Police rely on donated kit to combat surge in knife crime
Cash-strapped London force given torches and metal detectors after campaign by local man
POLICE in London have been using weapon-detecting equipment that a member of the public bought from Amazon and donated to them, The Daily Telegraph understands.
Mark Webb, 49, from Camberwell, has raised almost £1,000 in the form of donations and cash over the past few years to buy kit for his local police team to track down arms that gang members have hidden.
A deadly outbreak of violence in the south London neighbourhood – the latest incident of which saw four teenage boys stabbed on Thursday – has left residents terrified.
Mr Webb says officers lack adequate funding to buy the resources they need to remove weapons from the streets.
“I was doing weapons sweeps with the police and they didn’t have any metal detectors or equipment that would be helpful, such as powerful torches and inspection mirrors,” he says. So he started asking various public bodies to finance them, including the local council. Their response he summarises as: “There’s no funding. Try asking next year.”
Instead, he set to work. “I created a package explaining what was going on in the area, what was needed and that the police didn’t have the money for it.”
He sent it out to businesses, including the Co-op, which donated almost £330 to the cause. Using these funds, Mr Webb says, “I bought equipment off Amazon and gave it to the police.”
He then continued to fire off letters to organisations and individuals he hoped might be able to help, including Ray Mears, the TV presenter, whom he says stepped in to provide torches.
Heinnie Hayes, a retailer who sells outdoor apparel, also contributed powerful torches.
“The moment you step into the undergrowth and start looking for stuff, it’s pitch black in there,” he says, explaining why the torches are needed.
“In the past two years, they’ve found samurai swords, combat knives, kitchen knives and sawn-off shotguns stashed around the back of light junction boxes, in lifts, bushes, drain pipes. If you can think of somewhere to hide it, they’ll hide it there.
“They’ll bury a knife up to the hilt in the ground, go over and do a drug deal, then come back and recover it. Sometimes it’s not a knife but five or six screwdrivers. I once found eight very large kitchen knives in a carrier bag at the entrance to the Peabody Camberwell Green Estate.”
The Metropolitan Police declined to comment on accepting donations from a member of the public.
The donations of equipoment were revealed amid the fallout of the latest outbreak of violence in Camberwell.
The incident, reported just before 5.30pm on Thursday, left one teenage boy in a critical condition and another seriously ill. Two others were also taken to hospital with knife wounds. All were aged either 15 or 16.
Witness reports of the scene on the Elmington Estate were gruesome: one of the victims was seen “holding his belly and all of his intestines were falling on the ground”. Another reported seeing “lots of blood” on the ground and a “massive” knife lying on the floor.
Six teenage boys were arrested on suspicion of violent disorder and grievous bodily harm.
Last night they were released on bail. Five were released without charge, while one, a 15-year-old boy, has been charged with possessing a blade and cannabis, Scotland Yard said.
The attacks came just weeks after the latest killing in the stretch referred to as “London’s new murder mile”. Little more than half a mile away in Warham Street, Siddique Kamara, a 23-year-old father of one, was stabbed to death as he stood in the street with his friends at the beginning of August.
Three months earlier, in May, his friend Rhyhiem Ainsworth-barton had been gunned down and killed on the same road. Both had performed with Moscow 17, a drill rap outfit.
In three years, there have been almost a dozen murders and attempted murders in the neighbouring areas of
‘They didn’t have any metal detectors or equipment, such as powerful torches and inspection mirrors’
Camberwell, Peckham and Kennington. Some blame a lack of local facilities and spaces for young people to hang out in for the gang activity and violence.
Others suggest a lack of purpose or prospects is partly responsible, coupled with family breakdowns or otherwise dysfunctional home lives.
The appeal of gang life to young people with nowhere else to turn can be strong. But, as Mr Webb knows, once they start carrying knives, the risk of a blade being used against them inevitably multiplies greatly. “It’s just young lives being wasted,” he says.