Criminals preying on London school pupils to deal drugs have influenced many to believe it is “normal” to carry a blade, a former gangster said today.
Junior Smart, who once went armed with a kitchen knife on south London streets, now does charity outreach work with young people across the capital.
The Southwark-born criminology PhD student was jailed for 12 years after being caught in possession of several kilos of crack cocaine.
After being freed he founded the Camberwell-based St Giles Trust SOS Project, which employs former offenders and serving prisoners to help hundreds of young people a year at risk of grooming by street gangs.
He said young Londoners are being groomed or “gassed up” by criminals who con them into believing “there’s a lot of money to be made in the drug game”.
His teaching techniques include dissecting how a cut they would get from dealing an ounce of crack is much less than they think.
Mr Smart said he regularly witnessed gang-influenced behaviour by pupils, some as young as eight, who had “normalised” the violent “lifestyle”.
He spoke out after Richard Taylor, whose 10-year-old son Damilola was stabbed to death with a broken bottle on a Peckham estate in 2000, last week warned that children were “roaming the streets with knives” and were un- afraid of the consequences.
Mr Smart told how at one school assembly a boy of 14 exhibited the clinical knife skills of a gang hitman.
The trust founder had asked teenagers to put on paper smocks and use marker pens to “stab” their classmates to demonstrate the damage a blade can do.
He said: “This kid was 14 but moved like a professional. If it was a knife in his hand he’d have killed the other kid.
“He was aiming for the kid’s heart, liver and lungs. It scared the life out of me.
Without the so-called protection of carrying a knife youngsters don’t feel safe going into some areas.
“Most of those we’re working with see it as a way of life — they’re desensitised to violence.”
