If you didn’t know already, iPhone and iPad users can download the London murder map app. It’s free and has a few technical advantages over the website version.
Firstly, it centres on your GPS location so you can see which cases happened near your position. You can also select cases by London borough, gender and nationality as well as by weapon.
At the moment there are more than 630 cases on the map, including the notorious murders of Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen, Lord Lucan and John Reginald Christie.
The launch of the new ‘Trident Gang Crime Command’ is being backed by the mother of murdered teenager Negus McLean.
Negus was 15 years old when he was stabbed to death by a gang of youths in Edmonton, north London, on April 10, 2011.
The case remains unsolved thanks to a ‘wall of silence’ preventing witnesses from coming forward to help police arrest the killers.
Ingrid Adams, Negus’ mother, said in an interview: “I go to bed thinking of Negus and wake up thinking about him. I will always remember his smile. Even if a child isn’t in a gang they probably know someone who is in a gang or is affiliated with a gang.
“The police need to start with children very early. When I was growing up the police used to come into my school. You have to start young and talk to them to gain their trust. I know there is a problem with so called snitching and loyalties. But keeping quiet isn’t helping the problem.
“There is this wall of silence that needs to be broken down. They need to come forward to talk to the police. The wall of silence needs to stop. Since Negus there has been so many others.
“Negus was murdered on a Sunday; it was a bright sunny day. It could happen to anybody. It is anybody this problem doesn’t just affect the poor, people from broken homes or gang members, it could happen to anyone.”
The Met police have 4800 ‘nominals’ and 435 gangs recorded on their gangs database and estimate that 250 are criminally active. They claim 62 of those are responsible for two thirds of gang-related offences.
Gang members are thought to be responsible for 17% of all personal robbery, 40% of ‘cash in transit’ and commercial robbery, 12% of residential burglary, 26% of aggravated burglary, 14% of rape, 22% of serious violence, 20% of stabbings and 50% of shootings.
It’s difficult to put a figure on exactly how many murders are ‘gang-related’ but there are several high-profile cases every year.
Take 2010 as an example: In April Agnes Sina-Inakoju, 18, was shot dead with a submachine gun by two members of the ‘London Fields’ gang (the same gang was responsible for the murder of 15 year-old Shaquille Smith in 2008). Nicholas Pearton was stabbed to death by members of the ‘Shanks and Guns’ gang in Sydenham in May 2010. Samuel Ogunro was shot dead on the orders of a member of the ‘Peckham Boys’ in June 2010. Zac Olumegbon was stabbed to death by members of the Brixton GAS gang in July 2010. Sylvester Akapalara, 17, was shot dead by members of the GAS gang in December 2010. The murders of Gulistan Subasi and Ezra Mills in March 2010, Michael Ofori in June 2010, Marvin Henry in October 2010 and Sylvester Senyah in November 2010 were also said to be carried out by members of London gangs.
According to the Met Police the new Trident Gang Crime Command will be made up of 1,000 officers.
In a statement, it said: “The new command will retain responsibility for the prevention and investigation of shootings, but will now work more closely with boroughs to proactively tackle gang crime.
“The new command will be enhanced with additional specialist resources from the MPS, including Operation Connect and the Serious and Organised Crime Command (SCD7). It will take responsibility for real time monitoring of gang activity across London and work with new ‘Grip and Pace’ centres to coordinate and task corporate resources, both overt and covert, quickly at the relevant places.”
The Trident Gang Crime Command also has a new logo:
The focus is on 19 ‘priority’ boroughs - Brent, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth, Merton, Camden, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham.
So far the reaction from the media has been overwhelmingly positive. What do you think?
There were 114 homicides in London in 2011 compared to 122 the previous year, according to our own list of cases. This continues the downward trend since 2003.
The good news continues when we break down the cases by weapon. What had started to look like an increase in fatal shootings went into reverse while fatal stabbings showed a slight increase.
Fewer teenagers were killed in 2011 than in the previous year (reduced from 19 to 15). This continues the progress made since the peak of 2007/8 and the headline cases of Ben Kinsella and Rob Knox. Clearly the next group to target is the 20-29 year olds.
The percentage of female victims also reduced slightly from 25 to 23 per cent from 2010. Here is an unnecessary pie chart.
The low total for 2011 had not looked possible in the first two months of the year with 13 homicides in January and 15 in February. The only other significant spike was in August, which was the month of the riots.
Finally here are the figures broken down by borough for the last four years. Newham and Hackney had ‘good’ years while only Lambeth broke into double figures.
Borough
2008
2009
2010
2011
Barking and Dagenham
1
3
4
1
Barnet
3
2
7
4
Bexley
3
3
0
4
Brent
11
4
5
4
Bromley
0
5
1
4
Camden
1
2
3
2
City of London
0
1
0
0
City of Westminster
4
4
4
1
Croydon
5
7
6
6
Ealing
5
4
4
7
Enfield
9
4
3
5
Greenwich
5
6
4
5
Hackney
5
7
7
2
Hammersmith and Fulham
1
1
3
4
Haringey
4
9
3
8
Harrow
1
5
3
0
Havering
0
1
0
1
Hillingdon
3
2
2
2
Hounslow
1
1
2
0
Islington
7
4
6
4
Kensington and Chelsea
0
1
0
0
Kingston
0
1
0
1
Lambeth
13
7
8
11
Lewisham
5
7
8
6
Merton
5
1
0
1
Newham
6
7
15
3
Redbridge
4
1
2
3
Richmond
0
0
0
0
Southwark
12
8
6
7
Sutton
3
3
3
1
Tower Hamlets
6
8
5
9
Waltham Forest
7
5
6
5
Wandsworth
4
6
2
3
Total
134
130
122
114
Note: The Metropolitan Police’s rolling 12 month tables give figures of 124 homicides for 2010 and 117 for 2011.
This gallery displays 14 murder victims from the year 2011 whose cases remain unsolved. Can you help?
Notes:
This gallery does not include the cases of Wlodzimierz Szymanski and Aaron McQueen-Williams.
Mr Szymanski, 59, was found dead with a broken neck at a house in Chandos Road, Willesden, on March 18, 2011. A woman was arrested on suspicion of murder but released with no further action following consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service.
Aaron McQueen-Williams, 23, died of head injuries after falling out of a car on the A40 in Ealing on May 26, 2011. Police classed his death as ‘unexplained.’
The Metropolitan Police have issued a list of 290 ‘undetected homicides’ going back to January 1999, following a Freedom of Information request.
When people talk of unsolved murders we tend to think of classic fictional mysteries or the crimes of fiendish killers like ‘Jack the Ripper’.
Deep down, of course, we realise that cases go unsolved every year – Suzy Lamplugh in 1986, Daniel Morgan in 1987 and until recently Stephen Lawrence in 1993. On top of that there are the names of victims who do not get as such mass media attention.
The Metropolitan Police do not use the term ‘unsolved’, preferring to call them ‘undetected’, and include all homicides (manslaughter and infanticide as well as murder). In their own definition:
‘Undetected’ could refer to Homicides which are currently being
investigated, ‘Cold Cases’ which are being reviewed prior to investigation by the Murder Review Group, Homicides where the main suspect has died, Homicides where the case was dropped subsequent to arrest and charge, Homicides where the case was lost at Court or Homicides where the defendant was released on appeal.
The Lawrence case goes to show that the police don’t give up just because they don’t have enough evidence to charge someone immediately. Appeals for information are often issued a year, two years or even ten years after the event. New witnesses could come forward at any time and even ‘closed’ files can be reopened for what is called a ‘cold case review.’
The list contains 290 names spanning those 13 years, an average of 22 a year. A few of the names are familiar – Suzy Lamplugh, who went missing in 1986, is listed for May 2000 (presumably because that was when police received information from the girlfriend of the prime suspect) – but most are not.
Some of the cases on the list will have changed from undetected to detected since September 2011 because suspects have been charged. These include Jordan Jackson and Layla Djemal-Northcott (2006) and David Anthony Scott (1999) as well as more recent cases.
Apart from that, the list does provide some interesting insights for the full years 1999 to 2010. The year with the most undetected homicides is 2001 (36) and the lowest 2009 (10). The figures for 2010 (22) and 2011 (24 between January 1 and September 13, 2011) are likely to decrease as investigations continue. The month with the most undetected homicides is January 2007 (6).
The ratio of men to women victims in homicide figure is usually around 4:1, and this is roughly repeated in the undetected figures, although there is a wide variation. In 2008 women represent over 30 per cent of the total undetected, while in 2010 it is less than 5 per cent.
It is also noticeable that Afro-Caribbeans form the largest group among the figures for ‘Ethnic appearance’ as determined by the police.
The table below compares the undetected to total homicides for the five years between 2006 and 2010. The detection rate of just over 92 per cent for 2009 represents the best year for the Met. Although 2010 represents a large increase, this figure would be expected to fall as police investigations continue.
Year Undetected Total Homicides Percentage
2006 24 172 13.95
2007 24 163 14.72
2008 16 155 10.32
2009 10 129 7.75
2010 22 124 17.74
Total 96 743 12.92
Or to put it another way:
Figures for the whole of 2011 haven’t been issued yet, but from our own database we believe the total number of homicides has further decreased to around 113 from 124 in 2010.
For 2011 we decided to look not just at the victims of homicide in London but also the defendants who have been arrested, charged and put on trial.
The year has seen several major convictions: the suspected serial killer John Sweeney was given a whole life sentence for two murders, seven teenagers were jailed for killing 16 year-old Nicholas Pearton and two gang members were convicted of shooting the 16 year-old schoolgirl Agnes Sina-Inakoju dead at a pizza shop.
More easily forgotten are the acquittals of nine men of the murder of 20 year-old David Cauchi Lechmere. Not guilty verdicts are for obvious reasons not given the prominence of guilty verdicts, unless it is a particularly notorious case.
So throughout the year we attempted to add each conviction or acquittal to a database in the hope that it might shed light on the workings of the justice system. The spreadsheet can be found via this link in Google Documents.
Now for the basics. There are 181 defendants, of which 174 were charged with murder and seven with manslaughter. But how did their cases end up? Here’s the obligatory pie chart.
Of the 174 defendants charged with murder, 37 ended up convicted of manslaughter (21 of those by pleading guilty), 14 were convicted of a lesser offence (not homicide) and 37 were acquitted of all charges (one was acquitted by reason of insanity). Three were found unfit to stand trial.
Only one of the seven defendants charged with manslaughter was acquitted (two pleaded guilty, four were convicted).
The punishment for murder is always a life sentence – the only variation is in the minimum term set by the judge before the defendant can apply for parole. The starting point for this minimum term is 15 years but it is increased depending on aggravating features such as the weapon used, the motive for the murder and the number of victims.
Disregarding those defendants who have not yet been sentenced, and the one defendant who was sentenced to a whole life term, the average minimum term appears to be just over 22 years and four months.
As for manslaughter, there are many more options. Three defendants were jailed for life with minimum terms of 20, 16 and 7 years. Four were given sentences of ‘imprisonment for public protection (IPP), which is similar to a life sentence but with a shorter minimum term. Twenty-four were given ‘determinate’ sentences of imprisonment (with release on parole after serving half), six were detained under the Mental Health Act and two walked free from court with suspended sentences (both were cases of ‘mercy killing’).
Another interesting statistic is that a quarter of all defendants were teenagers. The full breakdown is as follows:
More than two thirds of defendants knew the person they were accused of killing (129 vs 52). The figure of 52 ‘stranger’ murders also includes those cases where the defendant first met the victim on the day of the attack. The number of random stranger murders is far less.
The breakdown of how the defendants knew their victim is roughly illustrated by this pie chart.
Finally we looked at the length of time it took from the date of the offence to the date the verdict was announced, rounding up to the next month (i.e one month 14 days is recorded as two months).
Generally cases are resolved in about a year, but there are some that take much longer. This is usually because the killer has not been identified, as in the case of James Citro, who murdered Nijole Siskeviciene in 1998 but was not convicted until October 2011.
We also tried to monitor which cases were associated with alcohol use, drugs, mental health and suspected gang links. This tends to be much more subjective, although it was of interest that 48 of the 181 defendants were accused of murders that were said to have gang links (either the victim or the accused was suspected to be a member of a gang).
*Note:The ‘intereactive’ google charts did not display properly on wordpress so we’ve had to make do with the plain image.
A stab victim being flown from Ilford, east London, to the Royal London Hospital. Photo by David Levene
There are several possible explanations for the decrease in the murder rate in London over the last decade: longer sentences, better living standards, better policing and detective work, a decline in drug use, or perhaps just a greater respect for human life in general.
All have a part to play, but it is easy to overlook the role of emergency medicine in saving the lives of victims of serious assaults who would otherwise be added to the homicide statistics.
One of those survivors is Daniel Alaile, who was 16 when he was stabbed in the chest while making his way home from a birthday party in Beckton, east London, in January 2010.
The knife penetrated his left ventricle, causing massive internal bleeding. He had just ten minutes before his brain died of oxygen starvation.
Five miles away the London Air Ambulance took off from the top of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.
Within seconds of its arrival Daniel was undergoing a major operation called a thoracotomy, right there at the roadside. His chest was cut open, the damaged left ventricle was sewn up and his heart restarted using a shot of adrenaline.
Although he was left wheelchair bound as a result of a blood-clotting disorder, Daniel would give evidence at the Old Bailey 16 months later. It could easily have been a murder trial, rather than attempted murder.
That year, 2010, the Air Ambulance attended 1,981 incidents in total. They included 318 stabbings and 73 shootings. The crew performed 26 thoracotomies, an average of one a fortnight. They have already exceeded that for 2011.
Long-term success rates for those who undergo the procedure are running at 18 per cent – meaning four or five people survive what would otherwise be fatal injuries. In the context of roughly 120 murders last year (down from more than 200 in 2003) it is a small but not insignificant proportion.
Formed in 1989, the London Air Ambulance now seems like a prototype ‘Big Society’ venture. It is a registered charity and has to find £2.2m a year just to keep going, including sponsorship from Virgin, HSBC and local businesses as well as fundraising events.
It is also a pioneering enterprise. In 1993 it became the world’s first medical service to successfully carry out a thoracotomy at the scene of the attack. Based at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, the helicopter can attend a patient anywhere within the M25 within 15 minutes. That includes even crowded public spaces like Trafalgar Square or (as in the video below) the busy Euston Road.
The emergency services are also likely to benefit from medical improvements being developed in the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, as featured in the fascinating programme ‘Frontline Medicine’ on BBC 2 last month.
In some cases casualties are given more than 150 units of blood (the human body usually contains between 10 and 12 units) as well as blood plasma and clotting factors. As a result they are saving a quarter of those expected to die, compared to rates for civilians of around five per cent.
Soldiers are trained to take act quickly to help their injured squadmates by stopping blood loss as soon as possible and ensuring they get treatment within the so-called ‘Platinum Ten Minutes’ (better than the old-style ‘Golden Hour’).
While this isn’t directly applicable to the streets of London, clinical trials of new blood transfusion procedures are now underway in England and Wales, including at the Barts and The London Trauma Centre, which includes the London Air Ambulance (also known as The Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS)).
At the moment the helicopter cannot carry blood supplies because of regulations concerning tracking of supplies and their storage at the correct temperature. However this could soon change. The Barts and The London NHS Trust say they are ‘close’ to resolving the issues and should have good news in ‘the very near future.’
This would give victims of knife and gunshot injuries an even better chance of survival. And while it doesn’t solve the problem of people using knives and guns on the streets of London, it at least reduces the human cost of crime.
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Recommended reading:
The excellent website of the London Air Ambulance provides much more information on this vital service and how you can help raise money to keep it going.
Photographer David Levene spent eight months with the team as they responded to emergency situations across the capital. The Guardian featured 16 of his pictures, including the one above.
It means judges will use a 30 year starting point – rather than 15 – for deciding the minimum term to be served before parole.
This brings it in line with murders motivated by hostility towards race, religion and sexual orientation, as well as murder for gain, double murders, gun murders, murders of police or prison officers and murder with a sexual or sadistic motivation. By contrast, murders involving the use of knives brought to the scene attract 25 year starting points and the less serious cases remain at 15 years.
Of course this doesn’t mean that murderers of disabled and transgender victims have been getting away with half the sentences of other hate crime killers. Judges have the power to increase or decrease the minimum term based on the circumstances of the case, including the vulnerability of the victim. There also remains the fact that evidence is required to prove that the killing was aggravated by hostility based on the victim’s disability or gender. In some cases the reason for the murder remains unclear.
Some cases from the archives:
In September this year Leon Fyle, 23, was jailed for a minimum of 21 years for the the murder of transsexual Destiny Lauren. Fyle strangled her and took her mobile phone and jewellery after visiting her flat in Kentish Town in 2009.
The same month two men and a woman were given minimum terms of between 21, 20 and 18 years for the murder of Gemma Hayter in Warwickshire. She was abused for years before being tortured to death and dumped by the side of a railway line.
In 2007 James Hopkins, 42, was jailed for a minimum of 17 years for the murder of transsexual Robyn Browne. The judge found that he went there to steal her property, stabbed her nine times at her flat in Marylebone in 1997. The guidelines for minimum terms did not apply because the killing took place before 2003.
The murder of Kellie Telesford in Thornton Heath in 2007 remains unsolved. An 18 year-old man was charged with murder but was acquitted after a trial in 2008.
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For a run-down on how sentencing is decided in murder cases see our blog on Murder Law.
The murder of Danny O’Shea in east London last week has highlighted one particularly divisive issue – when can you classify a murder as racially aggravated?
There have been questions – particularly from what you might call ‘right wing organisations’ such as the BNP – as to what exactly distinguishes the murder of a black victim by a gang of white attackers from the murder of a white victim by a gang of black attackers.
While the mother of Danny O’Shea has explicitly stated that her son’s killing was not a racist murder, it is suggested that the mainstream media are all too happy to leap in with the term when whites are responsible. Similarly, it is claimed, they are often happy to use the term ‘honour killing’ when its application to a particular case is debatable.
a) at the time of the offence (or shortly before or after), the offender demonstrates to the victim hostility based on the victim’s membership (or presumed membership) of a racial or religious group, or
b) the offence is motivated wholly or partly by hostility towards members of a racial or religious group based on their membership (or presumed membership) of that group.
Demonstrating hostility is not defined by the Act. The ordinary dictionary definition of hostile includes simply being “unfriendly”. Proving this limb of the offence requires evidence of words or actions which show hostility toward the victim. However, this hostility may be totally unconnected with the “basic” offence which may have been committed for other, non-racially or religiously motivated reasons. For example, an assault which takes place because of an argument over a parking place, but where the offender then utters racial abuse to the victim of the assault would come within the scope of this part of section 28.
In practice, it usually requires strong racist language to be used in the course of the attack. The police have not revealed any detailed information about what was said or done during the attack on Danny O’Shea, and (more to the point) have in fact stated that ‘there is nothing to suggest Danny’s murder is racially aggravated‘.
This could change. Or it could not. Speculation on the limited facts available, in a bid to put forward a particular political point of view, is not particularly helpful given that the investigation is ongoing. An 18 year-old man is dead and the priority is to ensure his killer or killers are brought to justice.
The idea behind the 1981 Contempt of Court Act was pretty honourable. Everybody deserves a fair trial and to have their guilt decided by a jury rather than be convicted by the ‘Press’.
Since then it has come under increasing pressure from the right to freedom of expression, first in the printed media and more recently the internet, which allows anyone to bellow an opinion in complete ignorance of the Act.
At a time dominated by press misbehaviour and the Leveson Inquiry, perhaps this determination is to be admired, even if it isn’t possibly to prosecute every prejudicial tweet or blog. The hope is that the message goes out that a fair trial is paramount. Fair enough. Perhaps it would be a good thing if the Act was better known by the public.
But at its heart the Contempt of Court is based on a delusion that jurors begin a case equipped with entirely open minds. As if they were twelve virgins who must be carefully protected from the evil, perverted world outside.
Every fact they are given is carefully controlled. They are given access to some some pieces of information, but kept in ignorance of others. They are sent out of the room while the judge decides what they should or shouldn’t hear. They are told not to investigate the case themselves, or carry out research on the internet. They are told to decide a case based on the evidence presented, no matter how poorly or partially presented.
These instructions now take up ten minutes at the start of the case, and are usually rammed home again in summary at the end of each day.
The problem is that everybody in the court knows that it is a complete farce (or as one journalist put it, ‘a comfortable fiction‘). The jury almost certainly do go home and look the case up on the internet, or chat to their partners about it, or do a bit of research into a subject they felt wasn’t properly explained. They certainly talk about the case in small groups when not all twelve of them are present.
Where is the research showing this is disastrous for justice? The great miscarriages of justice have tended to be based on flawed police investigations and prosecutions rather than prejudicial reporting.
All this isn’t a necessarily a problem with the Contempt of Court Act. Rather it is a lurking flaw in the justice system itself. Jurors are not virgins, and neither should they be. It is accepted that they can bring their past experience to bear on a case, even if they are a lawyer or a doctor or a police officer (providing they haven’t been excluded from serving on the case for this reason). To this extent they are trusted to approach the case fairly.
So why can’t a jury be trusted to hear the arguments for and against the relevance of a piece of evidence, such as previous convictions? Why can’t the whole process be held in the open?
The argument is that without the Contempt of Court Act the powerful media would run rampant over the course of justice. But it seems a little absurd to trust juries only part of the way. We don’t try to balance juries with regard to gender, sexual persuasion, past experience or political orientation, so why do we pretend that we can protect them from the information and opinion bombarding them every second of every day?
There must be a better way. After all, the Contempt of Court Act came about as a result of the Sunday Times’ reporting of the thalidomide scandal when it was under injunction. Given that the trend is now towards more information, not less, perhaps it is time for the system to change with the times, rather than the other way round.
Fewer teenagers were killed in 2011 than in the previous year (reduced from 19 to 15). This continues the progress made since the peak of 2007/8 and the headline cases of Ben Kinsella and Rob Knox. Clearly the next group to target is the 20-29 year olds.
The percentage of female victims also reduced slightly from 25 to 23 per cent from 2010. Here is an unnecessary pie chart.
The low total for 2011 had not looked possible in the first two months of the year with 13 homicides in January and 15 in February. The only other significant spike was in August, which was the month of the riots.
Finally here are the figures broken down by borough for the last four years. Newham and Hackney had ‘good’ years while only Lambeth broke into double figures.
