Walking to the first interview for this project, I noticed a young boy sitting on a wall a few roads down from my north London flat. He had his head in his hands and his body shook gently, quiet sobs erupting as his feet dangled above the ground. Opposite him lay a sea of flowers, some wilting, others fresh, weather-worn cards, their rain-defeated ink fading into illegibility and candles laid out to form the initials ‘JH’. When I came back home five hours later, he was still there.
It’s a memorial Londoners have walked past countless times since it appeared in early January, at the site where 24-year-old Jonah Ho-Shue was stabbed to death. He was the first person to be killed on London’s streets this year.
Around the capital, it is not uncommon to see shrines like this — tributes to lives cut tragically short. In many ways, knife crime is a hyper-visible problem in London. It is a fear which can sometimes lie dormant, and then be lit ablaze when a particularly senseless tragedy hits the headlines, such as the killing of 15-year-old schoolgirl Elianne Andam, or 16-year-old Harry Pitman at the end of last year.
Until 2016, youth violence in the capital was widely understood to be falling — down from a peak in 2009. Then the numbers started climbing again. The 2020 lockdown seemed to provide some respite, as rates of stabbings decreased for the first time in half a decade, but knife crime in London has risen each year since the pandemic, with a 22 per cent increase in Met Police recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the last year (up to September 2023).
It is undoubtedly a complex and fraught issue — even the stats can be hard to make sense of. Often, a sensationalised media and political reaction collapses all context. Moral panic about gangs, a loosely defined term, but one usually reserved for Black boys, abounds, and politicians promise harsher sentencing or crackdowns on forms of culture associated with the Black community, like drill music.
But away from opportunistic politicking and tabloid frenzy is a side of the story we tend to see less: the voices of the hundreds of people who silently bleed from every stab wound inflicted. Jessica Plummer, whose son was stabbed to death in 2015; Martin Griffiths, a trauma surgeon at the Royal London Hospital; Jacob*, who used to carry a knife himself; and Graeme Halleron, a Met Police officer working in violence prevention — all of their lives are a reminder of the infinite and devastating diameter of a knife.
Jessica Plummer
It was a bright and chilly Tuesday afternoon in January 2015, and 17-year-old Shaquan Sammy-Plummer was in good spirits. He had come home from college, Camden’s LaSwap, and was laughing with his mum, Jessica, as he quickly got dressed to head out to work at Tottenham football stadium.
‘He came to the mirror in the front room, he was fixing his clothes, and he said, “Mummy, look at your peng son”,’ Plummer remembers, smiling fondly. ‘Everyone always said he was good-looking. When Valentine’s Day came… I wish I could have shown you the cards and aftershave girls used to buy for him from the pound shop. But to me he was just normal, just Shaquan.’
As he stepped outside, Plummer repeated what she said to all of her three children whenever they left the house. ‘I said, “Remember to behave yourself. Be a leader, not a follower.”’ When he reached the end of the road, Shaquan turned around and waved goodbye to his mum.
‘And that was it,’ Plummer says. ‘I never saw my son again.’
Shaquan did not make it home that day. After work, he stopped by a house party in Winchmore Hill, but was turned away at the door by Jemal Williams, who told him it was full, but demanded that Shaquan hand over the drinks and snacks he had brought. Shaquan refused, but made no fuss and walked away.
He was only a few doors down when Williams grabbed a knife from the house, chased after Shaquan, and plunged it into his chest. The knife pierced his heart, and he stumbled and collapsed in a nearby driveway. He was pronounced dead at the Royal London Hospital a few hours later. According to reports, Williams had wanted to ‘teach Shaquan a lesson’. He was one of 15 teenagers stabbed to death on London’s streets in 2015.
That was the longest ride ever. I had my fingers crossed the whole time. And I prayed that my son was okay.
When I meet Plummer in her Finsbury Park home, it has been nine years since Shaquan’s death. She greets me in a bonnet, fluffy pink slippers and a faded T-shirt with young Shaquan’s face on it. She is softly spoken but warm, smiling often, immediately adopting a motherly tenderness towards me. ‘Just like my Andre!’ she says when I tell her that I’m 24. ‘You could be my daughter.’
There is barely an inch of Plummer’s home that doesn’t bear some resemblance of Shaquan. The living room is a time capsule, her middle child’s face peering from every wall.
‘That one was taken on his first day at his job at Waitrose,’ Plummer tells me, swelling with pride when I point to a photo on the windowsill. ‘At [Shaquan’s] funeral, I met the Waitrose manager, and he said, “You raised that little boy so well, he was so well-behaved.” Everybody said he was a credit to me.’
‘He used to help old people on the street, take their stuff home for them. They would offer him money, [but] he wouldn’t take it.’
Shaquan’s was a life ripe with potential. An ambitious child, he got his first job at 11, leaving on his bike at five in the morning to do a paper round before school. He had offers to study at five universities, and was hoping to pursue a career in HR. Plummer even had a bottle of champagne ready for his 18th birthday.
On the night Shaquan died, Plummer was in her night dress, ironing her children’s school uniforms and chatting on the phone with a friend. Hearing a knock at the door, Plummer assumed it must be Shaquan coming back late from his shift. ‘But [they] carried on knocking and knocking.’
Plummer opened the door to find two police officers, who told her that Shaquan had been in an accident and was in hospital.
‘I fell on the stairs, I was so weak,’ she tells me, tears running down her face. ‘She [the police officer] helped me up. I wet myself, and she helped me change.
‘I got in the car with them — that was the longest ride ever. I had my fingers crossed the whole time like this.’ She holds out her crossed fingers to me. ‘And I prayed. I prayed that my son was okay.’
When she arrived at the Royal London, a man appeared in an orange suit.
‘He asked if I was Jessica Plummer, and asked me to sit down. I said
I didn’t want to. He took a little while, and then he said to me that Shaquan had died. I said he was lying. He didn’t die. It was a lie.’
‘He asked me to come in with him to see my son, but I said no, because I was scared. And I regret it — I never got to see him or feel him. [That’s] going to be with me for the rest of my life. The only time I got to see my son was behind a screen.’
In the years since Shaquan’s death, Plummer has worked tirelessly to educate young people in London about the dangers of knife crime, speaking in schools on behalf of The Shaquan Sammy-Plummer Foundation, the charity she set up in her son’s name.
‘When I talk to children these days, they say, “There’s nowhere for us to go.” The youth centres have been shut down, so they find themselves outside. And that’s where the problems start.’
She still lives in fear for her two children, Shantel and Andre, her young granddaughter Shamiyah — and for herself.
‘I want to be there all the time to protect them,’ she tells me. ‘Because…I wasn’t there to protect Shaquan and I feel guilty. Sometimes I feel even guilty for laughing or dancing. So I avoid those things.
‘There are days I want to leave my house, but I can’t. Because [I’m scared] if I go out something will happen to me. I hate going on the train, because sometimes I think it’s easier for me to just run in front of the train and end my life.
‘That’s why I say Jemal is not serving a life sentence,’ she finishes. ‘I am. I’m still in prison.’
Martin Griffiths
‘Look out that window.’ I’m standing with Martin Griffiths on the top floor of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. He points to a panoramic view of the city’s skyline.
‘That’s the bit of London you could name; the Shard, the Walkie Talkie, the Gherkin. On that side life expectancy is 10 years higher than on the other side, the East End, where we serve.’
Griffiths is the lead surgeon in the Royal London’s trauma unit, one of the busiest trauma centres in Europe. At 57, he is a veteran of the job, describing himself as ‘punchy’ — when we meet, he is certainly disarmingly frank.
‘We admit two stabbings a day, two shootings a week,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘Day in day out, week in week out. We have an open chest most weeks.
‘This work isn’t for everybody, it’s a hard place to be,’ he admits. ‘It’s very attritional, it’s corrosive. You’ve got to be really good under pressure. And I mean, proper pressure — this person is bleeding to death. What are you going to do? And you’ve got to do it — you can’t phone a friend, it’s you. Martin, fix this now, or they’re going to die. But that’s where I’m at my best, that’s my comfort space.
We admit two stabbings a day. You’ve got to be really good under pressure — but that’s where I’m at my best
‘I’m the cutter. My job is to get you off the table alive.’
In 2019, Griffiths was appointed London’s first NHS clinical director for violence reduction, a role he now holds nationally. Combining clinical and pastoral care, he works with St Giles Trust, a charity supporting victims of violent crime that has office space in the hospital building, around the corner from Griffiths’ own.
‘Often it’s over nothing,’ he says, when I ask about what he and St Giles see as common causes of knife attacks. ‘Impulse control, money, prestige. The stimulus can be minimal and the action is horrendous. Occasionally, something more significant, some sort of long, deep-seated issue. But more often than not, it’s trivial — he said this, she said that. A lot of this stuff seems to be an insanely cheap tariff for a life.’
As Griffiths tells me that the people he sees coming in with knife wounds are getting progressively younger, he recalls one particular patient, a 15-year-old boy rushed in from A&E early on into one of his shifts.
‘It was a Thursday evening, around seven o’clock. Nothing was happening on the road, it wasn’t even late. This kid got stabbed running from a police officer and collapsed.
‘So here I am, dead body, no relatives. And I’ve got another 10 hours to go until the morning. I closed him up, wrote the note — I couldn’t tell the family, there was no family to tell. So I went away, had a little cry, and went back to work. I can’t afford the luxury of sadness.
‘What’s worse than that, though, is when you tell a parent their child is dead and there’s no response. Because I expect the shouting, the swearing. But nothing. That’s what I find chilling.’
Reducing re-admittance has been an integral part of Griffiths’ and St Giles’ work. In 2019, re-admittance rates to the Royal London were down from 45 per cent to just 1 per cent in six years.
‘That’s ridiculously low, by the way,’ Griffiths says. ‘And that’s just by being human beings, by listening better, offering new, practical support.
‘It’s easy to get people out of hospital alive. But what happens when they come back? Two, three, four times? We’re getting better at looking after them, what we offer our patients is better.
‘I don’t lament my choices,’ he says. ‘I’m good at what I do. What I lament is that this is happening in a first-world country with lots of resources. That’s what makes me annoyed.’
Jacob*
‘The first time I carried a knife…’ Jacob pauses for a moment, shifting in his seat. ‘I didn’t even really think about it. I’ve just taken this big kitchen knife, put it down my pants and walked out. And I’m just thinking, “I’m gonna get this guy today. Now.”’
What led to a then 21-year-old Jacob feeling the cool blade of a knife against his thigh, searching the streets of London for its intended target, is both remarkably trivial and incredibly complex. The flashpoint was a petty social media argument about a girl, between his friend and another young man. When Jacob and his friend bumped into the man outside a corner shop, a fight quickly broke out. What the pair didn’t know was that their opponent was armed.
‘As he turned around, [he] pulled a knife out and tried to stab me from behind. And he just kept swinging the knife around — a couple of times he tried to swing for my bredrin as well.’
Both managed to escape to a friend’s house, but, filled with adrenaline, Jacob was enraged.
‘I felt like my manhood was questioned, like I was being tested. I went into that mode, I wasn’t even seeing red at that point, I was seeing black. At the time, I had no heart.’
It was Jacob’s friends who eventually talked him off the ledge, reminding him that if he went to prison he wouldn’t be able to see his newborn son. ‘It took me a long time to calm down. But I thought about it, and I thought, “This isn’t me.”’
Born in Johannesburg, after suffering physical and emotional abuse from a relative he lived with, at the age of six Jacob moved to Shepherd’s Bush, west London, where he found himself in and out of the foster care system.
He tried to stab me from behind. I felt like my manhood was questioned, like I was being tested
‘We was poor [in Johannesburg], a lot of times we was hungry,’ Jacob, now 25, tells me. ‘When I got over here, I was just grateful. So when I was in school, I was a good kid. I had a lot of catching up to do: I only learned how to read and write around age nine.
‘My mentality was like, okay, I need to make something of myself. I always had this cup half-full mentality, always full of positivity.’
But after a painful and triggering reconciliation with his birth parents, Jacob started to rebel. ‘I became angry, very impulsive and I couldn’t understand why,’ he says. ‘The relationship [with my foster mum] started crumbling and around 19, I moved out. And I think that’s where most of the trouble started, in terms of dealing with the streets.’
While homeless and in desperate need of money, some of Jacob’s friends who dealt drugs found that their usual runner couldn’t work. So I just started jumping on it,’ he says. ‘And I thought this is light work, I can do this.
‘It was something I did in desperation. It was helping me survive and putting food on the table, making sure that my son had nappies.
‘The guys that I was trapping [dealing drugs] with, they would always carry [knives]. So it just became normal. Because with customers… you don’t know what you’re getting.’
Jacob had an even closer encounter with a knife a year later, after a random fight erupted at a party.
‘I could feel stings down my back, and it felt like a knife because of just the straightness of it. When I took my jumper off, there was holes in the back. So I realised, rah, these guys grazed me with a knife. After that I just ran home, I nearly pulled a hamstring running so hard.’
It has now been years since Jacob has been involved with ‘the streets’. In the time he has been away, he feels the picture of youth violence in London has intensified.
‘Nowadays kids are coming out with knives the size of my leg,’ he says. ‘The guys that are still in the streets are saying it’s literally a war zone. It’s frightening, even for a person like me.’
A budding rapper, Jacob is now focusing on cultivating his music career, while working in construction on the side.
‘There’s a lot of the mandem that I know on the streets, [who] could have been footballers, doctors, so many things. They had a lot of things going for them, but due to certain circumstances, not having the money… the opportunities… a lot of them are from single-parent homes.
‘If there was more skills in school, if they taught us plumbing, electrics, how to pay your bills, rent, things like that, I feel like kids would be more reluctant to be in the streets because they’d know how to make money in a legal way.
‘Over the years, as I’ve matured, I’ve realised a lot of it is just about wanting acceptance. I think it stems from just being a young kid that wanted to actually have that love that I wasn’t getting.’
Graeme Halleron
In a school hall in east London, PC Graeme Halleron is standing in front of a group of Year 9 and 10 students.
“Hands up – how many of you would tell a police officer if you knew your best mate had brought a knife into school today?”
Out of around 150 children, just two hands go up in the air. When asked by Graeme why his hand is down, one young boy says shyly, ‘I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.’
‘When we first started delivering workshops on knife crime in schools, it was just focused on telling kids ‘if you carry knives, these are the effects,”’ Graeme tells me. ‘But it soon became apparent that, actually, they already knew this. So we looked at getting a different message across – about the wall of silence.’
Certainly when Graeme begins his delivering his assembly about the consequences of knife crime to the pupils of St Edward’s, kitted out in his Met Police uniform some of the pupils appear disinterested, chatting amongst each other and fidgeting in their seats.
‘There’s this attitude of “I’m not a snitch. I’m not a snake”. And that’s a culture which I fully understand – at the end of day we’re asking them to tell on their friends.’
In 1991, Graeme had been working for the Met for just over a year, when a man came rushing into East Ham police station shouting that someone was on the ground outside and needed help.
‘I grabbed a first aid kit and rushed outside, and saw a young man laying on the floor, eyes wide open and unresponsive. He had a big wide open gash on his shoulder, down to the bone. And under his left chest was a very small scratch, which we didn’t think much of at the time.’
We get young people to put on our kit and say, ‘You be a police officer, you do the stop and search’
It turns out that small scratch was a knife wound, where the 19-year-old boy had been stabbed by a pupil at his college.
‘A helicopter from the Royal London [Hospital] arrived, and they basically started performing surgery on this young man on the ground.’
As he speaks to me, tears spring to Graeme’s eyes.
‘Sorry, it still gets to me now,’ he says, taking a break to collect himself. ‘Thirty-one years ago and I can see it as clear as if it was today – I could literally see into this young man’s chest. He died before even reaching the hospital.
‘At the time, my children were about six and four. From the minute I saw him until I broke down in front of my wife two weeks later, in the back of my head I was thinking: “what if that was my kid never growing up?”’
‘And the whole thing was over a game of table tennis.’
Since that early experience on the job, Graeme has been passionate about reducing violence on the capital’s streets. He has been a schools’ officer for the Met for 14 years, delivering workshops to children across east London.
Graeme acknowledges that mistrust of the Met, an institution found in last year’s landmark Casey report to be ‘institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic’, is a huge barrier to building relationships with young people.
‘We know young people a lot of young people don’t like the police,’ Graeme tells me. ‘We have the ability to take away liberties. So I understand there’s that negativity.’
The majority of the students at St Edward’s are Black – a community seven times more likely to be stopped and searched by the Met.
‘We do experiences with young people where we switch switch roles, we get them to put on our kit and say “you be a police officer you do the stop and search”, and they see it from our point of view, and that opens them up to the police a little bit.’
Graeme’s workshop is interactive, personal and warm. By the time the hour is up, the pupils are engrossed.
‘We all hang around at the end, and we tell them they’re all incredibly special, and that their lives matter as much as everybody else’s. Quite often we have a queue wanting to come up and talk to us about knife crime, kids saying thank you, that we’d opened their eyes to something. We’ve had several schools tell us that knives have been reported being carried because of the workshops.’
‘If we can save just one person, then we’ve achieved something,’
