Transcription
How bad's crime in the area? "It's really bad, mate." I need to walk about with one of these. Man, look, it's what you need to walk about with to keep yourself safe, man. Kids are smoking crack cocaine, 14-year-olds and stabbing each other up. It's, it's, it's a scary place to live in.
How old are the takers of drugs? It's hard to say the ages, but like height, you just see it when you're walking past. You, you'll just see little kids, what, 10 years old? Yeah, yeah, roughly, roughly about that. R, yeah. They come around and stab me, stab me, stab me. I've been stabbed enough. Oh, oh no.
Cleveland, a relatively small area on the northeast coast of England, covering parts of Yorkshire, Durham, and Teeside. It's not just the River Tees which flows through the region, it's crime too. Crime rates across Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Stockton, and Redcar are the highest of anywhere in the country, and with violent offenses the biggest contributor. It's the most dangerous place in Britain. This is Great Britain, Great Britain. It's not a great, this is real Britannia. We're in Britain, the biggest town right in the heart of Cleveland and the UK's epicenter for criminal activity. New statistics show the rate of recorded crime across Cleveland Police stands at 141.5 per thousand people. That means over 14% of those here were the victim of crime in the last year. To put that into context, that's nearly 40% higher than London's Metropolitan Police and over 50% above the rate for England and Wales. And when you look closer, it's an even grimmer picture. The area has the highest rate of sexual offenses in the country, the second highest rates of knife crime, and the fourth worst rates for drug offenses.
On the ground here, you get an immediate sense of the huge challenges facing Cleveland. We were threatened by multiple people in broad daylight, and on the Hemlington estate in Middlesbrough, it didn't take long until crime came to us. I walk about with one of these, man. Look, it's what you need to walk about with to keep yourself safe, man. So you've got to constantly walk around with a knife, constantly walking about with a knife, man, just to keep myself safe, 'cause I could be walking down any alley, someone could come down and stab me, you know what I mean?
Do you have a knife as well? Um, he doesn't, 'cause he's with me, do you know what I mean? No, no, I don't need knives, you know what I mean? Have you ever had to use your knife? Plenty of times, mate. I'm not proud of it, like, but plenty of times. And what, like what situations have you got to use it? Well, just where people thinking they're bad than me, you know what I mean? Trying to give me smoke, and obviously I'm not just going to sit there and let it happen. I'm, I'm going to retaliate, you know what I mean? So just the same, if I see them, I'm doing the same thing to them, you know what I mean? I've stabbed about 20 people, man, swear.
And so you still think that's all right to do? Well, depends, if obviously I'm not just going to go about doing it to anyone. Obviously, if someone's going to do it to me, if I see them without them seeing me, I'm sneaking up on them and doing them in straight away. Not a problem. So what you doing now? Just out chilling, you know what I'm doing, man? What do you mean, like, do you deal or not? Yeah.
The brazenness of this encounter came as a shock. And once off camera, this man told us he doesn't sell the drugs himself, but has children running them for him. This kind of operation is not unusual, and now with technology, it's easier than ever for criminals to target youngsters. Crime isn't just limited to the streets anymore; increasingly, it's online. And within a few minutes, I was able to find drug dealers based in Middlesbrough advertising their products on popular social media sites. It's not just illicit drugs that they're selling; they say that within the touch of a button anyone can buy guns, knives, prescription medication, counterfeit money, and cloned credit cards.
But some locals are fighting back. Paul Harris and Davey Leopard have lived on Middlesbrough's Grove Hill estate their whole lives. They were fed up with seeing kids sucked into a life of crime and set up the UKAN project to help keep children off the street. Most of our friends have gone to prison; they've died, suicides. It's just, it's not the same that you speed on; it's all, it's all changed. And yeah, drugs has got a big part over it, but it's everywhere, isn't it? So for me now, as all I'm thinking, this is give these kids a better chance, don't go down the path we've gone down, this path, and get yourselves a trade, a job, you know, have a bit of future, better plans instead of ending up being drug dealers.
So what's the youngest sort of drug dealer that you've seen around this area? Without exaggerating, I'd say I'd stick with a 12-year-old dealing drugs. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's common. That you're looking at me, you're like, it's just, it's a shock. It's common, but why do you think all these stabbings are going on? It's all down to drugs and money and reputation these days. The kids, if he's in our estate, we're going to do them in this place now, is the kids just know to you. Their work is certainly proving popular for those involved. I absolutely love it. There's stuff for kids to do; there's Fortnite and there's football at the back, and then there's pool tables and there's air hockey and there's this football. Think it's good for all kids, gets them off the street.
Why is it so important for you? Because instead of playing out on, like, the streets and stuff, you get to play in a, um, protected center. Do you want, you like hot dogs? Yeah. Do you want a hot dog? Alfie's mum, Don, is one of the grateful parents who volunteer here every week, running arts and crafts, cooking hot food, and even manning the tuck shop. But with the local council facing the threat of bankruptcy, the center's future hangs in the balance. If they didn't have this, what would happen? Where would they be? What would they be up to? Not can't speak for all of them, but on the streets, probably tormenting neighbors, fighting on the streets. They'll be playing out in the dark, in the cold, nothing for them to do, really, you know, as a parent myself, I'll speak for myself. Go on then, go and play out if you want to go and play out, but then we worry where our kids are, the safety.
It's a sad reality that crime feels like a part of everyday life to some people here, just something they have to put up with and accept. I don't feel safe at all. I wouldn't dream of going out after, after dark. Prostitutes, drug addicts, the houses being broken into, no police presence. It's, uh, quite horrifying, really. It's horrible. I, I, I, I come with my partner, Paul Ed, for safety. I had some very dodgy experiences in the middle of the night. It's usually quite a lot of drugs, and when drugs are about and they're not legalized, there's an awful lot of crime. Absolutely shocking. Like, I lived on Canon Park, lived in, uh, Carlo Street, and every place I've lived I've been burgled. Come 4:00, soon it starts getting dusk, uh, I'm back in the house, so I don't trust the town no more.
And stories like this are all too common. Theft offenses account for the second biggest crime group in Cleveland, while shoplifting is worse here than anywhere else. Shoplifting has increased across England and Wales over the last 2 years, and, and the Northeast is the worst affected area in the country, where the fences are up by a third. Some retailers in Cleveland have had to install panic alarms for staff, and one shopkeeper in Middlesbrough has gone even further. I just take the phone away every night because, uh, at least if anybody comes in, uh, for a blag, at least they're not stealing the phone because the phone is not displayed. PES runs a phone shop on the town's notorious Parliament Road, but he's been targeted so heavily by thieves he's had to resort to extreme measures.
How many times were you burgled? Burgled about, I think it's about, uh, 9 times, first three years, seven times. So what I do now, I just protect myself with the razor wire, razor wire here on the main, main, main entrance. If anybody hits with their car or whatever, I just cover myself to nobody coming in. Then if anybody comes through the roof or anybody just, uh, cut the my wall coming inside or something like that, I protect from every single corner. Yeah, I mean, because I can't take the risk. Once what's happened, the guy coming in, take the phone from me and run away. After 3 days later, the same guy with other three friends come to outside my shop, they just call me, come outside, I want to talk to you. I just go out; he said, you want to buy this phone? My phone, sticker on, price on everything, pinched from my shop 3 days before, he wants to sell me, and they said to me, I know you're a clever guy, don't call the police, we know where you live. I'm scared, I'm scared.
What's causing all of these burglaries? Prostitutes is making the problem because they just get the money for drugs, and this area is most of them, most of them druggies, prostitutes outside my house. I said to them, I don't mind you do whatever you want to do, it's your business, but don't do it outside my house because my kids are outside my house, my kids are listening from the windows what they're talking about. People ask them how much you charge for the blow job. My daughter, 11 years old, she asked me, Dad, what does the mean, blow job? What did I give them as an answer?
Just moments later, we saw firsthand what he deals with on his doorstep: multiple sex workers lining this residential street not long after kids had left school for the day. Prostitution was also visible in broad daylight, but these women are themselves at risk. Just last year, Cleveland Police said they had helped 40 local sex workers in a campaign to reduce harm against them. Violent crime is Cleveland's biggest problem, and knife crime is at the heart of it, with multiple stabbings now a daily occurrence across England. We wanted to meet the people behind the statistics. We've spoken to three people whose lives have been changed forever: a victim, a perpetrator, and a bereaved mother.
When I got up, blood was just showing everywhere. I thought, I'm dead, and I just said, I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm dying, like, and I thought that was it. In Thornaby-on-Tees, we meet Gary Gil. Two years ago, on this very spot, he was targeted by three men in a brutal attack. Bang, bang, bang on the door. For oh my God, you can see they all got knives, making it clear like this is what we've come for. I said, put the weapons down, and I'll fight you, I'll fight you all, yeah, idiots. And so they pretended to put the weapons down and then moved around the back of me, so one of them came towards me, and I went for great to my world, so I've punched him, and his eyes have rolled, and then, and I've went to like move to towards him again, then I felt stabbed, stabbed from behind, and I'm trying to, um, get myself out, get myself out, and then stabbed, uh, stabbed again, then stabbing my leg, and I went like, oh, and I've got, got like ended up on the floor. Not for just cover yourself up, just cover yourself up, and they were just booting me and stamping on me, and I got stabbed a couple more times.
And in those two years since that's happened, do you think knife crime's getting better? In this, 14-year-old son has been arrested recently carrying a knife. Now I asked him, why, why you carrying the knife, son? And he said, Dad, well, I've got problems and people. I thought he's literally, and so with a knife is a normality, and because he knows that other people are going to be carrying them, it seems knife crime follows Gary around. That evening, we speak to the brother of his partner. Andrew spent 14 years behind bars for almost stabbing someone to death. I just, uh, went out on my own on a mad one. I used to, I used to carry a knife to protect myself, uh, basically, I've walked up and asked a man for a cigarette, and he told me no, so I asked him for all his money, and he started fighting with me, so, so unfortunately, he got stabbed up 11 times, and obviously I ran away, and I found out that he, he almost died.
How much do you regret your actions? Oh, mate, I want, I 100% regret my actions. I wish it never happened. However, I feel like the sentence I got was justified, and it completely turned my life around. What's your advice to anybody thinking of picking up a knife? Don't do it, 'cause you're stupid. Sorry for the language, if you're absolutely stupid, you know what I mean? And, and it's peer pressure at the end of the day. There's a lot of kids who are walking about with knives who probably don't want to, but they're there with their mates, and it's peer pressure, like, don't pick a knife up, don't be pressured into doing something that you don't want to do.
While Andrew seems remorseful, he now has the opportunity to change his life for the better, but not everyone is so lucky. As a cut through his windpipe, and the blood was just coming out, and there's an awful lot of blood there. Yeah. Barbara's son, Robert, was murdered just meters from his home when he was stabbed in the back with an ornamental samurai sword in 2003. Her tireless campaigning led to similar replica weapons being banned, but over 20 years on, the wounds of that day have never fully healed. The sword, um, went through his windpipe, went through the left chamber of his heart, cut through a vertebrae in his back, then it went through the man at order. I see a tube coming up to your heart, isn't this? He bled profusely in the street. That, that what I've just shown you was his blood. Can you imagine how I felt looking at that? I got to the hospital, I, I was hysterical, literally hysterical. I rang up first, I got a phone call, um, his partner had said he's gone, so I said, gone where, 'cause I didn't know where had happened, um, and I, so I rang back, I thought, what's going on here? And I was told by a receptionist that he had been discharged and he was on his way home. Then I got the phone call from his partner to say he's gone, so I rang me dad, I was, I was ped, and I walked that floor in my house for years, up and down, up and down, and with the agitation and the horror of it, um, I got to the hospital, and I screamed right from the entrance, this was the general, and I said to the receptionist, you told me he was on his way home, and he's laid on a slab out there dead. And people say, oh, well, you should have closure now. Closure, what closure, what, what do the main closure, 'cause I don't know, there is no closure. It goes on and on and on. That person was here that day, go. His father spoke to him on the phone a couple of hours later; he was dead. You can't get closure over that; it's human.
Stories like Barbara's that lay bare the challenges weighing heavy on the local community, but how do you bring about meaningful change? Whether it's violence, antisocial behavior, theft, or more, every person we spoke to said it all links back to drugs. How bad's drugs in the area? Drugs, right? Drugs, man, could be called Drugs, Crack City, Crack City, Smack City, swear. I know a lot of kids are with 14, 15, 16, who were smoking crack. Yeah, smoking crack, okay, before they're 16 years old. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's, I'm not even, that's not, I'm not even exaggerating, mate. That's how bad it's getting at the moment. That crack has, it's taken over; it's a pandemic with crack. Who's doing the robbing? Just, just druggies. So it's all drugs, all drugs, you stay arguing. I can, I could guarantee I'd spot a drug dealer even a working class; they all do it. It's not, it's not just law class people; it's everywhere.
References to drugs are everywhere here, with rows and rows of boarded-up buildings raided by police and the names of anyone who's snitched blasted on walls for all to see. Cleveland Police are trying to crack down on drugs in a series of specialist operations to root out gangs, but the sheer scale of the problem here is shocking. Just days before we arrived, a huge cannabis grow was raided at this former Middlesbrough pub, and while we were out filming, we heard of an even bigger discovery. The police face an ongoing battle with trying to control drugs in this area; as soon as they arrest somebody for growing drugs, another place will pop up to replace it. We've heard that Cleveland Police has raided a property in Hartlepool this morning, morning, and found £200,000 worth of cannabis plants, so we're going down there to take a look, 'cause you can smell it coming from the door, but you can't like, now the door's open, but if I was walking past it, would I necessarily know? One of the, the main things is how dangerous it is to a lot of these farms, 'cause they bypass the meter, so it's directly into the mains, and it's a major fire risk; if you live next door, you're at risk of your house going up. People don't realize that.
The police here face huge obstacles, but is it any wonder, with 14% fewer officers since 2010? In 2019, the force was put into special measures, the first ever to be rated inadequate across all areas, and despite these measures being lifted last year, people here still have concerns. Do you feel safe now in Cleveland? Not really, no, no. And the police are corrupt pieces of sh*t. Why do you think they're about to bring the Matrix up here, man? The Matrix police have come, The Matrix to come up here, 'cause Cleveland Police aren't doing the job, man. There's kids as young as 10-year-olds just doing little drop-offs with people; it happens, there's nothing you can do about it, 'cause you're not going to catch them, and there's not much help from your local services, so the police aren't really interested; Social Services aren't really interested. It's for the local community with all to step together to do things about it. Police don't do anything; that's why I'm being burgled seven times, nine times, you know what I mean?
One of the most important roles of journalism is to hold power to account, especially when it comes to public safety. Over the past three months, we made repeated requests to speak to Cleveland Police, but the force said it was too busy, despite having spoken to several media outlets just days before we arrived. The area's police and crime commissioner did agree to an interview. Steve Turner was chosen by vote, as in 2021, representing the Conservative Party. He's facing another election this year and was keen to say what he's done to improve things. What I promise the people is, and they deserve an efficient and effective police force, and that's what we're building here. So we look at the crime data by percentage of population, but when you look at the arrest data by percentage of population, we're the second-best force in the country for arrest data. We've got some of the best figures for arrest rates and conviction rates on crimes like shoplifting, on burglary, on knife crime, and those, the, that's the data we've got to look at as well. It's not just about reported incidents; we can talk about knife crime going up, but reported incidents of knife crime go up when we increase our stop and search, and we've increased stop and search by about 40% here in Cleveland to start to bring those figures down.
You've been in power for three years; why hasn't this happened sooner? You've got to understand how low the force was when we took, we were in a position where we were only just managing to respond to crime; we had no strategy, we had no clear direction. We were a force that wasn't recording crime properly and didn't understand our demand, and we understand that now, and we've managed to put the wheels back onto this, and we've built some really solid foundations, and we're now starting to read the benefit of that. What the public of Cleveland need to understand is we are not the violent place that's perpetrated in, in some of what you see in the, in the press. Yes, the statistics are high; we are a tough place to live and work; we're a tough place to place, and there's no getting away from that, and there's a lot of work still to be done, but for the vast majority of people, they don't see crime. A lot of the crime that's reported affects a very small amount of people, so it's not always about the crime you see; it's about what the police force are doing to keep us safe in other avenues as well.
Steve's naturally keen to defend his record and his hometown, but his words don't echo what we saw and heard from the local community. Yes, it's not everywhere, and it's worse in some places rather than others, but one way or another, criminality is visible here. Residents talk about it in a matter-of-fact way. If I was out about on my own, I would feel unsafe to be honest, 'cause there is a lot of crime in the area, and the scars it leaves behind are even on public display. Though it's true crime is on the way down, both locally and across the country, levels in Cleveland are proving stubborn, and it's an uphill battle for those that live here. What could the police do? What, how do you fix this? I don't know, I know no answer, because you tell me what I do more than this, only one thing left I do, bunker like a bomb-proof, nobody coming in. I've lived here all my life; I've seen it; I was brought up in it; I understand better than anybody the struggles people face here in Cleveland, and that's why I'm so passionate about doing something about it. The way they go about things is just case shut, the money up. I'm not, that's not the case; it's not about the money; they've got to put proper help in there; they've got to give proper support. Those who want to carry a knife, you can't stop them; they're going to carry a knife. The only way I think that there can anything can be done is to actually jail them; they're not, they're not getting jail time.