Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
On call to fight tide of blood on the streets
Afrenzy of ambulance and police lights illuminate the street of busy pubs, bars and coffee shops with a blue tinge. Police tape surrounds the crime scene as partygoers spill out onto the streets at 2am.
Just minutes earlier a young man had been lying on that same pavement in a pool of his own blood, yet another victim of Britain’s knife crime epidemic.
But the crowds nearby seem more interested in having a cigarette than the commotion nearby. Somehow this has become commonplace, normal even.
Paramedics rush to treat the man’s chest and abdomen wounds from a fight outside a bar.
In previous years this would almost certainly have been the scene of a punchup, often the worst injury a broken nose or split lip. But now any argument can have fatal consequences as more and more people in our towns and cities routinely carry a blade.
I joined the ambulance crews in Birmingham city centre on the front line fighting this dreadful scourge.
For the emergency services, knife crime has become a predictable part of their shifts in every major UK city.
“A knife can be obtained by anyone in society” says Dr Mark Nash. “It is not just gang-related, you can find a lethal weapon in any domestic kitchen.
“In the past, it might just have been a few fists – now, all it needs is for someone to pull out a blade and it goes from being a few black eyes to a death.”
The victim, who is of Afro-caribbean origin – five out the six victims under 20 killed in the area last year were from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background - is immediately sent to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
Despite being stabbed three times, this 24-year-old is one of the lucky ones. He will survive. Many others do not.
Just this week saw the fatal stabbing of 14-year-old schoolboy Jayden Moodie in Leyton, East London.
In fact, the West Midlands Ambulance team I’m riding with – Dr Nash and critical care paramedic Robert Davies – describe tonight as “quiet”.
They form the MERIT crew, the allnight specialist medical intervention trauma team, which responds to the most seriously injured patients.
Somehow, despite reading the terrifying statistics of 60 knife-related incidents, including fatal, serious and minor stabbings, every week in the West Midlands, I assume the chances of a call- out tonight involving a knife are remote.
I could scarcely have been more wrong. In one 12-hour shift there were no fewer than three reports of stabbings.
Within hours of the shift starting at 7pm, we’re dashing to reports of three people getting stabbed in a brawl.
We’re pulled back from the scene, but within moments of returning to base in Oldbury, Sandwell, another call comes in and we race to another bloody scene outside a chemist.
The team rush out of the ambulance, quickly clamping gauze onto the gash on the patient’s leg to stem the bleeding as he whimpers on the pavement.
Sat clutching his leg in agony, tonight’s victim is carefully placed on a stretcher
People think, ‘Well, if I wound someone I might be a bit more macho, give me some bravado’ DR MARK NASH WEST MIDLANDS AMBULANCE MEDIC
When we treat a lad with stab wounds I think ‘That could be my son’. It does affect you emotionally DR MARK NASH AMBULANCE DOC
as streams of his blood stain the streets. It may not sound life-threatening but Mark says a wound on the leg can be just as fatal as the chest.
It would be easy to dismiss all knifecrimes as gang-related. But it’s not so simple. Mark says the availability of sharp instruments as weapons and the underestimation of their power makes the issue so widespread.
“Recently we were called to a fatal incident after an altercation where the stab wound to the chest was only a centimetre wide,” Mark tells me over the loud whir of sirens. “People think, ‘Well, if I wound someone I might be a bit more macho, it might give me some bravado.’”
Despite the astonishing rise of knife crime in London, the West Midlands is facing a very real crisis of its own.
The Home Office confirmed last year that the region has seen the biggest spike in knife crime outside of the capital, with the number of incidents increasing by more than 1,000 year-on-year since 2014.
And for the doctors and paramedics who treat the victims, it’s an epidemic of violence they are all too aware could reach their own families.
As a dad of three teenage boys, Mark says he worries about the prevalence of knife crime among younger generations. “Of course, I do think when we are sent out to treat an 18-year-old lad with stab wounds, ‘That could be my son’.”
And it’s easy to see why. Deaths among teenagers and younger children have reached a 40-year high in the region, with more per head in the West Midlands police area than in London last year, with up to 280 kniferelated offences a month.
The last teenager to be killed in the region was Jaydon Washington James, from Coventry, who was stabbed two weeks before his 16th birthday.
Recorded offences with blades in general were up 6% in a year in 2018, as the West Midlands murder rate hit a 10-year high. Already in 2019, 34-year-old Stuart Roe was stabbed to death on a street in Halesowen, in the Black Country.
West Midlands Police is trying its best to tackle the problem, despite facing cuts of £175million since 2010.
One of the most shocking knife crimes in the region from the past year was the killing of Mylee Billingham, 8, whose dad William stabbed her to death in his home near Walsall after flying into a rage when her mother started a new same-sex relationship.
Mark says: “You get a call in like that and you think, ‘Why would anyone do that?’, but you can’t rationalise it. Bad things happen to good people.”
But for Robert, who is a dad of two young children, and Mark there is no obvious solution to the problem.
He pauses for moment before his radio starts buzzing again with his next call-out, adding optimistically: “Hopefully there will be a sea change.”
Who knows how many more deaths the region will face before that sea change takes place.