The code of silence that destroys black lives

Say it loud: they're black and proud so proud they couldn't stand to be rejected by a young boy who just wanted a quiet life.

Another wasted black male, and more suffering families who cannot stop the evil marauders. Witnesses don't talk there, just as they don't in so many places in London.

We are often told that the problem is a lack of social cohesion. But what if the problem is too much community cohesion? Some in the black community don't talk to police because they are petrified of retribution; but others want to keep the problem between themselves.

The police and courts have no business interfering, they believe. And so it grows, the lethal culture, a multiplying virus infecting vast areas of our cities.

By way of proof, next Monday, BBC1's Panorama will tell the story of two other young black boys, Londoners who are irretrievably being sucked into gang violence, not because they are tough but because they are not, and cannot see any other way of surviving the inner-city jungle, their habitat. It is, as presenter Jeremy Vine intones, "a parallel universe few of us get to see". Yet we must, even though we are told to keep out.

The lauded American academic Robert Putnam says racial diversity wrecks civic bonds and a sense of belonging. Sometimes that can only be a very good thing.

Outsiders can break the codes of silence and conformity within communities where crimes are tolerated in the name of solidarity.

Near me there lives a smartlooking Glaswegian woman in her thirties. She is often seen with a young black boy, about 14 and edgy.

You notice them, an incongruous pair. I now find out that she is keeping him safe from a gang that wants him alive or dead the choice is his. His mum and the Glaswegian go to the same church and the black priest there made the arrangements. The child had to break free from his neighbours.

The Glaswegian decided she could do something.

By contrast, the police seem weary and fatalistic, as if there is no point in even trying. Perhaps they are too preoccupied with the other badlands enclaves breeding jihadi cells. That must partly explain the growing audacity of violent, urban posses and hard-drug dealers in the past five years in London.

Gang terror is as socially corrosive and devastating as Islamicist terror. To treat it as a lesser crime is to mock the victims and justice itself. But for the police to do better, these communities need to loosen their own bonds.

Tight cohesion can kill..