The deaths of Jodie and Yousef cannot be in vain
My son was heading for Manchester at the weekend, and I sent him off with even more dire warnings than usual. “Don’t get in a fight, OK? Hand over your phone. No… just run.” He responded to my obvious anxiety with the testy impatience of any teenage boy who knows for a fact that a) mothers are annoying, and b) he is immortal.
What’s the point? What’s the point of telling him not to get into a fight? You don’t need a fight to get killed anymore.
Jodie Chesney didn’t provoke anyone. The 17-year-old, pictured, was just sitting in a playground with her boyfriend when she was stabbed in the back. Horrifyingly, there doesn’t even seem to be a motive. There is speculation it was an initiation, a macabre audition for gang membership by two youths who were seen fleeing the scene. How are we supposed to protect our children against such motiveless malignity?
Jodie was a good kid, a bit old-fashioned even. In November, she was pictured standing smartly to attention at the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall. A tearful friend called her “the nicest, loveliest, kindest person you could meet”.
The same applied to Yousef Makki, another 17-yearold, who was knifed to death on Saturday. Manchester
Grammar School described Yousef as a “dearly loved, incredibly bright pupil”. How did a lad who wanted to be a heart surgeon end up bleeding to death in a Cheshire suburb? He should have been the doctor, not the casualty.
Critics have pointed out that it shouldn’t take the deaths of a white girl and a private school student to get the Government to respond urgently to a youth knife-crime epidemic. But their deaths did cross a line. If Jodie and Yousef are victims, then no teenager can be considered safe.
The statistics are deafening. According to a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Knife Crisis: Young, Armed and Dangerous, the NHS has seen a
93 per cent rise in 16-year-olds being treated for stab wounds in the last five years, a third up in the last two years.
As one copper said on Twitter, it’s high time that knives were upgraded from “offensive” to lethal weapons.
Despite what Theresa May claims, it’s quite easy to pinpoint one reason for this unfolding national tragedy. Back in 2010, the then home secretary capitulated to civil rights campaigners and dropped plans to bring back stop-andsearch laws.
How many young lives have been lost because she bowed down to political correctness instead of taking a tough, dare I say it, Conservative line on law and order? Lord Hogan-howe, the documentary’s presenter and former Met Police commissioner, says it’s high time someone got a grip and called for deprived areas to be “flooded” with 20,000 new police officers.
But, as I reported last week, police recruitment is now more concerned with diversity than finding people who can scare the lawless. That needs to change – and fast.
Let the deaths of Jodie Chesney and Yousef Makki not be in vain. The fightback for the good kids needs to start now.