He says it another three or four times, until two of the younger kids set on him. The older boy and one of the larger kids have locked arms together as they grab each other's tracksuit tops.
They're both getting in hits to the head as they keep each other standing. The one with the bat is dancing around them, desperately swinging the bat again and again against the older lad's arms and skull.
A girl starts screaming and the older kid rips himself free and runs away.
There's an argument now between the woman who screamed at them to stop and the kids with the bat. She tells them they only used a bat because they knew they wouldn't beat him in a fight: 'Yous'll get fucked up when he comes back for yus.'
A minute later the street is quiet again. Everyone has walked off.
We watched this through the living room window of a terraced house in Liverpool last Sunday afternoon. It's a student house, but it's not in a particularly bad area. We stepped outside when we heard the noise, and when I looked down the street there were two or three other people stood on their doorsteps.
I'd have thought twice about watching them or going outside if it were adults, but these were young kids, and none of us wanted to watch a kid get his head split open on the street outside.
Last week, Gordon Brown held a meeting to organise the governmental reaction to the recent spate of knife crimes amongst teenagers. Only 16 MP's attended, and the culmination of that meeting was a statement. It was a statement quickly dismissed as 'gesture politics' by the former head of the Youth Justice Board incidentally.
Brown said that youths would be treated more harshly than previously by police officers if found with a knife, and could expect to end up in court.
Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers and also in attendance at the meeting, specified the new police guidances more clearly than Brown. From now on, officers will use common sense in every search, but will be less inclined to issue cautions when knives are found.
A youth will face a charge, even with no previous convictions or aggravating factors.
The meeting coincided with the introduction of a national advertising campaign aimed at deterring youths to carry knives. The message is that those who carry knives are themselves more likely to be hurt and killed in knife attacks.
With this logic, if you are a country with the capacity to engineer nuclear bombs, you are more likely to be attacked by a nuclear bomb from a country with similar nuclear bomb- engineering abilities. It does make a lot of sense.
The Cold war was balanced for decades on this premise of irrational counter- thinking. Likewise Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan represent the modern- day, global examples of how carrying a weapon for protection puts you at risk from being hurt by the very possession of that weapon.
The psychology is straightforward: no- one wants to turn up to a gun fight with a catapult.
The youth that doesn't carry a knife gets mugged or beaten, and loses his possessions, or the confrontation itself. The youth that carries his knife with him is challenged, pulls his knife from his pocket, and one of a lot of things may happen in those tense seconds.
One: ideally for the victim, the attacker flees, and the victim walks away.
Two: the attacker, or attackers, wrestles the knife from him, and he is robbed and possibly hurt by his own knife. The victim could also use the knife on his attacker, forcing the consequences of carrying a knife upon himself.
Three: the aggressor pulls out a bigger knife, or another weapon, or someone sneaks up behind him and hits him, or he falls over, or he is challenged to use it, or someone jumps between them, or the police arrive, and so on.
These situations are based on the assumption that the youth is carrying the knife passively; there is no known vendetta against him, or that he himself has no issue against anyone else. He's carrying it in case he's mugged, or attacked, or walking through an area he's scared of, and amongst these kids, the new threat from Brown to prosecute kids with knives may deter many from leaving the house with a blade.
These aren't the youths needing to be targeted though. At some point in childhood, many children develop a fascination with knives, or fire, or ninja stars (I'm imagining my childhood friends here).
They may all be easily accessible in the house- including ninja stars, incidentally- and a few kids may take it too far, bring them to school one day, and get excluded.
But these youths, and the ones with knives in their pockets in case they get mugged, aren't causing the real trouble.
It is the youths in the opening story that will provoke the cycle of violence that surrounds a fatality. The kids are fighting in the street, and one of them has the misguided presence of mind to realise that he cannot beat his enemy with his fists, so he carries a bat with him to attack him.
I doubt I'll see them again- I wasn't really concentrating, just watching the whole scene, so I can't know how it will continue to escalate, or even if it will.
But a boy willing to bring a weapon in the first place has already beaten through the psychological barrier of carrying and using weapons. When someone is intent on violence, as the kid we witnessed last Sunday was, any weapon is a danger.
He'll be fearful of retaliation, limited only by the imaginings of his own fear, and it may spur him to carry something smaller, better hidden, to protect himself.
The older boy may reason the same thing, or he may now be intent on violence as retaliation. He might also decide that a knife is necessary, to protect himself against this younger boy and his friends. The situation is a tightly- wound coil of fear and retaliation that really could end up with one of the youths seriously hurt, or dead, or in prison.
The majority of the recent attacks seem random, but all involve a situation where a youth is single- mindedly intent on violence, just like the kid with the bat was.
The last few I've heard occurred on a dancefloor, in a case of mistaken identity, outside a club, when friends tried to intervene in a separate fight, and in a bakery, when a youth told to leave attacked a customer.
The last case raises a point of capital significance that has not been addressed by the government and police. The teenager was slashed to death with a shard of glass that was broken in the shop seconds earlier. There was no weapon involved, only the intention to cause violence on anyone around. The teenager had been asked out of the shop for a fight by his attacker beforehand.
With a focus on knife crime, youths with vicious intent in their heart can continue to carry bats, scissors, screwdrivers, penny rolls, or use bottles or glasses in the vicinity to attack people. The police can't charge someone with a pair of scissors in their pocket unless there is cause for alarm, its the reason many muggers carry them instead of knives.
When I was a little younger, an acquaintance of mine was arrested for being abusive to a police officer. He had a beer bottle in his hand which was taken off him. After he was charged and released, he received a letter telling him that, at the guidance of the police, the offensive weapon had been 'destroyed', like it was a gun.
A beer bottle is just a container until someone intended or threatening violence wraps his hand around it. Similarly, a knife, a baseball bat, a screwdriver or a bundle of keys are all just objects comfortable in everyone's home, until they are picked up by someone with the intent to cause violence.
In Gordon Brown's proposal to prosecute those that carry knives, the attempt has been made to remove what his team has ascertained to be the cause of knife crime from the streets. But the actual cause of knife crime is not the number of knives on the street, its the number of people willing to use weapons, like the teenager with the bat.
An understanding as to why certain people are intent on violence when they leave the home should be addressed, but it'll be too difficult for a government to analyse something as psychologically variable as that, so they'll carry on with the adverts and the posturing.
With violent intention, there will nearly always be a weapon to hand, so the police shouldn't fight the number of weapons on the street.
Once again, like prostitution, like drugs and like alcohol, they have to investigate what's going on underneath it all, the inner motivation.
Knife crime will drop when the issues at the heart of street violence are addressed, if ever. Until then, expect more stories.
"I ain't got drugs and I ain't got a gat in my car,
there's a baseball bat in my car,
but I use that to play baseball or I play rounders."
-Wiley, People Don't Know
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