The scourge of gang violence needs to be nipped in the bud - Bill Carmichael

Olivia Pratt-Korbel was shot dead by a gunman who was trying to force his way into the family home in the Dovecot area of Liverpool.

He was chasing a convicted criminal who ran to the house after Olivia’s mum, who was also shot and injured, opened the door to see what the commotion in the street was all about at 10pm on Monday night.

Neither of the men were known to the Pratt-Korbel family who were entirely innocent.

There have been a spate of shootings in the city in recent weeks, including the murders of 20-year-old Sam Rimmer in Dingle and a 28-year-old woman, Ashley Dale, in Old Swan, who was apparently not the intended victim of the attack.

Sadly, Yorkshire is not immune from gang-related gun violence. For example Jamal Nedd, 26, was gunned down in Huddersfield in December 2020; 20-year-old Ramey Salem was murdered in Sheffield in the same year, and Lewis Williams, 20, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Mexborou gh in January of last year. There have been many more.

But the recent shootings have led to fears that gang-related violence, which declined during the pandemic, could be on the rise again.

As it happens I have some personal experience of the devastating impact on local communities of such gangland violence. My sister lived in the Norris Green area of Liverpool, not far from where Olivia was killed, during one of the most vicious and violent gang feuds of recent years.

There is a row of shops, called the Strand, where a group of teenagers used to hang about outside the off-licence openly smoking weed. The off-licence had a sign on the window: “No smoking spliffs in the shop.”

This was the so-called Strand Gang, or Nogga Dogs, and their bitter rivals were from nearby Croxteth, known as the Crocky Crew.

There were frequent fights between the two groups, thefts, break-ins and shootings, which made the lives of residents a misery, but didn’t seem to trouble the police very much. Things escalated shockingly in August 2006 when a member of the Strand Gang, Liam ‘Smigger’ Smith, was ambushed by members of the Crocky Crew and shot dead as he was leaving Altcourse Prison, where he had been visiting an inmate.

On the day of his funeral – featuring a horse-drawn hearse and a cortege of 11 funeral cars – gang members wearing black T-shirts with the words “Smigger Nogsy Soldier” on them, told local businesses to shut “as a mark of respect” or risk their premises being firebombed.

My sister, terrified for her own children, remarked bitterly to me that at least she understood what it must be like to live under the Sicilian mafia. Law-abiding residents lived in fear without much intervention from the local council or the police. Violence continued to escalate and it all ended – predictably – in a terrible tragedy when 11-year-old Rhys Jones was shot dead in 2007 as he walked home from football practice. He’d been caught in the crossfire when one of the Crocky Crew opened fire on his rivals.

To be fair this shocking incident did lead to Merseyside police treating gang crime a bit more seriously and there have been some successes against the criminals in Liverpool and elsewhere. Gun crime, which had been rising since 2015, declined across the UK more recently, although this is probably due to the pandemic, which appears to have suppressed many types of criminal activity. But there are clear signs that violence is beginning to grow again now and what is needed is a robust and rapid police response to nip it in the bud.

We need the police to focus relentlessly on the things that matter to the public who pay their wages – violent and sexual crime, theft, burglary, fraud and anti-social behaviour.

Unfortunately, all too often the police are distracted by fashionable and openly political causes and spend an inordinate amount of time and money investigating hurty words on social media and “non-crime hate incidents”. If it is a non-crime, it is none of the police’s business.

Recently, for example Hampshire police turned up mob handed at the home of a British army veteran and handcuffed and arrested him for re-posting something on social media that had caused, they explained, “anxiety” to an anonymous complainant.

Even Hampshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Donna Jones, thought this out of proportion to any alleged offence saying: “When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong.”

Quite. We need the police to confront the bad guys and put them behind bars, not waste time and money on trendy frivolities.