Will it ever end?

One evening, about two years ago, Gemma noticed something odd in her son’s bedroom. She couldn’t work out why her 16-year-old had two phones so, being a mother, she confiscated one.

That phone eventually rang, leading to the first time she was confronted with the truth about what her son had got himself into.

“I picked it up and said straight away ‘who’s this?’ They said they were a friend of Jerome’s.

“So I said: well, I know all his friends, so who is this?”

Gemma doesn’t remember exactly, but it was about this time in the short conversation when the voice on the other end of the phone said something along the lines of, “you better hand the phone over to your son or I’m going to come around and stab you”.

For Gemma and her son, this was just the beginning. When Bristol24/7 visited in the middle of the day in December last year, the blinds were down in all the windows of her house and her son had been taken to a safe place outside of the city after the latest incident.

Since discovering the phone, Gemma has found out her son was “running” for a drug dealer further up the chain.

In a topsy-turvy couple of years, she has seen him fall out of school, get threatened with a knife by the gang members who were having an increasing influence on him and even threaten her – leaving a knife stabbed in his bedroom wall with a note on it.

Jerome had fallen into a life delivering street-level deals of small quantities. But he was also caught up in the gangs which control most of the Class A drugs which come onto the streets of Bristol.

In last year’s police crackdown, it was runners like Jerome who were the principal targets for officers who swept through Easton and St Paul’s smashing through doors and arresting dozens in the dawn light.

There is “a roaring trade” in St Paul’s and Easton, in “the only city in England and Wales where supply is so overt”, says the barrister in his robes and wig as he opens the case at Bristol Crown Court just a few weeks after our visit to Gemma’s home.

“As Calais is well-known for quality wine at cheap prices, so are the relevant areas in St Paul’s and Easton for their stock of Class A drugs available for supply day and night of every day of every year.”

To rewind a little, the whole police operation started in early 2015 when Avon & Somerset Constabulary received a letter from community leaders to step in and stamp out what they saw on their doorsteps.

Just a couple of months later, Operation Tibia was launched with the bold aim to start the beginning of the end of the supply of drugs in St Paul’s and Easton.

By the spring, undercover officers were buying drugs in parks and on streets, collecting evidence of who was involved and where they were based.

The series of dawn raids came in October, and by January more than 60 people – some as young as 17 – were in prison for a total of 181 years.

But this isn’t the first time this has happened. And nor is it a stand-alone operation (there are separate operations for the higher level dealers and gang leaders).

This was a targeted approach to the small-fry dealers in a specific area which has been a magnet for drugs, drug dealers and drug addicts – and the anti-social behaviour that comes with it – for years.

On a still winter morning, Chris Mills, a former crack cocaine dealer who’s turned his life around to form Bristol Life Centre, a charity which helps youngsters find a way out of crime and gangs, drives his car slowly down Grosvenor Road.

“This is the scene that was most common to me, this whole road here,” he explains. “This is where I grew up. The Black and White Cafe was right there – the most notorious… whatever you want to call it,” he adds as we pass the colourful rows of houses, the graffiti and the house at number 27 where one of the most raided premises in the UK used to sit.

The cafe was home to the Aggi Crew who controlled a tight criminal network of drug distribution in the area until they were unceremoniously replaced by Jamaican Yardie gangs in the late 1990s.

It is a venue referenced numerous times in court a few weeks earlier, with the barrister stating that now “some think the area is returning to the era of that cafe”.

Having been involved with the Aggi Crew and now working as a mentor helping youngsters exit a life of crime, Chris is in a good position when he says things are different now.

But he also sees similarities – especially in the reasons why some of the youngsters he works with now are falling into a life similar to the one he once led.

“The court or the police may see one aspect of it – they are a criminal, yes justice needs to be done and needs to be served. But there’s also another side of it and when you get to see the other side – the family break-downs, the lack of love, the lack of belonging. All of that plays a major part.”

He reflects on the daily battles when he was growing up faced with drunken groups of racist white men who chased and assaulted him and his friends on their way back from school. There was also a culture of fear and segregation on the streets in the 1980s, the decade of the St Paul’s riots.

But he also talks of the family background and life at home. “Most of us coming from families that were broken and underprivileged, the things that we wanted we didn’t believe we could get.

“As a 17- or 18-year-old wanting to be successful and not knowing how, and then being presented with the idea that you are able to sell drugs and make money – well, I believe every person wants to be successful and be able to provide for their family.”

Chris says that drug dealing and gang culture may have given many of them the success they thought was impossible. But it came at the cost of violence.

“I see now how our violence we related to one another is freely being initiated between the younger folk. But now instead of fighting with fists, the first thing the kids are doing are grabbing knives and the extreme of that is they are grabbing guns,” he adds.

“This is why I do what I do, because I do see the pattern continuously being replayed in younger people’s lives and it’s sad.”

On a walk through St Paul’s earlier with Chris, we bumped into a friend of his, Dan, who, like Chris works with some of the youngsters caught up in today’s drugs and gang culture in St Paul’s and Easton which formed the focus of Operation Tibia.

Dan is a former crack cocaine addict who has turned his life around and now works as a mentor with some of the most challenging youngsters in the area.

We meet him again in the pouring rain near Cabot Circus where we take refuge in a car on Champion Square, between the glass-roofed shopping centre and a block of council flats.

Many – but not all – of the youngsters involved now, Dan says, have come from extremely underprivileged backgrounds and have grown up in some of the most deprived pockets of the city on estates in Lawrence Hill and in Easton.

In some extreme cases, new recruits are orphans, often victims of civil wars in places like Somalia. Some are refugees with little family support surrounded by and disenfranchised from a culture which is telling them they should be wearing the smart trainers and expensive clothes on sale in Cabot Circus.

“This generation is so money motivated,” Dan says. “Everything is about I, myself, you know what I mean? It’s about my expensive trainers, my phone, my iPad. That’s credit, that’s my status – if I’ve got that stuff, then I’m somebody; I’m successful.

“A lot of guys see it as escapism. They think ‘I don’t have to worry about school, I don’t have to worry about the system’.

“The problem is, they don’t see themselves making it in this society or this system, they can’t make it in the 9-5. But they can see themselves selling drugs.”

Despite the recent operation, Dan says gang culture is not as prevalent as before, pointing out that even the more notorious street gangs of recent years in Bristol – the Blood Gang and the High Street gang (made famous through their own court cases) – have all but fizzled out.

“No-one’s being groomed from generation to generation anymore. But instead it’s more fluid here. One person can be involved in two groups, for example. There’s not so much of a postcode barrier any more. That’s not to say there are not a lot of youngsters getting dragged into crime and street groups.”

For the mentor inside both Dan and Chris, news of Operation Tibia was shocking.

They both clearly condemn the actions of those found dealing drugs. But to see the people they are trying desperately on shoestring government funding to pull away from the magnetic gang lifestyles get locked up like that cut deep.

Chris calls prisons simply a “university of crime”. On our second meeting at the Docklands youth centre on City Road, which has been struggling to stay open with successive local and central government cuts, he says: “You go [to prison] and you learn how to become a more effective criminal. It happened to me, it happened to countless others around me.”

That day we talk briefly about the frantic time when he found out a handful of his mentees had been locked up and taken away.

“It’s sad and it hurts. At first I had a lot of sleepless nights because when you work with these kids they become part of you, their lives become part of your
life. You see everything that’s going on behind the scenes.”

But he adds: “I think a lot of it was predestined in a way because of the environment, because of the lack of resources within the community, because of the lack of help available.

“When this building we’re in now was closed down, I remember people saying to me ‘what are we going to do now?’ ‘Where are we going to go?’ Within weeks they were in trouble.”

Chris mentions his Boys to Men programme. Some of the boys involved were also caught up in the court case. “One of them, who has managed to get himself out – he hasn’t been arrested in other words – was involved in a lot of stuff and has now turned his life around.”

He now works full time as a plumber, he says. “That’s the dream, to see every young child in this community and out of this community have a fair chance at life and make proper, informed decisions.”

Returning to the same youth centre a couple of weeks later, we meet one of the people in charge, Delroy Hibbert.

Delroy was one of the people sitting at the community meeting almost a year ago who decided a letter must be written to police to ask for help with the street drug dealing issues. But he too is exasperated by the approach.

Greeting him at the front door, we walk past classrooms for pupils referred out of mainstream education for their challenging behaviour and up two flights of stairs to an empty room.

Our chat is briefly interrupted twice by people coming to look around at the space which Delroy says he’s being forced to rent out as offices to keep the building open to the community.

Once we are finally left in peace, he gets straight to the point: “Of those 66 people (sent to prison in Operation Tibia), about 50 per cent were 25 and under, so it was quite upsetting seeing young people being caught up in this and ruining their lives at such a young age.”

Delroy estimates that the 181 years in prison will cost the taxpayer about £9 million. “That’s millions that’s been spent on addressing this issue,” he says. “Well, I can tell you that on my way here this morning I passed someone who was looking to buy drugs.

“There are still drugs being sold, because that operation didn’t attack the demand, it attacked the supply.

“There is a better way. Prevention is not only better than cure, it’s actually a lot cheaper than cure. There isn’t a strategy to tackle the gang issues that happen in St Paul’s and Easton, kids are still struggling at schools.

“Even when people are coming out of prison they’re struggling to get on the straight and narrow, struggling to access housing and there’s a lot more that society can do.

“Yes, I don’t condone what happened – going around selling heroin and crack outside schools – but we need to look at how much society prevents that happening, how much society stops the demand for drugs.”

He says the cuts here are all part of a “widespread” failure in education, training and local and national government which is “narrowing opportunities”.

After waiting for weeks to pin him down for an interview, we finally catch up with Chris Green, the neighbourhood sergeant for Easton, a man who knows some of the youngsters caught up in the Operation Tibia case well.

We meet at Trinity Road police station where we jump in a police van to spend the morning drifting around the area, picking out the problem spots and talking candidly about the case and his job.

“A lot of us have watched those people grow up. In fact, a lot of those people who’ve been convicted [in Operation Tibia] are people I’ve had conversations with or my colleagues have had conversations with and we’ve said to them at some point ‘your luck’s going to run out and you’re going to get caught’.”

Chris talks at length about the cycle and the never-ending problems which come and go – the old-fashioned policeman in him even admits he felt “gutted” for some of the youngsters who ended up in prison, having seen them grow up and lost them to the gangs in the area.

But he says, looking back over his career, he has never seen the police on the front line work so hard to get to the root causes – identifying troubled kids early and helping them find opportunities to exit a life of crime.

“Where we identify now people who might be on the periphery of gang activity or drug dealing, we can get in there and make referrals and break the cycle because actually that revolving door of the criminal justice system isn’t going to work,” he admits.

Chris talks about the extra work he does going into family homes of known young dealers and sitting down with parents to help them divert their children away from crime, drugs and gangs.

“Sometimes I sit in people’s front rooms where they’ve got teenage sons and I often say to myself ‘is it the job of the local policing team to sit and tell them that they suspect that someone’s 15-year-old son is selling crack and heroin?’

“Well, I don’t know, but what I do know is that if the parents have that knowledge and we try and empower them to have some kind of control over their children then we can say that we’ve done everything and we’ve delivered that message.”

On our drive around we talk about the users too and Chris spots a few known to him, stops to chat with them and sends them out of the neighbourhood. He knows who they are and often where they are going. He drives us past the alleys and children’s playground – one notable one off Bannerman Road – commonly used to sell heroin and to inject it, needles often seen discarded next to the swings.

One thing Operation Tibia did do was identify more of these places and as a result increased foot patrols around the areas and introduce CCTV. Chris says it’s estimated that some 3,000 drug users access this area, and it’s the community that has to put up with the ills that come with it.

We return to the prison sentences for a moment and the approach of locking up the street-level dealers. “76 arrests and 180 years prison? That’s nothing to aspire to,” Chris says.

“But even though I talk about diversion and identifying people that should exit the lifestyle, when we’ve got evidence of people dealing drugs in the street and ruining their communities then we should continue with enforcement, because that’s never going to be acceptable and I don’t think it’s acceptable to the public either.”

Clinton Wilson, known as King Aggi, former head of the Aggi Crew, is cautious about police and even some social workers thinking they can talk some of the youngsters around.

“People say ‘oh you should do this and you should do that’,” he tells Bristol24/7 as we meet in the park behind Portland Square a few minutes’ walk away from the old Black and White Cafe.

“But [they] don’t know shit because they ain’t been there. [They don’t know that] he’s scared and he walks with his knife because he’s gonna get rushed.

“There are ways out. As you get older you find that out, but when you’re young you don’t see none of that.

“The only people you see that are maybe finding a little way out is drug dealers with nice cars that look like they’re finding their way out.”

Now a rapper, he talks about whether prison sentences are the answer: “You take away their life, you take them away at 18 or 19 years old or whatever, but when you send them back out there at 25 or 26, they’re lost. All they know is what they knew before.”

Turning to the recent police operation, he adds: “Sometimes it depends on which side you’re taking away. You take away these Easton boys or, you know, you take away these [St] Paul’s guys.

“It’s rare you take away both at the same time. You weaken St Paul’s, you make the Easton guys get all bright and they come and take five or six out of Easton and they make the St Paul’s guys get bright.”

In his mind – and in Chris Mills’ mind, who is standing opposite him – what should be done is simple: less locking up, more money for the community in St Paul’s and Easton to work with the youngsters from a young age.

“Understand this thing: this is the best area in Bristol,” Clinton says proudly. “I’m not hyping it because I come from here; it is the best area in Bristol.

“But mums here don’t want no shootings and all this and all that, drugs selling outside where kids are playing in this park. You understand?

“Nobody doesn’t want that. There ain’t no-one ‘round here promoting it, it’s just a struggle and for the youths this is their main teaching – more than school and more than anything.

“I just think more gotta be done for them. We’re not doing enough and we’re going to wait until it turns into a real, real battle and people are dying every week and they’ll start looking for people and saying ‘oh, how can we sort this out?’

“It’s too late, mate.”

Back at Gemma’s house, as we sit in the living room with the blinds pulled down, she tries to remember what happened after she picked up that first telephone call on her son’s second phone.

“I called the police straight after and they came round. He was taken out of the city for his own safety, my younger children were taken away and a red flag was put on this house.

“When I spoke to the police I was given a lot of information about who these people may be and what they are capable of – what sort of life they lead. Before that I didn’t have any idea. And I kind of wish I still had no idea,” she adds with a nervous laugh.

We talk for a while more about her struggle to understand why her son has got into what he has. We talk about her anxiety every time he leaves the house now and her worry that this latest incident, which has seen him taken out of town again for his own safety, will happen again.

How does she see the future for her boy panning out? Gemma pauses and looks at the floor before turning her head back up. “I think you always have to have hope, so I’m going to hold onto hope,” she says as another nervous laugh escapes. “But…” she begins, before stopping, reserving herself as our interview comes to an end.

Gemma, Jerome and Dan have all had their real names changed to protect their identity. Gemma and Jerome are supported by Catch 22, a charity working with young people caught up in gangs. Pictures by Darren Shepherd and Sophie Nichols.

Extras:

Watch the Bristol24/7 documentary film, Crackdown, with extra interviews:

Hear the debate on drug regulation in Bristol. Click on the image below:

See an interactive behind-the-scenes look at the police raid which took place last October. Click on the image below: