By STEVEN DOWNES, Editor, Inside Croydon
The murder on Tuesday night in Thornton Heath has been reported as making Croydon the scene of more violent deaths in 2023 than any other London borough. There have been 11 killings in this borough this year.
Murder scene: the police searching Mayfield Crescent yesterday for evidence related to the latest killing
Yet the news of the latest Croydon murder did not even make it on to BBC London’s evening bulletin last night.
The Metropolitan Police’s own press office has not yet issued any official announcements via its online newsdesk.
Has murder in London become such a commonplace?
According to figures correct at the start of this week from the Metropolitan Police, of a total of 80 homicides in the capital in 2023, 16 of the victims have been in their teens. Of the teenagers, 14 died from stab wounds, two were shot.
After five Croydon teenagers were stabbed to death in 2021, giving the place the glib tabloid tag of “London’s knife crime capital”, there was some kind of self-congratulatory briefings going on at the end of 2022 simply because no teens had died before they got the vote. Thank goodness for small mercies…
There will be no such ill-judged claims of “success” with the usual round of annual summaries in 2023, it is easy to predict.
Efforts and resource have been made to try to address the problem. Though it is arguable that money has been misdirected and misspent. Croydon Council gave a Violence Reduction Unit job to a former Labour council leader with no experience in the subject. She didn’t last long at the cash-strapped, crisis-hit council, and as we notice daily, there’s been no noticeable reduction in violence, either.
In 2018, MOPAC, the Mayor of London’s policing committee, splashed the cash with a £750,000 grant to a single organisation in Croydon which had given itself the brief of community cohesion, forging some kind of engagement with the notoriously, institutionally racist Met, and reducing the tragedies.
The group has the support of Croydon Council and local MPs, even the Bishop of Croydon. But its expensively curated programme of Friday group chats and the occasion game of football between the police and local youth does not appear to have achieved much – apart from creating a well-paid job or two.
Recently, more modest grants of around £20,000 a time have been distributed to organisations in hot spot areas – the town centre, New Addington and Thornton Heath – effectively to create WhatsApp groups among the community and youth whose aim is to try to calm any civic unrest arising around flashpoints.
That’s it: policing by WhatsApp.
There was, entirely justifiably, a wholesale display of public grief after 15-year-old schoolgirl Elianne Andam was stabbed to death outside the Whitgift Centre at the end of September.
But for the others who have also suffered violent deaths in Croydon in 2023, there’s been less fuss made.
At the time of publication, the police had yet to name the 27-year-old man who was killed on Tuesday night.
Here are the names of other murder victims in this borough this year:
Tyrese Miller
Tyrese Miller, 22, who was shot in the chest in the early hours of April 4, his corpse found at the junction of Croydon Road and Beddington Lane, close to Mitcham Common.
Lucas Sutton, 22, was killed on May 23. He suffered two fatal stabs in the back after “an altercation in Mayo Road involving a number of black males who were later seen running away from the area”.
Sutton sought refuge in the nearby Pawsons Arms after the attack. Two teenagers, one of them too young to be named, were arrested and charged with murder and are expected to stand trial in 2024.
Ion Rado
Ion Rado, 46, was found dead in a car park in Crystal Palace on June 1. Homeless and vulnerable, he had received a fatal stab wound to his liver and was left for dead. A man has appeared in court charged with murder.
Felecia Cadore, 29, died in hospital five days after being stabbed at her home in Grenaby Avenue on June 9. It was reported that she had suffered cuts to the throat and wrists. A 22-year-old man appeared at the Old Bailey later that month charged with the murder.
Usmaan Mahmood, 20, was stabbed in broad daylight near Thornton Heath Rec on June 13. The police arrested and charged a 19-year-old with the murder.
Nelly Akomah
Nelly Akomah, 76, a church-going grandmother was found dead at her home in Thornton Heath on June 20. She died from injuries consistent with strangulation, after a bungled burglary by a local handyman, who was arrested with his girlfriend at Stansted Airport.
Bradley Hutchins
Bradley Hutchins, 20, died from stab wounds after a knife fight on North Walk, New Addington, on September 12. Hutchins and a 19-year-old, both stabbed, made their way to a nearby London Ambulance base. Despite receiving urgent medical assistance, Hutchins was pronounced dead on scene. Two men have been charged with the murder.
Elianne Andam, 15, was stabbed to death on her way to school on September 27. A 17-year-old boy has been charged with her murder and possession of a kitchen knife.
Mehak Sharma, 19, was found stabbed at a residential address on Ash Tree Way, Monks Orchard, on October 29. Sahil Sharma appeared in court the following week charged with her murder.
Justin Henry
Justin Henry, 34, was reported missing to police on October 16. He had last been seen on the CCTV of the McDonald’s drive-thru on London Road, Norbury at 9.50pm that evening.
His body was eventually found, three weeks later, in a car parked in a residents’ car park in Purley. Two men from Croydon have been charged in connection with the murder.
All very grim.
And these are only the fatalities in an increasingly violent, and armed, society, where scans of shoppers on Croydon high street discover individuals in possession of deadly crossbows.
Meanwhile those in Government, including policing minister Chris Philp, who long ago promised legislation to ban the sale of “zombie knives” and other horrendous weapons, have still failed to deliver. Perhaps it is not a priority for them. How many more lives need to be lost before they act?
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The figure of 80 killings for London as a whole is not just lower than previous years but very notably so. The average the past few years (before, after and during the pandemic) has been 120 ish. Granted we’ve still got ten days to go, but that is a remarkable change.
And yet Croydon is very much bucking the trend, the rate here almost triple the average for the city as a whole (~3 per 100,000 vs ~1 per 100,000). Is our borough being used as a dumping-ground for problems created elsewhere, or failing to deliver initiatives that have been effective elsewhere?