Comment: The night my street was turned into a crime zone

It's certainly a mixed area: one side of my road is large, handsome mid-Victorian terraced houses, the other low-rise council blocks.

Some of the council block is privately owned, some of the houses are housing association. Others are occupied by upper middle-class families.

There have been mini-crime waves over the past few years, when one halfgeneration of teenagers comes of carwindowsmashing age. And yes, there's the drug-dealing in the alleyway and the stolen and torched mopeds on the estate.

But as I say: this is the inner city, you accept these things.

However, when the lights began flashing along my road last night, and the crime scene tape began to be unwound, and I began to realise that a local kid had been stabbed to death within 20 yards of my front door, well, I have to say that my sense of the place where I live did become tangibly darker.

Because this wasn't a mixed homicide: this was the 21st teenager to be stabbed to death in London this year.

I don't think it's significant that it seems to have been black-on-black, I think the key factors are youth, material and spiritual poverty, and a terrible - almost nihilistic - anomie.

It's all very well being told crime rates are falling but it's difficult to hang onto that objectivity when police in white plastic overalls are up all night dusting your neighbour's car for fingerprints, and you have to be escorted out of the crime zone to take your kids to school.

There wasn't much neighbourly chat this morning: this wasn't like smashed car windows or stolen mopeds - this wasn't something anyone could make light of, and perhaps, on reflection, we shouldn't have made light of those either.