping viewing. His handlers tried, several times, to coax Walker out of the darkened flat with the offer of takeaway pizza.

Walker’s crime was stabbing his wife’s stepsister to death, before throwing her over the balcony and taking the victim’s four-year-old daughter hostage. In the end, he was double-tapped by Long, but  miraculously survived. Grabbing the child, who had been stabbed in the neck by Walker, Long ran out of the flat, carrying her to safety and leaving the incapacitated criminal to be dealt with by colleagues.

No one can fault Long’s actions on that day — nor on another, two years later, when he took down three heavily-armed robbers at a meat-packing factory in Plumstead, South East London, killing two and injuring a third. Such were his gun-toting heroics that the News of the World, having discovered his real name, dubbed him “Dirty Tony”, a moniker he bridles at. The paper also reported the nickname foisted on him by a police commander, Sue Akers: “the Met’s own serial killer”. Her loose lips wound up costing the Met £5,000 in damages, after Long sued his former employers.

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But it was Long’s final shooting that echoes the Chris Kaba incident, in that it was more ethically and practically ambiguous, and called into question the definitions of hero cop, psycho-villain, and, yes, racial profiling.

In April 2005, the officer found himself opening fire on 24-year-old Azelle Rodney, who was sitting in the back of a VW Golf with his fellow gang members, Wesley Lovell and Frank Graham, in the front. All three were black. Police intel, which included the use of a surveillance drone, had indicated that the men were armed with machine guns and en route to rob a gang of Colombian drug dealers somewhere in the outer reaches of North London. Long fired eight rounds from his Heckler and Koch G36 carbine at him, six of which hit Rodney, in the face, head, neck and chest. Rodney died of his wounds.

To cut a long story short: the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) initially concluded that there was insufficient evidence to convict anyone in connection with Rodney’s death. There followed a long, drawn-out inquest, then a judge-led public inquiry, and finally an Old Bailey murder trial in 2015, which saw Long acquitted and his name finally cleared.

All the signs suggest there will be a similarly drawn-out exercise in truth-seeking in the wake of Kaba’s death. Heat, confusion and protest have followed the incident: Sky News bizarrely reported that a large central London protest, featuring Stormzy, was a memorial march for the Queen. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has now opened a homicide inquiry, a move that has prompted the Met’s approximately 2,500 armed officers to threaten handing in their weapons in support of their beleaguered colleague. It’s not the first time such threats have been made, nor will it be the last.

A cynical solution to the perceived problem of specialist firearms units “holding the public to ransom” — a solution that would also, conveniently, help the police regain the streets from violent criminals — would be to simply arm all police officers. The UK (excluding Northern Ireland) is one of just 18 countries, out of 193, that does not routinely arm police. Doing so would surely level the playing field between officers and armed criminals, especially female officers, who routinely face suspects with an advantage in both size and weaponry. Why should the 34,000 Met police officers tasked with keeping a city of nine million people safe be expected to do so, for the most part, with little more than a stick and a pair of handcuffs?

“The subject of arming the police has been going on for years and is normally raised after an officer is shot dead,” Long says, “or more recently after terrorist attacks such as Borough Market where unarmed officers received life changing injuries because they weren’t correctly equipped.” Last week also delivered up another justification: on Friday, in Leicester Square, a female police officer was left with potentially life-changing injuries after she and a male colleague were stabbed by a “frenzied” suspect.

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“Sadly, we’re now at a point where there is more justification in routine arming than ever, but at the very point where the police have never been in a worse position to implement it,” says Long. “The current government and the last two Mayors of London have got rid of 70% of police stations required to securely store sidearms, and all but one of the ones containing a firing range.” The other issue is that “no serving police officer has been recruited on the understanding that they will be required to carry a firearm, so they could not be forced to do so”. Understandably, “incidents such as the recent Streatham shooting reinforce the attitude among many officers that they would never carry a firearm for fear of the way they’d be treated if they ever had to fire it”.

Long says that for a sea change to occur, every Met recruit who joins the service must be prepared to be armed — if not immediately, then at some point in the future. If they refuse, their employment should be terminated.

As Long’s career illustrates, an officer who shoots someone may be characterised as either a hero or a villain. The fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in 2005 — a tragedy of mistaken identity that occurred in the hunt for the 21/7 terrorist, Hussain Osman — tested the resolve of many armed officers, and the thickness of London’s collective skin. But, such was the capital’s siege mentality following the 7/7 bombings, Londoners expected the police to do what they had to do to take out the bad guys. As former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Blair, would later tell me: de Menezes “died in the fog of war” — a sentiment that, alas, many Londoners were prepared to accept in the short-term.

Equally, some battle-hardened Londoners would have written off Mark Duggan’s death at the hands of a specialist firearms unit in August 2011 as just another “scumbag” getting what he deserved — regardless of the details of the shooting. Others protested, and ultimately his death ignited days of rioting. Once again, the Met’s relationship with London’s black community was strained, as it had been after the accidental shooting of Cherry Groce, which triggered the second Brixton riots in 1985.

Ultimately, every police shooting leaves both the public and the police damned if we do, damned if we don’t. We want the police to protect and serve and take out the human trash that other state agencies are failing to catch, but we don’t want to give them the resources to do their jobs. Rampant racial profiling, the industrial scale stop-and-search of black youths, and the service’s failure to get a grip on London’s violent gang crime often makes me question the Met’s motives, as well as its strategies. But as the old saying, mistakenly attributed to Orwell, goes: “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” To put it another way: being an armed cop is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

One rare moment of excitement during that first Mayoral campaign occurred when Johnson’s team shipped in a bunch of Ugandan politicians and dumped them on the streets of south London to spice up the optics of an otherwise all-white campaign. Some years later, while on the Obama campaign trail, me and Suzanne Moore were similarly used as effnik stooges at a John McCain rally in Richmond, Virginia. We were plonked just feet away from the presidential wannabe to add a multicultural couple to an otherwise sea of white.

Today, however, the fine line between racism, tokenism and cynical opportunism is being revealed as the war in Ukraine enters its third month. Amid the exodus of five million people fleeing the Russian invasion, several expat African, Asian, and Middle Eastern students, as well as non-white Ukrainian nationals, have reported how the authorities are giving white citizens free passage out of the beleaguered country while holding back “foreigners”. Having spoken to legions of black friends, relatives and colleagues in my Caribbean bolthole, across the diaspora and back home in the UK, such accounts appear to confirm the Afro-cynical view that the Ukraine conflict is a white man’s war and one black people would do well to keep out of.

For many in the African diaspora, myself included, the sight of Poland’s EU commissioner pledging to shelter Ukrainian refugees in his own home, and of the UK government creating a “Homes for Ukraine” scheme, and of the US opening its doors to 100,000 Ukrainians smacks of Eurocentric self-interest — a self-interest that reinforces a sense of black cynicism and resentment. As Trevor Noah pointed out during one of his monologues on The Daily Show at the start of the war: “It is interesting that Eastern Europe has been so willing and able to accept a million people coming into their countries in just a few days, when, just recently, they didn’t seem to have any space for a different group of refugees.”

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We’ve all seen countless images of Syrian refugees in convoy zigzagging their way across Europe in search of safe haven, while the EU pays off Turkey to keep them from getting to Greece. We’ve heard the Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki state publicly that “we will not be receiving migrants from the Middle East and North Africa in Poland”. We’ve seen Hungary’s 13ft razor-wire fence stretching 115 miles along its border with Serbia designed to keep out refugees like wild dogs. And we’ve seen the gut-wrenching images of migrants’ corpses washed up on our shores or packed into the back of container lorries like dead meat, while successive prime ministers galvanise the sort of “hostile environment” immigration policies that led to the Windrush scandal and the bizarre outsourcing of asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Helping to prosecute this “narrative” is a Western news media which black readers, viewers and listeners have become all too adept at decoding for dog whistles and subtexts and racial bias that don’t seem to matter in the context of expressing solidarity with Ukraine. “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed,” Ukraine’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, told the BBC. “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan… This is a relatively civilised, relatively European city,” reported CBS foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata. “Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria; these are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine. These are Christians, they are white, they’re … um… very similar to the people that live in Poland,” intoned NBC News correspondent, Kelly Cobiella. “Now the unthinkable has happened to them. This is not a developing, third-world nation. This is Europe,” gushed one ITV “reporter”.

Add to this the weight of history, Europe’s discriminatory migration policies, and the existence of various neo-Nazis on both sides of the frontline, and it comes as no surprise that very few black people have been inspired to take up arms and join President Zelenskyy’s International Legion of Ukraine. There are two notable exceptions: Malcolm Nance, a 61-year-old former US intelligence officer and ex-MSNBC analyst, and Ben Grant, a former Royal Marine and eldest son of Tory MP Helen Grant, have both signed up to the Legion.

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While Nance has been tweeting furiously, giving interviews and posing for macho photos since he took off for Ukraine over a week ago, little has been heard of 30-year-old Grant since he left for the frontline in early March. Even in the case of Nance, despite his relatively high profile, the comparative lack of interest in both his and Grant’s welfare — from blacks and whites alike — further illustrates a growing and widening “not our war” indifference that black people caught earlier but one suspects will soon become the British norm.

If “black Twitter” and the global Afritariat are anything to go by, Robert Downey Jr donning blackface in Tropic Thunder is more likely to get a round of applause on the streets of Harlem or Brixton than either Nance or Grant. The historic ill-treatment of black personnel in the US and British militaries is something the diaspora isn’t about to forget in a hurry, not least because even tokens such as Nance and Grant are so thin on the ground that black people literally see themselves as having no stake in the war, despite the ripple effects of rising fuel and food prices affecting them as much as anyone else.

Whether it’s tokenism, racism, or plain old indifference, the uncomfortable truth is that black whataboutery concerning the West’s interest in the sanctity of Ukrainian life over that of Afghanis, Iraqis, Yemenis or Congolese belies a romantic view of Russia as my enemy’s enemy is my friend. This is, of course, naive. Yet, to paraphrase Muhammad Ali’s apocryphal draft dodging line: “No Russian ever called me nigger.”

Having grown up during the Cold War, the son of parents who toiled under the British colonial yoke, at the very least I speak for a generation that believed that the only bulwark against American imperialism, or the suppression of black sovereignty, or European neo-colonialism, or support for British and South African apartheid was the existence of a nation with the balls to stand up to Western decadence. But life has moved on. It’s time Russia showed more heart and less balls, and at the very least called a ceasefire. Perhaps it’ll end up being nothing more than a token gesture, but at least it will be one the diaspora can support.

Put the price of fame aside, and the real pressure faced by the Fresh Prince, and to a lesser extent his “bitch slap” whipping boy Chris Rock, is being that most problematic of black male stereotypes: the role model.

Ironically, the pugnacious Smith’s rather comfortable living has come from playing an assortment of morally righteous heroes, including a homeless salesman, Muhammad Ali, and Venus and Serena Williams’s father. Arguably, as an actor, Smith is merely portraying characters who have little or no bearing on his real personality. By his own admission, his public persona is a confection, a construction “designed to protect myself, to hide myself from the world”. But under closer scrutiny, his self-indulgent tale doesn’t really stack up.

Smith has, for some years now, cried, crumbled and collapsed in countless interviews, reality TV scenarios and bizarre family encounters. He has spoken of his battles with mental health issues and his contemplation of suicide. He was left on the brink of a televised meltdown following his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s revelation of an affair in 2015, aged 43, with a 22-year-old rapper. Pinkett’s adultery, which she described euphemistically as “an entanglement”, led to gossip about her and Smith agreeing to an open relationship (which to me sounds like cuckolding by another name).

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Yet Smith has courted the role-model dollar for decades. Way back in 1993, he refused to kiss co-star Michael Anthony Hall in one of his breakthrough movies, Six Degrees of Separation, for fear of the scene alienating his fanbase. His carefully chosen and generally wholesome roles, as well as occasional musings about running for president one day, have ensured the sort of “four-quadrant” appeal that has made him Hollywood gold. But his emotional outbursts, which include a previous slapping incident involving a reporter in 2012, not only illustrate Smith’s edginess, they demonstrate the fragility of the black role model.

If you’re a working-class black kid from South Central or South London, the chances are you’re still battling with disproportionate levels of unemployment, mental health, and urban deprivation in your neighbourhood. In an ideal world, it’s these areas that can really benefit from role models on the ground. But in the absence of government or corporate behemoths investing heavily in disenfranchised black youths — perhaps by building a well-funded, sustainable, nationwide role-modelling programme — the whole idea is just that: an idea.

Practicalities aside, role modelling is fraught with philosophical and ideological difficulties. Many of those who champion them set unrealistic examples for young people to emulate, despite probably knowing hardworking black men and women in their area who could mentor a kid desperately in need of basic life skills.

While there have been predictable calls for the Academy to strip Smith of his Best Actor award, it is striking he didn’t wake up yesterday and face multiple cancellations by studios, corporate sponsors and the global media. “Successful” black men are something of a fetish, not just within the mainstream black diaspora, but also for white liberals and buccaneering reactionaries alike.

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The diaspora likes straight up and down, messianic or redemptive figures. For many, complexity is in the journey, not in the flaky mind of those who break down and sob on camera because, you know, like, success is like, hard, man. For real.

White constituencies, on the other hand, who are in search of a strong black man, see a successful brotha as being either proof of what can be, or evidence of what is. Here, complexity is all in the mind: it’s either about idealism, dreaming and, in reality, exceptionalism. Who needs rich parents, connections, a private education or any of that luck stuff that comes as an accident of birth? Just pull your socks up and the rest will follow!

As uncomfortable as white observers may be about viewing the melee in LA through a racial lens, for black people, role modelling is always about racial dynamics, be they existential or more abstract. The “community” is all too aware that Smith’s violent outburst and the uncomfortable close-up of him yelling at Rock to “keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth” will have triggered a wider sense of vulnerability in the diaspora. If Smith can meltdown like this, it can happen to anyone. Well, newsflash, is does happen to anyone. All the time. Which is why it’s time to forget about Will Smith and Jada Pinkett representing anything other than their own self-indulgent, decadent, narcissistic selves.

Certainly, some within the community will look at Smith making an ass of himself and feel a sense of shame and embarrassment. Not only have we “lost” a role model, they will reason, he will have played into the hands of detractors who suggest that white audiences can tolerate black entertainers just as long as they focus on being entertaining and don’t trigger the white mainstream’s latent fear of the “big black man” or “crazy black woman”.

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When I look around, I don’t see white kids being force fed the idea of role models. Many will counter that white youths don’t need obvious role modelling because mainstream society is already awash with white role models. But I think we’ve reached a point where role models have become confused and conflated with heroes and mentors — both of which offer more tangible meaning to young black people.

The distance and otherness of heroic figures, for one thing, allows for fantasising and stimulating the imagination, something I feel black kids are not encouraged to do enough as they are often consumed by in the moment “reality”. Mentors, on the other hand, are very much about taking the here and now by the scruff of the neck and showing young people how to navigate the world with practical ideas, strategies and tactics, to survive and thrive. Role models fall between these two stools. When the bar is set vertiginously high, too many black kids feel they can’t measure up to an Obama or a Stormzy or a Will Smith.

What they need are practical skills to deal with the day-to-day dramas that can help them through the labyrinth of school, family and their local postcode. And what they don’t need is another wannabe hero who can’t read the room.

But taking the lethal option was almost as undesired by the perpetrator as the victim. Murder has a way of redoubling the authorities’ efforts; and besides, dead men can’t pay kickbacks.

Today’s bad guy, however, leaves nothing to chance. The tripartite of gangsterism, terrorism and militarism has become a crowded market, and the art of intimidation has given way to the credo of shoot-first-don’t-even-bother-asking-questions-later.

I’ve seen this callous disregard for human life, and the blurred lines between crime, politics, warfare and “legitimate targets” in countries ranging from war-torn Sierra Leone to South Africa. But nowhere is it more abundant than in Mexico: the narco-capital of the world, a place where ingenious methods of drug trafficking and murder go hand in bloody hand.

To gauge what a typical Mexican crime reporter’s beat reads like, here’s the introduction to a recent report from Albinson Linares of current affairs show, Noticias Telemundo:

“The corpses of three people, dismembered and burned, were found in bags in Abasolo, in the state of Guanajuato, on Sept. 2. Three days later, a trans woman was murdered in the same state, and the body of a man, burned and tortured, was found hanging from a tree in Coacalco state. On Sept. 7, more than 300 migrants who had been kidnapped were rescued in Aguascalientes, and on Sept. 19, an entire family in Chihuahua was killed and an explosive package in Guanajuato caused the deaths of two men.”

And that’s a tiny sample of the 438 “acts of extreme violence” registered in Mexico that month. In this sense, then, daily life in Mexico is not a million miles away from the corrupt, ultra-violent, narco-state image of the country that Netflix has successfully cultivated via multiple documentaries, movies, series and “dope operas”.  The latest, and greatest, incarnation in the streaming service’s drug dramas is season three of Narcos: Mexico — a show notorious for its “brutal” executions and murder.

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But the truth is that, if anything, these shows actually downplay the violence of cartels. In Narcos, when someone gets whacked they’re dispatched like a third-rate nobody. A bit of blood splatter; a groan; next. In the real world, people who fall foul of the cartels get taken out in the most macabre of fashions: in one execution video allegedly released by the La Familia Michoacán drug cartel, a pit bull rips the man’s testicles off in full view of the camera. It’s horrific, gruesome, and in keeping with the cartels’ sadistic rule of law.

“These videos emerged in Mexico way back in late 2005, with the first one supposedly coming out of Acapulco,” says British journalist, Ioan Grillo, who left Britain for Mexico 20 years ago and is the bestselling author of El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. “It showed the interrogation of a gang member who was strapped to a chair. At the end of the video someone puts a gun to his head and blows his brains out. Literally. That video wasn’t posted on the internet in the same way that videos are today, because at that time it wasn’t as easy to post videos online. It actually turned up on a VHS tape and was given to a regional newspaper in the United States before making its way to the Dallas Morning News newspaper and then onto Mexican TV. They didn’t show the video in its entirety, but that was arguably the start of it all.”

According to Grillo, the cartels got the bright idea of shooting VHS videos of their murderous activities, and disseminating them via American and Mexican mainstream media, from watching al-Qaeda’s beheading videos of Westerners in the early 2000s. After one Mexican news programme ran the unexpurgated version of an American contractor’s beheading by the terrorist group in 2003, the cartels registered the hype it generated, and a new narco-propaganda tool was born.

Ever since, an endless stream of filmed ‘media-friendly’ atrocities and ultra-violent stunts have been employed by various warring cartels, including the rolling of five decapitated heads onto a crowded dance floor in Michoacán in 2006 by masked gunmen and the discovery of a box containing a football with a man’s face sewn onto it in a Sinaloa street in 2010 as a threat to the Juarez drug cartel. Inside the box was the message: “Happy New Year, because this will be your last.” The victim, Hugo Hernandez, was found chopped up into seven pieces.

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Yet decapitations have become so routine that, as Grillo says, they’re barely newsworthy anymore. So to up the propaganda and aesthetic stakes, the likes of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel records videos to spread on Facebook and Instragram. They usually show a phalanx of military vehicles and cartel members posing in tactical gear with assault weapons and, as Grillo notes, “sometimes torturing and executing enemy cartel members”.

While YouTube had been an unwitting early adopter of cartel snuff videos, and the jihadist executions that had inspired them, its $1.6 billion acquisition in 2006 by Google soon put paid to all that. The drug lords’ propaganda activities retreated into the shadowy recesses of the Internet and onto ‘dark social’ platforms and encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp, which contain no digital referral information about source material and thus make it nigh on impossible for law enforcement to track a video’s origins.

With decapitation fatigue setting in among Mexico’s informational gatekeepers, and the Western mainstream media having little or no interest in Latin American current affairs, dark social has given the cartels, with the help of a new breed of ‘citizen journalists’ and the pervasive use of mobile technology, the opportunity to spread its propaganda. Websites such as Blog del Narco have become aggregators and repositories for the worst of Mexico’s violent drug war, disseminating information the mainstream media and political establishment choose to ignore due to cynicism or boredom.

From these blogs — and increasingly their associated Twitter and Instagram accounts — a sort of narco-chic has evolved, spanning everything from music to fashion to ‘slanguage’. Like the criminal milieu of West Coast gangs and their symbiotic relationship with gangsta rap in the Nineties, or the petty New Jersey mafiosi who got their dress codes from The Sopranos in the early noughties, the narcotariat is seeping into mainstream culture thanks the nexus between Narcos and traditional-cum-trendy drug culture.

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And so at one end of the spectrum we have narcocorridos, or drug ballads, about the exploits of drug traffickers, sicarios (cartel hitmen), their lovers or even mass murders. And at the other we have buchonas: the cosmetically enhanced, Kardashian-esque girlfriends of flashy cartel players whose style has become something of a social media phenomenon. Just look at Jenny69, one of the more visible ambassadors of buchona culture despite being from California, who has racked up more than two million followers on Instagram.

No doubt we’ll learn about these developments in Netflix’s next outing in Mexico. But just as journalists have to wrestle with cartels exploiting us as useful idiots in a trade-off between proper news and propaganda, so documentary and film producers must contend with the costs of glamorising one of the most dangerous criminal underworlds on the planet.

In 2017, Narcos producer Carlos Muñoz Porta was shot dead while location-scouting in Temascalapa, north of Mexico City. To date, no one has been brought to justice for the murder. We will probably never know whether it was cartel-inspired or just another random act of violence. Either way, it seems guaranteed that the blurry line in Mexico between art and reality will continue to be crossed for many more seasons to come.

But despite the obvious differences between a failed Arab state of 18 million and a dual-island nation of 1.3 million, the two countries have become strange bedfellows. As unlikely as it may seem, Trinidad has become one of the world’s key recruiting grounds for Isis, a status linked to the country’s other big wheeze: drug trafficking.

I was reminded of the connection between the Caribbean, the caliphate and cocaine last week after hearing of the death of 80-year-old Yasin Abu Bakr, an imposing 6ft 6in former TV producer and ex-cop who, as leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen movement, in 1990 pulled off an attempted coup in Trinidad. For the better part of a week, Abu Bakr was effectively the head of state, making him the only person to ever lead an Islamic coup in the Western Hemisphere.

I met Abu Bakr in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, in 2018 while researching a book on tribalism. Initially, I was drawn to him after more than 100 Trinidadians left home to join Isis and the jihadi cause, lured by a mix of fundamentalist ideology, warped romanticism and, in many cases, money. These young men travelled not just to Syria but also Iraq, often taking with them, and usually against their will, scores of women and children.

Given its small population, Trinidad has provided disproportionate numbers of jihadis to the ISIS cause. The US and Canada, with a combined population of some 350 million, larger Muslim communities and a seemingly more fertile breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment, are believed to have exported just 300 or so men and women to the Levant for jihad.

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Yet in Trinidad, just 6% of the population are Muslim, and, of these, an estimated 90% are of Indian descent. While most are arguably “moderate”, a small minority has no strong attachment to their communities — thanks to a combination of atomised families, absent fathers, rampant drug addiction, gang culture and social marginalisation. Such a perfect storm feeds the worst excesses of identity politics, making young, impressionable and often desperate men vulnerable to the chest-beating Isis propaganda machine.

But even before Isis existed as an idea, let alone as an organised terror group, the foundations of Islamic extremism were being laid in Trinidad. In the late Seventies, the island saw a revival of Islam that came off the back of an American black power movement underscored by the teachings of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, as well as the Islamic revolution in Iran and the assertion of a more muscular, global Muslim identity. This Islamic reboot differed from the prevailing, passive Trinidadian Muslim identity and capitalised on endemic corruption, a growing gang problem fuelled by a burgeoning cocaine trade and a sense of alienation felt by many youths who were unable to access a piece of the oil and gas pie being divvied up by foreign capitalists and their government cronies.

Without proper education and lacking job opportunities, those who felt left behind began to turn to Islam as a way out, and a means of clearing the streets of the drugs that went hand in glove with the new money. Located seven miles north of Venezuela, which has an ultra-porous 1,378-mile border with the cocaine capital of the world, Colombia, drugs continue to enter Trinidad by speedboat and leave on container ships, planes and private yachts, as well as in condoms carried inside the stomachs of drug mules.

These narcotics often enter Trinidad with decommissioned Venezuelan military weapons, which explains the tendency of gangs in Port of Spain and elsewhere to have more firepower on the streets than most police forces. Perhaps that’s why an unofficial investigation by the government in 2009 found that up to 90% of cops were involved in illegality, ranging from “running and selling drugs, to colluding with gangs by renting out weapons to criminals, to performing extra-legal killings”.

Throughout the Eighties, the Islamist reboot was seen as a counterpoint to a society that was rapidly turning into a Sodom and Gomorrah for urban youth. Muslim militias took the fight to the dealers, drug lords and gangs on the streets of Port of Spain and beyond, becoming a vigilante force to be reckoned with. Indeed, as the new incarnation of Islam became more and more powerful, its more pernicious fringes — who were more concerned with financial gain than philosophical enlightenment — became enforcers, protection racketeers and, in many cases, out-and-out gangsters themselves.

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Already well-developed in the US, Prislam — a brand of prison-based Islam that conferred protection to its adherents and access to criminal networks both inside and outside of jail — soon took hold, causing schism after schism. Initially, these took the form of pseudo-religious “Muslims versus apostates” conflicts aimed at legitimising gang-on-gang assassinations. Then came “Muslims versus non-Muslims” contract killings — until it became expedient for gang members to either align themselves with the Prislamic “Muslim City” faction or their non-Muslim uber-gang rivals, “Rasta City”.

Semantics aside, the names of both organised crime groups soon had little to do with Mecca or Haile Selassie, save for some members who happened to be Muslims or Rastas, as well as drug dealers, hitmen and government stooges. But something had to give. With cocaine and oil came the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, unbridled corruption and gangster politics, which eventually gave rise to an unprecedented rejection of the government.

Enter Abu Bakr.

Over afternoon tea in the Jamaat al Muslimeen compound in Port of Spain, Abu Bakr, a sardonic, charismatic character formerly known as Lennox Phillip, told me how on July 25, 1990, he mounted the coup with some 113 black Muslim foot soldiers, using intelligence sources to determine when key police and military figures were indisposed or out of town. The plotters duly blew up the capital’s main police station, took the local TV news channel and stormed parliament, taking the prime minister, ANR Robinson, and a number of his fellow legislators hostage at gunpoint for several days. Trinidad being Trinidad, chaos ensued. Riots led to several hundred injuries and some 30 deaths.

Having taken the Trinidadian government to task for its complicity in ramping up the country’s drug problems and spiralling violent crime, Abu Bakr’s audacious move, in fairness, was more a citizen’s arrest of the government than a coup d’état, designed to seize control and take the reins of power. Abu Bakr’s power grab came to an end when he and his followers gave themselves up. After being charged with murder and treason, Abu Bakr was released from prison two years later as part of an amnesty deal.

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“We were a community outreach organisation,” he told me in his modest office, adding he still believed that he could have reversed Trinidad’s crime epidemic if he had succeeded. “A hundred people would convert at Friday prayers. We got money from Libya. We were cleaning up the drugs on the street — we were doing good work. We had outreach centres, feeding centres, shops, businesses, land, medical centres… The Government feared us.”

That fear, Abu Bakr said, had led to the government violently clamping down on his organisation. With no recourse to the law, Jamaat al Muslimeen’s seizure of power was, he claimed, as much about self-preservation as it was about ending corruption.

“It’s a known fact that many people who said they were Muslims manifested themselves as something else,” he suggested. Certainly Jamaat al Muslimeen struck me more as a sort of Islamic scout movement than an insurgency. But for a few that wasn’t enough; the lure of jihad was too great. “The Trinidad-ISIS connection is not nonsense,” Abu Bakr told me. “Many people left Trinidad to fight for ISIS because of the lack of hope.”

Is there any sign of that hope being restored? If there is, it is hard to spot. Three years after our conversation, the drugs continue to flow into Trinidad — and violence continues to erupt. As Abu Bakr told me at the time: “This is the land of steel pan and carnival. This is supposed to be paradise. Yet for many, it is anything but.”

Nobody really knows what happened next. Nobody ever does in these situations. But the trigger is always the same: someone is pushed or punched; something is thrown or kicked; a fire is lit and a riot starts.

Having grown up in Walthamstow, Tottenham’s East End neighbour, I know the area intimately. I’ve been a member of London’s “black community” all my life; and when the community sneezes, the capital catches a cold. Watching the wall-to-wall coverage of the riots, I only had to glimpse at the predominantly black faces of those caught up in the melee for my jaw to drop, my stomach to churn. Familiar landmarks, streets and memories burned beyond recognition. Within three days, the same scenes were being played out in towns and cities across England.

The country soon became gripped by a desperate need to discover the “truth” behind the riots. Pantomime historian David Starkey appeared, shamelessly, on BBC2’s Newsnight claiming that “the problem is that the whites have become black”, evoking Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech with incendiary glee. “His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense,” Starkey waxed. “The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent. They wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham.”

On the other side, those who had lived in the shadow of bigotry, structural inequality and what they described as the “institutionally racist” Metropolitan Police saw the riots — or “uprisings”, as the Marxist fringes put it — as yet more evidence of a Britain broken by racism and class war.

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At the time, the official line was straightforward. On August 4, 29-year-old Duggan was shot dead by police officers from Operation Trident, the Metropolitan Police unit charged with investigating gun crime in London’s black communities. Trident had mounted an operation to apprehend Duggan, who they suspected of being in possession of a firearm, without informing the local police.

Make no mistake: Mark Duggan was no saint. In fact, he wasn’t even “no saint” in the George Floyd sense of the term. Duggan wasn’t choked to death on the street, unarmed and seemingly of little threat. He was shot dead while trying to escape on foot, in possession of a firearm he’d bought 15 minutes earlier. As one former officer who was attached to the unit that killed Duggan told me: “If you don’t want to be shot and killed by someone like me, don’t go out on to the streets of Britain with a gun or a deadly weapon.”

As a Fellow of the Design Against Crime Research Centre at the University of the Arts, it is my job to examine criminal behaviour through a creative lens. So when I look back at the Tottenham riots, what I see is a theatrical, operatic event — albeit a dark one triggered by those addicted to daily drama and a need to be heard. As one old Caribbean saying goes, which is generally applied to getting a good hiding: “Those who don’t hear must feel.”

In a similar manner, a riot gives the voiceless, especially those with low dopamine levels, an opportunity to get caught up in the rush, the excitement and the drama of anarchy. A riot is like Glastonbury for sociopaths. Antagonists see fires burning, smoke billowing, shouting, screams and sirens and they get high. Somewhere between the peaceful demonstration and the five deaths, hundreds of arrests and damages estimated to be as much as £300 million, someone made a critical error of judgement — and then the rioting started.

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Perhaps the biggest tragedy of all is that it could have been avoided. Even police experts have conceded the anarchy was preventable. “There was a disgraceful absence of visible leadership, and that should be shaming for the Metropolitan Police,” was the verdict of retired Met Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Gilbertson at the time. “With rank comes responsibility, and part of the responsibility is visible command… It’s blindingly obvious to say that you [should] push them away from target-rich environments; a shopping area, a retail park — all of the places that were trashed by the rioters.”

At the time, Tottenham MP David Lammy told me he knew the riots were coming. Unlike most MPs, he was born and raised in the constituency he represents; but like many of his constituents — like me, in fact — he comes from an immigrant, working-class family, too many of whose relatives have had negative encounters with the police. He understood the existential problem between black people and those tasked with protecting them.

But many of us predicted a riot. Tottenham was always going to erupt. Even today, despite now being home to a gleaming £1 billion football stadium, recent deprivation figures show that Tottenham remains one of the top 6% most deprived neighbourhoods in England. Beyond the escalating property prices and significant high crime “powder keg hotspots”, volatile Tottenham — and its surrounding boroughs of Hackney, Waltham Forest and Islington — has long been home to rabbit warren council estates that look like open prisons where an absence of “boots on the ground” policing, partly due to falling or reprioritised police resources, allows gangs to act with impunity. The atomisation, alienation and cynicism — on all sides in such human Petri dishes — means the business of predicting riots is an exercise of “when” not “if”.

After all, we’ve been here before. In 1985, the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham erupted. Fuelled by racism, social exclusion, police brutality and poverty, youths took to the streets. Duggan lived on that estate; PC Keith Blakelock died on it. The anger of the rioters, and indeed many pacifists, was articulated graphically by Bernie Grant, Lammy’s predecessor, who infamously remarked: “The police got a bloody good hiding.” Grant’s words were strong — too strong given that an officer had just been murdered in the line of duty. But those words became the tagline of the 1985 riot. Something political had happened.

On the other hand, the 2011 riots were, as Lammy later wrote, “an explosion of hedonism and nihilism”. In Out of the Ashes, he suggests that lack of education, ineffective parental guidance, poor role models, ill-discipline, unemployment and a host of social and developmental ills created the perfect storm for a riot.

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Yes, the rioters’ behaviour was criminal. Yes, they should be held to account. But go to Tottenham, says Lammy, and witness the conditions people are living under. For him, the finger was there to be pointed at the mindless criminals at the heart of the riot, and indeed failed police tactics and leadership. But it was also there to be pointed at Cameron, Blair and Brown too. This trio had arguably mortgaged British society, economically and morally in the run up to 2011, just as Thatcher had previously done with the resultant miners’ strikes, poll tax riots and previous Tottenham, Toxteth and Brixton disturbances.

Of course, plenty of black people have died at the hands of police in Britain. But barely a handful have led to serious rioting in the 73 years since the arrival of the Windrush. So why Mark Duggan?

To some extent, people rioted over his death because “his people” were able to mobilise a demonstration outside of Tottenham police station, which then got out of hand — not because he was a galvanising figure like Rodney King or George Floyd or Cynthia Jarrett, whose death sparked the first Tottenham riot in 1985, but because the moment presented itself.

Perhaps that’s why we’ll never be able to explain what happened ten years ago. The chaos was already there. Duggan’s death was merely the trigger. And as communities in Tottenham and beyond continue to rot, I suspect it won’t the last.

That isn’t to say that it has been an easy ride. Britain’s first lockdown seriously dented drug dealers’ freedom of movement, and their supply has been hit by a number of significant domestic and international drug busts. In the world of narcotics, at least, the past year will no doubt come to be remembered as an era of stockpiling, increased prices and lower quality cocaine as dealers “trod” heavily on their wares with more cutting agents — not to mention the resulting boom in the cannabis market.

Yet in many ways, today’s itinerant drug dealers, able to roam from door-to-door, are perfectly suited to life in lockdown — and that’s a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Once upon a time, punters, users, abusers, junkies and “nitties” (those itching, scratching, semi-feral addicts) had to venture out of their homes and scurry off into the night in search of a little dope.

In the early eighties, when I was barely a teen, I had a friend who wanted to score some weed and made me traipse with him to a “shebeen”, or illegal drinking club, operating out of a dingy squat in Stratford, East London. The place was occupied almost exclusively by Rastas who were either smoking big fat spliffs or selling tiny bags of weed. My pal, despite still being in his school uniform, scored a £5 bag containing a few buds, twigs and seeds and rolled a crappy joint. I took a puff of it, coughed my guts up, pulled a “whitey” and ran out of the gaff as paranoid as hell to the toilets in Stratford Shopping Centre, where I locked myself in a cubicle until I calmed down.

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In seventies and early eighties London, Rastas were to selling weed what the Royal Mail was to postal delivery services; they had a near monopoly on the trade, certainly at street level. In the absence of hydroponic technology, globalisation and, it must be said, what would become the British public’s penchant for exotic and eclectic highs, weed was a cottage industry with deep roots, and routes, to Jamaica. Anything stronger was the preserve of bohemians, the clubbing elite and the rich and famous. Even then, unless you were well-connected or in the entertainment industry, if you wanted drugs you needed to go out of your way to get them.

But in the decades since, Britain’s love affair with narcotics has taken on a whole new meaning. According to the Home Office’s latest figures, roughly three million people took recreational drugs in England and Wales last year, with around 300,000 in England opting for opiates and/or crack cocaine. In terms of valuation, the illicit drugs trade is worth an estimated £9.4 billion a year — which makes it larger than the UK music industry (£5.2 billion) and gaming industry (£2.9 billion) combined, and with an annual turnover bigger than several major high street chains, including Boots (£6.7 billion) and Primark (£5.9 billion).

Given that chronic weed, amphetamine and cocaine use appears to be as British as a Sunday roast, it’s no wonder that, in recent years, enterprising foreigners have moved into the UK drug market, “sniffing” easy money to be made. Indeed, thanks in part to the EU’s obsession with freedom of movement, its porous borders and, it must be said, our police forces’ flawed racial profiling which dictates that only black people sell, buy and consume drugs, Eastern European dealers have been able to force their way into a lucrative market.

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Eastern European dealers sussed early on that consumption is Britain’s metier, and they made hay with it. While scrawny British inner-city “hood rats” thought riding around on stolen scooters selling crack was a major step-up from dealing on street corners and council estate stairwells, Serbian and Albanian dealers were taking orders on WhatsApp and Telegram encrypted messaging services and delivering to punters’ doors in modest, but comfortably air-conditioned saloon cars. These dealers innovated the use of social media, with many advertising flash sales and “buy two, get one free” offers to regular clients, using price differentiation to offer “standard” and “premium” cocaine. Most importantly, they offered a reliable, consistent and relatively risk-free service.

In other words, they run their “phone operations” like businesses, rather than trap house outtakes from Top Boy. This contrast in modus operandi between Eastern European and native drug dealers is down to what you might call a differing account of “psychological subjectivity”. In other words, if you don’t think and act like a drug dealer, you won’t get caught like one.

Only last week, for instance, the Metropolitan Police publicised an operation it led which resulted in 154 arrests in London relating to County Lines activities: Officers “were also proactively on the look-out for suspicious activity in their efforts to tackle violence, the Met’s top priority,” it added. Two operative words here, “suspicious” and “violence”, provide a clue as to why Eastern European dealers have been so successful; they were, for a long time, absent from their crime narrative in Britain.

Just as with stereotypes surrounding the Italian mafia, Jamaican Yardies and Chinese triads, the image of the black-clad Bond-villain Russian invariably springs to mind when we talk about any criminal east of Berlin. But while Eastern European gang members are no strangers to violence, many of the dealers I’ve spoken to are singularly focussed on doing their job, and therefore distance themselves from any violence which may attract unwanted attention. Our conversations are usually prosaic: about football results, their children back home and, increasingly, how the traffic congestion caused by the closure of some bridge over the Thames is affecting their delivery times. If anything, Eastern European dealers in London operate more like Uber than the Barksdale Crew from The Wire. 

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And since lockdown, this work ethic has made it easier for them to adapt. One dealer I know is pretending to be a more orthodox “essential worker”, wearing a hi-vis jacket and driving around in a van as a cover. Others have changed their shift times, now usually working from just 4pm-6pm or weekends only. Some have even upped sticks and left the UK altogether, putting their phone operations on a skeleton staff until the much-anticipated summer boom.

One of the savvier young London dealers I know — who recently escaped a county lines operation after a “nitty” held him up for his stash with a hypodermic needle, and was then nearly stabbed to death by the gang he now owed money to — has gone “freelance”. He bought a scooter and uses a Deliveroo box as a cover story to sell crack, a move that’s become so common that the Met have started to randomly “stop and search” delivery bike riders.

More recently, though, the Met — perhaps realising that it could prove more fruitful — has decided to target the middle-class drug trade. When I worked as a producer on the Channel 5 documentary series Gangland, a constant refrain I heard from dealers was that gentrification is contributing to Britain’s ever-expanding drugs market. The Government certainly agrees; last week, it was revealed that it plans to launch a middle-class “information campaign” to make “snorting cocaine as socially unacceptable as drink-driving”.

Certainly their value to dealers cannot be underestimated. Aside from being spendthrift, reliable and creditworthy, middle-class punters are mavens when it comes to spreading the word about who’s got A-grade cocaine or ecstasy. If you’re a dealer, being able to boast that you have doctors, lawyers and media types in your contacts book is certainly a nice marketing touch. After all, the bourgeoisie love nothing more than knowing they’re in good company, even if they are contributing to a trade that results in Mexican gang members being decapitated every now and again.

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I learned just how valuable middle-class coke users are during the 2019 general election. Having got wind of a high-profile political client who was being “served up” by the friend of a source, I attempted to broker a deal with one of Fleet Street’s finest for the story. But at the last minute, the drug dealer baulked at my offers of fame, fortune and the opportunity to change the course of British political history. “Bro, it ain’t worth it,” he told me. “He’s my best customer.” When it comes to middle-class dealing, discretion is key; another reason why the professionalism of foreign dealers sells itself.

Just days before lockdown, The Sun reported that “London has become a hotbed of international criminals – from Albanian cocaine kingpins and African street gangsters to Turkish Cypriots”. When I asked an old source in the East End scene if this was yet more tabloid bluster, he simply said: “I moved to Essex to get away from that shit. Now they’re moving in here. You can’t compete with them.”

In some ways, I suppose it’s to be expected that a capital city of nine million people has its fair share of foreign dealers — just as it has its fair share of foreign businessmen. And with the UK bracing itself for the end of lockdown restrictions this summer, no doubt these “essential” workers are already preparing for the inevitable narco-bonanza that will follow.