A London film-maker who risked her life to document gang culture has said more must be done to tackle street violence.
Penny Woolcock, who won the Achievement of the Year prize at last month’s Women in Film and TV awards, said most Londoners did not realise that they live near gang members and regularly cross “front lines” between rival groups.
She said it was a “tragedy and a disgrace” that this was happening in London. “I live in Angel and at the bottom of my road there is the N1 and the Cally Road boys,” she said. “This culture is right under our noses.
“In that environment, it is completely normal that, by the time you are 18, there are members of your family in jail, you know people who have been stabbed and shot and you have done these things yourself.
“It is a culture that has been allowed to run wild.”
During filming of her film 1 Day in 2009, about the postcode gang wars in Birmingham, Ms Woolcock was threatened with guns and police tried to make her show them her footage.
She filmed the city’s two notorious gangs — the Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew — and later helped introduce rival gang members to each other.
Her latest film, One Mile Away, which was shot over two years, showed how the violence between the gangs was reduced as a result.
She said the same approach of working directly with gang members should be followed in London and warned against charities which fail to engage with criminals. Ms Woolcock said she first decided to film gang life because of her experiences in London.
“I was living in Archway and there were little bunches of flowers where a kid had been stabbed or shot and I thought, ‘What is going on?’,” she said.
“Then I was robbed of my handbag in Tufnell Park. We both looked at each other and I thought, ‘What are we doing?’
“It was the combination of seeing young men dying over something I didn’t understand and the attack which made me want to do some work on it.”
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She said she agreed to work on One Mile Away because there was a chance that people would stop killing each other as a result. Since the film was released in 2012 there had been what Ms Woolcock tentatively described as a “fragile peace”.
The men who appeared in One Mile Away also run a mentoring scheme where they try to stop young people joining gangs.
She said: “You have to change the whole mindset. You can’t just say, ‘Stop fighting’, you have to replace it with something else.
“It is great that the Evening Standard is taking this seriously.”
