Full transcript: Jason Featherstone on London Real
0:00 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, and when the new year comes, I think of one thing, and that is my list of goals. Yes, this is the time of year where I try to write out my goals for the next year. I try to keep it simple. I recommend three, and I write these down and basically stick them up in my mirror, so every morning when I get up and brush my teeth I can take a look at them.
0:28 I’m a big fan of setting goals. I try to get all the people around me to set them and drive them crazy in doing so. I really recommend you do it. I think it’s a great way to push yourself and without setting goals it’s a really hard way to quantify any achievements. So a few tips if you want to do this.
0:49 What I find the most important thing about a goal is to make it quantifiable. And by that I mean to make it specific in what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it. So for example, a goal of I want to be rich isn’t one that you can really ever attain because it’s not specific and there’s no timeline. So a better goal would be I want to save 10,000 pounds in my bank account by September 30th. You know that’s a goal that you can basically be doing something every day in order to get to that goal. You could not be spending, you can be looking for new work, you could be working extra hours to try to get that promotion so you know that’s a good quantifiable goal. Another goal that’s not so great is I want to be fit. Again it’s very hard to actually to tell when you’ve actually achieved that so a better one would be say I want to bench press 100 kgs by June 30th and that way you know that every day you can be doing something you can be eating better that day you can be arranging a training partner that day or you can be lifting so it’s like you can always be something. I find that most people’s goals break up into the three things people think about the most which are relationships, health, and yes cash money.
2:04 So your goals don’t have to be broken down to those three but it’s something you might think about. So I highly recommend sitting down now with a piece of paper and sketching out three realistic but challenging goals for the year. You know you don’t even have to achieve them but I think but I think but trying to achieve them, I think, is just as important. And like our guest said last week, Derry Llewellyn Davis, the ultra marathoner, is like sometimes you have to do stuff to realize you don’t wanna do stuff.
2:36 So by actually even trying and maybe even failing at something, you realize that, oh, I wanna go in a different direction. So I highly encourage people to do that. This week on the show, we have Jason Featherstone, who works for an organization called Surviving Our Streets here in the UK. And it’s modeled after a movie that was very big last year called The Interrupters, which was shot in the south side of Chicago in some highly urban and very violent neighborhoods.
3:06 And it was about, the whole concept, it was like an award-winning movie at Cannes, was that you could go in and interrupt this cycle of violence that happens by putting people kind of from the streets. So ex-gang members, people growing up in the neighborhood could go in as non-police forces and basically calm these people down and break the cycle of violence that happens, and they’ve had some surprising amounts of success with this. And it’s quite impressive.
3:35 And what Jason’s trying to do is implement that here in the UK and in the prison system. So I hope you enjoy this show. We had so much to talk about because recently there’s been this gun violence in the United States and we talk about so many things, violence, gun violence, gang violence, you know, how can it be stopped? How did the police work with this? So it’s a very broad show. I think we probably need another show to even talk about those things.
4:02 So I hope you enjoy that. As usual, we’re sponsored by Onnit Labs. They are the makers of Alpha Brain, Shroom Tech Sport, and now Hemp Force Protein, which I have tried. It’s It’s a fantastic way to get some gluten free, dairy free, I think it’s everything free, even sweetener free for everyone trying to get on my case about staying off aspartame. It’s sweetened with stevia and it’s nice because it’s not an animal protein, it’s a hemp protein and it just sits much better in your body.
4:33 You can pick up that stuff, the Alpha Brain, the Shroom Tech, even the Bulletproof Coffee which I’ve bought but not tried yet and everything at onit.com. And when you’re checking out, type in London Real as the coupon code, get 10% off, and support the show. We’re also sponsored by Audible. So if you go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash London Real, you can get a free 30-day trial and a free audio book. I’ve just downloaded A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
5:03 I’m going old school on you folks. London is one of the cities. The other is Paris. So I thought I’d check that out and get a little audio action. I love listening to podcasts.
5:14 As you guys know, I listen to Rogan, I listen to Duncan Trussell. I love the church of what’s happening with Joey Coco Diaz, another guy who writes goals down. Joey Diaz is a big fan of goals. When he worked as a used card salesman, I think in Denver or Boulder, Colorado. One of the big things was to go in every morning and write down your goals.
5:33 The physical process of writing those down does something with the human brain where It gets you task oriented, but when I’m not listening to those podcasts, I like an audio book every now and then because it’s almost a little more serious, pushes my brains in different ways. I kind of relax with podcasts and try to educate with audio books. So you can get that. Of course, you can get any Robert Greene’s books, Mastery, 48 Laws of Power. It’s all good.
5:59 It’s all good. So there you go. Anyways, without any further ado, wishing you a kick-ass 2013, I think it’s going to be big. I got a good feeling about it. It’s got an unlucky number which always means that’s lucky for me because I don’t believe in any of that nonsense. I think it’s as lucky as you make it. So let’s make this year a big one. Get those goals. Write the three of them down. Man, send me a picture of those goals. Email it to us. Post it on Facebook.
6:25 I’d love to see what you guys got. I’m going to finish mine up here. And here’s Jason Featherstone from Surviving Our Streets and our guest host, MMA fighter Pete Irving. Very good to have Pete in on this show since violence is his business, you could say. And next week we’ve got Nick Gabriel back to tell you about his ayahuasca adventure in Peru.
6:46 It is a very intense episode. It was full on and it is the realest deal I think I’ve heard. It’s also I think one of our longest podcasts ever. So that’ll be next week. Until then, it’s about the journey.
7:20 This is London Real. I am your host, Brian Rose. My co-host today is Mr. Peter Irving, who is an MMA fighter and also a writer for Fighters Only magazine. You might have met Pete in August when he was our guest on the episode called The Warrior Poet.
7:36 And if you want to take a look at Pete’s beautiful face, you can go to our YouTube channel, which is LondonRealTV, and check out that episode. Pete’s also fighting, I think, this weekend in Russia. Is that right? That’s right. Yeah, I’m fighting in Moscow on Sunday.
7:50 That’s insane. Okay, should I make some Rocky references? Yeah, I’m just hoping I’m gonna be home in time for Christmas with my family. Okay, you got the beard going on as well Kind of rocky beard. Yeah, it’s been a preemptive insulation Okay, excellent. Well, thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Thank you. And our guest today is mr Jason Featherstone who is a trustee at Surviving our streets which is a violence prevention organization Focusing on the reduction and interruption of knife gun and gang violence That’s correct.
8:21 Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You know, we were trading emails the last couple of weeks, and what Jason says in his email is like one of the first things he’ll say is, I’ll be in prison today from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
8:34 You know, and I’m just like, you know, one thing I know is that I won’t be in prison, you know, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. But it was like, it was quite a wow, you know, that you’re really down, you know, you’re in the trenches, really. And I just wanted to know, if you could tell us, what is a good day for you for surviving on the streets, and what is a bad day? A bad day.
8:56 For you. All right, I’ll give you that answer with regards to the prison work that we do. A good day for me is when we’ve engaged, we’ve delivered a session, let’s say on Mondays we do a violence interruption program, where we have a number of young people that have been trained in mediation skills. And they’ve come from different walks of life, they’re at different stages in their development, and some are more ready to embrace change than others, so to speak.
9:29 And so a bad day for me is when I’ve gone in, and the engagement is perhaps lacking in the sense that they’re distracted, some of the guys have short attention spans, etc. And that does get me down, believe it or not, and I do take that to heart, I do take these things to heart. A good day for me, full engagement, and everyone’s on the ball, and we get good outcomes, you know, we’ve managed to do a couple of mediations, the guys are engaged, we are developing their progressing and that’s a good day for me.
10:09 How do you get respect from these kids because they must be sizing you up from like the minute you walk in the door? From the get go. Be honest, you know, don’t make out you ever more than you were, you know, be upfront. I find it always helps to share your experiences with them, be open and truthful. I find that if you go in just try and teach or lead or anything along those lines like sharing from your soul first, you’re in for a hard time, you know?
10:39 You need to build a rapport up, build the relationships up. So, yeah, that’s it. I mean, I grew up in Tottenham, North London, and I grew up around a lot of the issues that some of the young people in prison are currently facing or have faced in their past, and I will share those experiences, so. What’s the equivalent of Tottenham in New York City or Chicago, I know you’ve been to Chicago, is that like the south side of Chicago? If people want like a reference because I haven’t even been to Tottenham and I’ve lived in London for 10 years Well good well good starting point really because the riots of 2011, right?
11:14 They started off in Tottenham Tottenham’s history right and goes back further than that as well. Yeah, 85 is the first one, you know In terms of Chicago, where would it be? Englewood Okay, I don’t know if that tells me anything. What about LA? I don’t know. I don’t know LA too much much. I can’t say Compton or anything like that. That’s way out. Do you know what I mean?
11:36 Comparison to London. The violence is much lower than the US. Okay. I want to ask you about that later too. But if you had to roughly describe what Tottenham is like, how would you describe that neighborhood?
11:47 I would say for young people growing up in Tottenham, they’re facing an uphill struggle. The provisions are there for them, the opportunities, and their perceptions of what their reality is it’s quite it’s quite bleak you know so in in in that sense there is a high crime area there is a high incidence of violence in that area as well it’s one of the priority boroughs for gang gang violence but on the flip side there’s a warm side to it there’s a community side to it you know you’ve got a lot of people that are community orientated people will stop and talk with the neighbors on the streets and so forth, but I think with the deprivation in Tottenham right now, I think anywhere you’ve got high levels of deprivation, poverty, lack of opportunity, you’re gonna have issues.
12:41 So that’s one of the things that we’re looking to address with SOS. Is it a first generation immigrant community or like second generation? Where are people from? It’s actually one of the most diverse areas in London, I believe. Have you been there, Pete?
12:56 I haven’t talked yet, yeah, yeah, I haven’t spent much time. Yeah. But in terms of generation, for me personally, my grandfather came from Guyana, South America and that was in the 60s and my mother was born here, so that would be a third generation. And you grew up there? I grew up in Tonno.
13:18 And would you call the neighborhood worse now? I guess that’s all relative, what worse means, but is it tougher, a tougher neighborhood grow up and when you were young? I think the issues are more widespread and especially for the young people. When I was growing up in Tottenham there were like groups of young people that grouped together and such but it was more loose, it was more friends, it was more networks and pair groups etc. There was no real organisation or names for any groups or cliques or anything like that. I think of the last 10 years especially we’ve seen the formation of a lot of groups are identifying themselves with a territory with some some form of ranking. Is this the post court thing or is that?
13:57 Yeah, that is there in Tottenham as well. When you say Tottenham is the most Diverse area is that is that a source of detention or is that how relevant is it? I wouldn’t say that’s a source. So gangs don’t form based on ethnic identity. Some more.
14:12 You’ll get the Eastern European groups and Afro-Caribbean groups and then primarily African groups groups, Western, the Afro-Caribbean groups, et cetera. But I can’t say with the Eastern Europeans, they will group together with the Turkish guys. They’ll group together based on that. However, with the West Indian, the African groups, et cetera, it’s more diverse. I would say we get everyone in there, you know.
14:38 But are they second generation? Is that why? It’s difficult to say because I would say some are, but then you get guys have just Landed that they were born in different country and they’ve come, you know, you didn’t say the word gang You said the word group is that something that you try to I know language is probably so important in everything you do Yeah, do you do do you try not to use that word? I do I do because the connotations it has Use the word gang In the context of the word if you look at like say the American gangs We’ve got a lot more structure a lot more hierarchy and it’s formed with the sole purpose of of criminal activity and such.
15:16 With what we have here, we do have elements of that, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but it’s a lot more loose. Like if you go to any one of these areas that’s affected, north, south, east or west, and talk about gangs, the guys will say it’s a family, first and foremost, and that’s how they see it, they see it as the family, and it’s not, the vast majority of the young people that I deal with don’t like using the word gang. So they’re not, these groups aren’t hierarchical in the sense that, of the American model.
15:46 Yeah, well, it does exist. And what you’ll find in this field is very hard, it’s impossible to generalize. So I will never, if I do say something and I make a sweeping comment, it’s based on my personal experiences and my viewpoint, but it’s in no case indicative that this is the case all the way through. Now with the UK, it’s a lot looser. we have what you consider the youngest, which are the younger generation, like 14 and below, actually from 17 and under, potentially, but then you can get an individual who’s 17 and considers himself an older and young people will treat him as such.
16:21 And again, the other side is the oldest or the elders. And it’s funny that when I was growing up, I would consider an older someone in the 20s or that sort of thing, but now you’re an 18 year old guy saying, I’m an older, you know, I’m a boss, or whatever, you know. If you look in America with some of the gangs that we’ve had access to at Chicago, the structure is a lot more ingrained, you know, you’ve got your foot soldiers, your enforcers, your captains, your lieutenants, your ministers, and the king.
16:55 And we don’t necessarily have that. Is the U.S. activity more surrounding a business? I mean, a lot of those things you describe in Chicago are typically, I think, created around these high-rise buildings where they have these structures as far as drug-dealing and security, all that kind of thing. Is it more of a commercial enterprise, the quote-unquote group or gang in the States, as it is over here?
17:16 Not necessarily. Well, that’s the thing. I think it’s more structured out in the States for making money in a more widespread sense, and then they have the territorial issues and the rival issues and stuff like that. Not in the UK, what’s really disheartening, it’s bad anyway you look at it, but for the postcode issues, there’s no real ultimate aim or ultimate goal, it’s just we don’t like these guys from the other side or we don’t like this area for whatever reason.
17:45 There’s not a financial element in it? Oh no, definitely, there is, don’t get me wrong, but I would say America is a lot more focused on that, whereas we do have that here, obviously we’ve got the drug trades et cetera, the robberies and stuff, and you’ll have different groups that will have a bit more specialized, a specialized way of doing things. We have certain people that do certain things and such, but when you come to the youngsters, not so much. Yeah, they’re in the drug trade, but it’s hard to say either way, because there are some that do and some that don’t.
18:21 Does that make it easier or harder to combat? I was just going to say the very same thing. I would say harder, I would say a little bit harder, because if it’s over no other reason than you don’t like to sell the area, it’s a little bit more difficult. If it’s a business transaction, you can get people to focus on, go make some money. Do you know what I mean?
18:44 What’s the point of going and doing this? How are you going to make money? If it’s not making money, there’s no value in it, do you know what I mean? Whereas with some of the young people that I deal with, or the SOS deals with, I should This whole motive is the pagans, the rival gang members, et cetera, they call each other pagans that look between gangs and… Well, the other side is the pagans.
19:07 Yeah, the other side is the pagans. So it’s like… Like infidels? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Non-believers.
19:13 It’s kind of like a sense of belonging and hate and these kind of things fuel… There’s a quote from your website where you said, the greatest predictor of violent events are prior events. And it was just interesting just to say that it really all boils down to that. And there was this really famous movie called The Interrupters that came out one year ago or two years ago in the States. And it was filmed in Chicago and it was all about these people that went in and tried to interrupt this tragic cycle of violence.
19:41 And they were usually people from the streets, you know, that’s why they had this credibility and they could go up to the gang member they might have gone to school with or maybe they used to gangbang with in the past and say, just, you know, cool things down. It just seemed like this simple model, but they seem to have a lot of success with it. Yeah. And I know you spent some time in Chicago, so can you tell, am I explaining that right? Yeah.
20:01 Or can you tell us about that movie and the whole idea behind? Yeah, not sure. Interrupting. No, the Interruptors was a fantastic movie. It did come out last year.
20:08 It followed the lives of three violence interrupters from the Cease Fire Chicago Cure Violence program at Chicago. They’re called Violence Interrupters. Violence Interrupters. They’re people that are specially trained in high-risk conflict mediation skills, behavior change, theories, et cetera, and they’re there to interrupt the transmission of violence between person to person, or between groups. And yeah, it was a heart-wrenching film to watch.
20:37 I recommend everyone that gets an opportunity to see it, go and see it, it’s out there. And yeah, so basically, the premises, And this kind of, it’s a concept that can be used in any field, not just gang violence, et cetera. It’s like, if I was, let’s say, Brian, you’re a soldier, you just newly trained, you just had your basic training, et cetera, you’re just about to go into the front lines in Afghanistan, and you have the opportunity to speak to two people.
21:07 But you’re going to speak to one of them, yeah? One of them’s gonna be an academic, he studied war, he knows about the history of it, he knows the intricacies of it, knows everything. Or you can speak to a squadie that’s done two tours and you’ve got an hour to spend with them before you go onto the front line. Who are you going to want to speak to? Probably the latter.
21:27 Yeah, and that’s the premise. It’s almost like a non-alcoholic, someone’s never been an alcoholic before leading an alcoholic, anonymous session. People are going to be looking at thinking what do you know about it you know and that’s that’s one of the powers that the powerful ethos sorry that’s the powerful ethos with that model of credible messengers so you’ll find that the three violence and disruptors that maybe follows have come from the local communities that they serve and they have a name within the community for a particular way of standing that they’re stand-up people that the word is their bond if they say a thing they’re gonna do their best it what they’re gonna do the thing you know and from that reputation they’ve built they are able to engage people are likely to be involved in violence from their local communities and people are likely to open up to them and trust them because this is the thing within the within the community context you’re gonna have people that have lots of information they know what’s happening they know when troubles brewing when things are about to blow up and stuff like that and that information doesn’t necessarily get passed to the usual authorities that would deal with this sort of thing like the police services etc. Sorry to break your foot there but I’m just thinking just could you give us a sense of how these things manifest when you see it like trouble or violence what’s the extent of
22:56 The violence what what kind of violence we’re talking about what yeah how many people and what we’re talking about robberies or yeah it was an example in Chicago yeah Chicago and over here but Chicago first of all well I think a few months ago from Friday to Sunday they had 32 shootings in Chicago yeah Friday to Sunday how does that compare to to England so it blows us out of the water you know it’s completely blows us out of the water we have nothing like that you know excuse me so let’s say in Tottenham last year I believe there were two gun-related murders but what’s the sort of percentage wise or how many more I don’t know how many more people there are in in Chicago I would all right as far as I can remember there’s 2.9 million people in Chicago and we’re close to 7.9 I might be a little bit off but that’s about right so we’re more than double the population okay yeah with Chicago Chicago yeah I mean yeah I don’t even know how to describe live in Chicago for like a year and a half but the south side Chicago it’s just like man you really wouldn’t you wouldn’t go down there, unless you live down there, some of the high rise projects, which I don’t know if you’ve watched The Wire, but you can kind of see the economy is built around the low rise and high rises.
24:05 And a lot of those have been destroyed because they found that they can really ruin communities because the gangs control a lot of the entrance and exits, but in Chicago really takes it to another level. But what do you say to someone who said, it can’t be this simple, Jason, you can’t just tell someone to chill out and that stops all these vendettas and gang related pieces? Is it that easy or is it really that effective? It’s not easy. It’s not easy.
24:32 It’s effective but it’s not easy. Any vast majority of mediations are going to have people that blow up and there’s been a particular violation. A violation is just an agreement. Someone’s owed someone money, someone slept with the wrong girlfriend, really basic stuff like that. The vast majority of things that do tend to blow up into larger conflict between groups is interpersonal stuff.
24:56 Have got the historical issues between groups or gangs etc but you can have a case whereby yeah a guy likes a girl and he sees her with another group of guys and he won’t necessarily want to cause a scene over a girl but you make it his business to have a problem with this particular person over the next couple of weeks do you know what I mean and then it won’t it won’t be identified as an issue over a woman but these have a lot of these things start you know it It was interesting you mentioned the wire, because in Baltimore they’ve got one of the most successful replication sites from the Cure Violence Cease Fire Chicago model out there. Oh, really? And the gentleman, oh, he doesn’t like being called Mr. Barksdale, the boss in the wire.
25:45 The wire, Mr. Barksdale. Yeah. He’s the teacher, right? No.
25:50 Wait, Mr. Barksdale? He’s like the boss. What? The boss?
25:55 Oh, okay. Yeah, one of the one of the one of the main guys. Yeah, he was he was like the main guy He’s actually a varnish enropta with Baltimore. I really had the real box though Yeah, and they’re having phenomenal successes out there in one community. They reduced homicides by 50% Whilst they’ve been out there. So they’re having a real really really good success I mean like Pete says what’s an example like what’s a bread and butter of what they do?
26:16 Do they go into the community? Do they go to people’s houses? I mean how and is it dangerous for a VI to go into these situations? Um It can be. I think over the years, they’ve had a number of VIs that have been shot, but as far as I’m aware, none of them were targeted. It was all crossfire during a mediation, you know?
26:38 Is this in America or Chicago? This is in Chicago. Right. This is in Chicago. So a typical situation, I can give you… Let me see if I can give you one. All right. So we’ll become aware that someone… This is in the UK now.
26:53 We’ve become aware that someone’s been violated. And that can mean any number of things. Yeah. Violation is anything. So sorry.
27:01 Yeah. Let me clarify that. It could be someone owes money and not paying. It could be a disrespect issue. It could be violence against a person that’s close to you or your gang or your group, family member.
27:15 It could be a girl that’s been mistreated. It could be a number of things. Any number of things. It could be talking to someone out of line. So you’re perceived to be lower in the rankings per se, and you’ve jumped out of your place and you’ve spoken to someone with a particular tone.
27:29 That’s enough. You know? And you log it as a violation. Yeah. Okay.
27:34 That would be a perceived violation. In this arena, violations are the pinnacle. How you manage your violations is how you’re perceived on the streets, and that’s your name. That’s your, you know, if you’ve been violated and you handled it, and I’m talking from a a young person’s perspective, you don’t handle that in the right way, you’re gonna be perceived as potentially as a victim, they say moist or wet and that is someone of a low moral standing per se, low caliber of character if that makes sense in the street term, you know, that you’re a coward basically and that could be, through their eyes, the end of them in the street life, you know.
28:10 So it’s the little things, you’re constantly managing these quote-unquote little things. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. But let me give an example. So we was, we became aware that a person, a former high, very high risk person, he late thirties, has been violent. And this is a person that has been involved in discharging of firearms, multiple stabbings, etc. He’s done his time and everything but this happened to him or someone close to him and he’s going absolutely bonkers he’s going mad you know and from his previous history there’s a very good indication that he’s going to be involved so basically there’s a high-risk criteria to work out okay how likely is this gonna how like how likely is this to turn into knife or gunplay and that would be history of violence, aged between 14 to 24, history of violence, known to be a weapon carrier, recently released from prison, with the reason you’ve gone to prison is for a violent offence, so people might be sitting down waiting for you for revenge, etc. And yeah, and if you hit four of those criteria, you’ll be considered high risk, and this person was most definitely high risk. And we became where we went, we got a chance to see him straight away, got there, his palms are sweaty, his shirt’s more or less wet, sweat, he’s going absolutely nuts. It was a long process, like five hours. Fortunately, it was just like a one-on-one situation.
29:47 Is this something you were involved in? Yeah. And you’re talking to him with someone else? I was just myself at that particular time. Did you know him before?
29:55 Yeah, yeah, we grew up together. Okay. Yeah. And that’s what it’s based on. There’s no way a stranger could come and talk to anyone in that state. You must get some of your friends to see you come in and they’re like, no, no, no, no, no, not this time, Jason. No, no, this time this beef is real and I don’t need your interrupting ass over here. You must get that from some guys. No, you do, you do. And you just don’t take no for an answer. It’s not a choice that they get to make, you know.
30:22 But at that, there is a cutoff point though, if you’re working with someone for a long period of time and then they’re completely not engaging, then the resources and time is limited so you need to work with who you can work with who you can get results with you know so that that does come to play as well but yeah what’s your what’s your relationship with with the police how do you how do you coordinate with them or do they have expectations on you then they most presumably know who you are and what you do yeah in certain areas the police are aware of us it’s It’s a delicate subject, I’ll tell you why. In terms of what we can offer to the community, and obviously that doesn’t include the police because they’re part of the community, is a reduction in violence.
31:08 That’s the service and the product that we can deliver. What tends to be the issue is police generally like to deal in intelligence, but that’s not a service that we provide because by doing that, talking in street terms, the violence Interruptors have come from the streets. They’ve turned their lives around. They’re trying to make a positive impact But they still need to abide by certain conduct and informers sexual predators They they’re actually grouped in the same kind of category on the streets and scum of the earth if SOS was seen to be Informants then the work could be finished, you know So that but this is where it comes into trying to educate people not saying that they’re not educated Don’t get me wrong, actually that’s a poor choice of words there.
31:57 Do you have to legally report something if one of your guys says, I’m going to go kill that guy tomorrow. Are there any legal issues where you have to report things to the police?
32:09 There’s a duty of care. And these are issues that do come up. But what we try and do is not get involved in the intricacies at the wrong and right of a situation. With the public health strategy, because this is what the model is, we look at the violence as if it is a disease. And I can get back into the structure of the model to give more of an oversight of how that works.
32:39 Because Dr. Slutkin, the founder of the model, he was an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization. And he gives a brilliant speech, much more eloquently that I’m gonna be able to do it or try that basically back in the days in the earliest days you had you know people with the plague etc being thrown in dungeons because people didn’t understand the problem you know now we understand as an illness and it’s treated as such so with that being said we don’t get into the morality of the issue we just work to assist in the best week we can to help you put out a situation. Yeah. Yeah. Is it a lot like a disease if you look at like from a clinical perspective how violence spreads and is it really just like an endemic or? Most definitely. Most definitely. We did a chart. There’s probably a fancy name for this particular type of chart but forgive me I don’t know it and it laid out graphically in dots the spread of the U.K. rights, for example. And I’ve seen in the first few days it was London-based, you know, Tottenham, Wood Green, then spreading to different parts, south, east, north, west, London, etc. But then by, you know, a few days in, something really strange started to happen. It started to jump cities, you know, and it was no evidence to say that someone from Tottenham, north London, went 285 kilometres up to Leeds and started to write up there. So what was the the gel that what was the thing that
34:08 Connected these two? And it’s interesting with violence is research to suggest that witnessing violence yeah or anything like witnessing is as powerful as being involved in or being a victim of violence and that is enough if you’re talking about in health terms to carry infections. So if you can take your minds back to August 2011 what did we We have 24-hour news coverage on TVs, police cars burning, all of the newspapers. It’s quite sensationalized. That’s right.
34:40 I had people in New York that thought the city was under siege, and it was by no means under siege. I’m not diminishing what was going on in Tottenham, but it made it look like everything was out of control. Most definitely. Most definitely. And that was it.
34:54 Look at influenza, for example, one of the greatest predictors of predicting who’s going to catch influenza or the flu virus next is, all right, has that person come in contact within one with the flu virus? Do you know what I mean? If I’m looking at a community, okay, who has the virus and who has this person been in contact with? And then you focus intervention with that part of the community because that’s what’s going to happen. And Now, with something like the flu, you’ve got the bacteria or the actual virus that’s invisible to the eye.
35:26 Okay, now, in terms of violence, how that translates, it’s that we’ve, in a sense, we’ve been taught violence, like violence is a learned behaviour. So if you can take yourself back to when we were kids and watching Tom and Jerry, Road Runner, all these cartoons, all our action heroes, Swatch Nega, Stallone, etc. But even in the cartoons, did we ever see Road Runner and Coyote, Wale Coyote, sit down, have a chat, talk things out, resolve problems? No, they have a problem, they try and they go for each other, you know?
35:58 And that, at a young age, that becomes like a, that settles, we soak that up, you know? I mean, I’m not convinced that, that, that, that violence is a strictly learned behaviour. I think, I think we’re pre-programmed for violence in the same way that I think, I think human beings are pre-programmed for that regional tribalism. hence the difficulty because that’s not a learned behaviour that’s a that’s something that that people are naturally inclined towards and it just spreads out in circles you know like I’m from Newcastle you know and there’s a big local rivalry from between Newcastle and Sunderland and people hate each other and there’s problems every time there’s football but when I come down here when I hear someone with their Sunderland accent we’re like oh we’re guys from the northeast you know and then when I go abroad no matter where anyone is from from England I’m not talking about me personally I’m just talking in generalies whether you band together in those broader and broader groups, depending on the situation.
36:46 But if you’ve only ever lived in Tottenham, you’re going to form those groups. In the same respect, I’m not convinced that seeing violence necessarily brings it over. The influenza analogy, it’s very interesting, and I follow what you’re saying, but influenza can affect any human being. There was a there was a very definite corollary between the places where the riots broke out and the economic situation in those places, you know it you know Riots didn’t happen in You know in in affluent areas because people saw them happening No, that’s right and my response to that would be that we’re like we’re talking about the flu for some So I’ll carry on that analogy where we’re you know exposed to the flu virus all the time You know, I mean, but our body has to be in the right state to be infected with it.
37:41 So if our immune system’s up, if we’re healthy, we’re doing the right stuff, we’re in the gym, et cetera, we can get over that. However, if we run down, we’re tired, our immune system’s down, et cetera, we can get the infection. I take it back, it is an accurate argument. So in terms of the environment, the affluent areas, the environment wasn’t set for the violence to take place in that, that’s how I would say it, because they’re not suffering as much as, you know, some of the guys in Tottenham or Brixton or…
38:08 I was wondering like when you’re talking about that infection, I was wondering if that would be like the direct viewing of an unscripted violent event as opposed to Tom and Jerry, as opposed to Schwarzenegger blowing everyone away, as opposed to a UFC fight or one of Pete’s fights where you see two consenting adults going at a, you could call it violent but it’s a physical contest, as opposed to seeing somebody down the street getting beat up and slapped around and really physically hurt in my neighborhood. I mean, do you discern any of these things from one to the other? Because I’m not convinced that they’re all equally infectious.
38:44 Oh, I see. Yeah. The thing was, I’ve trained MMA and I don’t see MMA as violence per se. There were probably tons of people that will disagree with me, I’m sure, you know, the cage fighting thing but the way I see that as a sport you know I see as an active sport I wouldn’t people some people might say rugby is violent but aim isn’t really to bash anyone’s head in but during the course of the event people do get cut they do get concussed etc so I see that as a as two different things because when two people go into the cage or the ring or whatever to to have a battle of might, et cetera, or to fight, to compete.
39:28 It’s not with necessarily any malice or due to a conflict situation, per se. It’s a sporting event. It’s to obviously win your bout and to progress up the ranks. Yeah, that’s a very idealistic way to put it. But I mean, it’s one of the good things, I’m glad Pete is here, but I could argue that violence is your business.
39:51 It is, yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, and it’s recreational as well. So, you know, it is good getting the better of somebody. It’s a good feeling. And that’s, again, that’s something that’s pre-programmed, isn’t it? The setting of it is the critical thing.
40:08 And, you know, what you’re saying, again, about violence, pain, learned behavior, this is, I’m fairly certain that it’s instinctive and that channeling it is a key. I don’t know, there’s initiatives up there. Jimin Facey, a local London fighter, he’s got a hands up guns down, I don’t know if you’ve heard of his initiative about that, he teaches mixed martial arts and Thai boxing and stuff like that for kids who form disadvantaged areas, tries to get them to channel violent and aggressive impulses into something positive and something creative.
40:45 Do you think any schemes like that are worth pursuing? together? Yeah, most definitely. I mean, with Sorrowing Our Streets, we’re actually in partnership with the MMA clinic in Lisington, and on Sundays we do some training with some young people from East London. We’re coming for a year now, and it’s been really, really good seeing these guys grow and develop. Is that helpful? Yeah, most definitely. Most definitely. When we started, it was to give the guys something to do on a Sunday and to give back to the community. The MMA clinic have been fantastic. I must say they’ve opened the gym often Sunday they provided a van to go and collect the guys totally free of charge it was not you know I mean provide a war class coaches to instruct the guys and I believe it is because it’s you know once we’re driving down to the gym once we’re driving back that’s the moment for engagement to find out how you’re doing I guess I can be a good way to engage I mentored a child with a program in the UK called Chance UK and they’re actually going to be on the show in February and I spent a year with him when he was eight and and then nine years old.
41:48 And at one point it came up, where his mom was like, do you wanna teach him some martial arts and stuff? And I was unfortunately spending one day a week with him, like four hours, and I thought I was actually potentially gonna do more harm in teaching him how to box for an hour or two a week. And I wasn’t gonna be with him all the time. I wasn’t gonna teach him the martial arts way, the way you respect people. And so I thought it was a, I didn’t wanna open that box by doing it.
42:14 But then again, I wasn’t looking for a way to engage with them if I was looking for in the wire another example There’s the boxing gym in the wire and they use it as a way to really communicate with those boys Definitely because dialogue. So yeah, I mean with with that sort of training the MMA Muay Thai boxing, etc. Anything along those lines There’s a number of lessons that come along with the actual physical activity, you know, there’s not giving up There’s you know, you’ve got 20 press ups, 20 sales, 20 squats, etc et cetera, how many sets and repetitions to do.
42:46 And if you put your knees down and you stop and you rest, the rest of your team’s gonna get that again. You’re gonna do another round off the back of that, you know? You learn about being a team player, you learn about pushing through your boundaries, you learn about feeling pain, feeling like you wanna give up, but then find that little bit extra that you never knew you had and realize you can go a lot further and go for a lot more punishment than you think you ever could have.
43:10 And those are all invaluable skills like boxing the actual MMA is just a tool for a wealth of positive things you can cut out of it. When you see these communities that you have to work the most with, what’s like the baseline thing that you see right away that they’re lacking as opposed to the communities that are doing fine? I mean, is it that single parent home? Is it these kids that don’t have role models? Is there a single ingredient?
43:38 No single ingredient because, kind of like what I was saying in the beginning, that there’s no sweeping generalisations that everyone will fit into. I’ve seen people with both parents in good family homes really go down really dangerous paths in terms of violence and I’ve seen the real, what would be considered the stereotypical cases in our single parent families someone that’s been through the care system from the get-go and they do tend to be pretty far out there themselves, but I think, my own personal opinion, it is a role model issue. I won’t say 100%, but I think if we could change one thing, that would be my thing.
44:20 And this is where the violence interrupters come into it. You know, the people like United States with the movie, Kobe, Amina, Eddie, etc. Swanky. These are the VIs in Chicago that were in the movie. That’s right.
44:32 Okay. Pablo Boone, sorry Jermaine, Darren, a few other guys etc. Now what’s important about that is if you’ve got someone from you know your quote-unquote nuclear family, you’ve got both parents in a profession etc that young person sees every day you know his dad puts in a suit, grabs his briefcase, goes to meetings, put his tie on you know he sees that if you’re growing up with it doesn’t matter where you are really. But if you’re growing up without that, a young person, males especially, will look to model behaviour and that’s how we learn. If you look at a baby for example, if you notice that babies start to speak, you know, the mum, dad, juice and that sort of stuff, way before they’ve ever been taught what the letter A is or the alphabet is or how to string words together but they do. And they do that by watching the people around them and watching the faces of people as they communicate with them and they model that and that process doesn’t stop. And it’s one of the primary ways that human beings learn how to do things. So if you’re looking at an 8, 9, 10 year old growing up in an area with high rates of violence, and there’s no positive male role model, because it’s not a lack of role models, there’s tons of role models, but it’s this who is the role models for them. And they’ve come out and the people that they identify with as role models are people that know how to navigate their environment. And this is a key point
45:53 I really want to get across. If you’re like 8, 9, 10 years old and there’s older guys giving you grief or you’re just aware that your environment is not safe environment. I know clearly like coming like going home from school and seeing on these yellow police placards and it said a serious assault any information police calls such and such got to the bus stop and there was a robbery placard and the top of my road there was a murder so on the way to school I’ve seen three of these placards and that lets you know that there’s a big issue here and you’re not safe and then for a young person growing up in the environment they want to identify the people that know how to navigate that how can they get from here to there and remain safe and these guys unfortunately that know how to navigate that don’t necessarily always have the best behavior or the best ways of dealing with it they’ve just you know as a human being you do the best with what you have when you know I mean and that’s who they model.
46:52 What do you present to them as an alternative? The violence interrupters. People that have come from the streets, people that have come from the streets, they have been known for an involvement in the streets prior in the local community. They might have done a bit of time in custody. There’s no way to question the validity or this person’s story or history, yeah?
47:13 And here are these guys now that are now in the community, accessible, not a star that’s come from the community, doesn’t live in the community anymore, these guys are accessible day in day out to them and they can see these people display different behaviours, how can we resolve this, how can we move forward without violence, how can we just squash it, it doesn’t matter who was right who was wrong, it doesn’t matter, how can we move forward as a community without trying to we say lick people down without trying to harm each other, do you know what I mean? And you’ll find that from my personal experience the vast majority of the people that I come in contact with do not want to be involved in that lifestyle. You will get a small minority and I’m very very grateful it’s a small minority of people that enjoy it. I’ll be real, they enjoy it, they like the buzz, they get a kick out of it or they still fully believe in what they’re doing. But the vast majority of people don’t. It’s a survival thing. Human beings are quite resourceful. You put us in hostile environments, we’ll do the best we can to get through and that’s all that’s happening and you’ve got 9, 10, 11, 12 year olds forming strategies at a very young age of how to deal with these issues and unfortunately even as they get older they don’t re-evaluate these strategies early enough to make adjustments and they keep the same strategy as a human being like if this works I’m not going to
48:41 Change it and that’s just human behaviour right? And it’s up to people at the violence interrupters to educate and to pass on the knowledge that actually there is another way and there isn’t another avenue for you to navigate, but they have to be shown that. So how do you approach them and communicate that? And communicate that. You could do that in an actual interruption or mediation.
49:09 What would that, when you say an interruption, I mean, I’m just trying to imagine this scenario that yeah is it is you know violence actually happening or about to happen and you go and put yourself in the middle of it or do you deliberately bring for other rival factions together and make them sit down and talk okay it can take it can take shape in many different ways we’ve done mediation we’ve done mediations whereby there’s been an incident has been violence on both sides with two different individuals and they’ve both got something else to lose or something to gain from it. We play on that. We don’t generally play on the greater good of mankind because no one’s ready to hear that really at that moment in time. So it’s about, OK, you’ve been back and forth to prison. Do you want to sit down for 15 years for this? You’ve got a little one now, you’ve got a daughter. Are you going to be there for your life? Your dad won’t run around for you, et cetera. Are you going to make same mistakes etc you know we pull on that. With another person for example this was a young person in custody he initially didn’t want to resolve this particular conflict but he had a couple of open cases that were coming that he hadn’t pled for and we was trying to put to him like look do you want to keep this ongoing where you’re watching your left right and center you’re about to do some serious time because he believed he had to plead guilty to
50:37 Something, so he was going to do at least a minimum of about five, six years. Do you want to, you know, go through that hyper-vigilant stress day in, day out? Or do you want an opportunity just to get your head down, get your head around the fact that you’re about to sit down for a long time and get on with it? And they, you know, both these parties took the option of settling the issue. And the way we do it’s not you can’t like show someone even if we know that between these two people one is a lot more high-risk than the other person we don’t go to the person that’s potentially come off worse and say look brother he’s gonna do this and that you know so because the ego will come into play and you might fire him up saying what what you know does he know who I am etc so you don’t play on that whatsoever you avoid that and in that instance one person didn’t want to meet the other person to have a sit down, shake hands, let’s call it a day sort of thing.
51:35 He was happy enough to say, look, I’m going to do what I said I’ll do. If he does what he says he’s going to do, in terms of put down certain things and certain behaviours, we can get along. So that was mediated without the two people that were having to sit down with each other. We just followed up with both parties. We had people that were close to them that monitored the situation and made sure no one was violating the agreement.
51:56 And that was it. In other cases, like tomorrow, for example, I actually want to mention Cook and Wood Young Offenders Institute because we’re doing a lot of work in there. And that’s the institute that we’ve actually trained a number of young people in custody for violence as violence interrupters in the prison. And that’s the first time that this has ever been done. The model, the Cure Violence Cease Fire Chicago model is in about 22 cities in the States, it’s been internationally replicated all over the world, but it’s never been done in a prison, which is a completely, it’s a very different dynamic because on the outside we look for people that have those experiences but have been removed from the issue. You don’t pick up a guy that’s still on the streets doing all sorts and training them up as a violence interrupter. It doesn’t work like that. They have to have a period of non-offending.
52:48 They show that they’ve progressed in their behaviors, in their lifestyles, et cetera. In the prison, you’re training young people that are in the middle of it. They have existing rivalries going on, they’re in the middle of ongoing historical conflicts, and they’re in an environment that can be hostile. So you’re trying to use these same techniques that have worked on the streets in a prison environment. That’s right.
53:15 I was going to ask you before, what sort of rates of success you have or how regularly people abide by the agreements that you make, but then I brought me on to thinking again, do you have the same kind of success with guys that you’ve trained in prison, two guys that you’ve recruited from this post period of non-offense? Yeah, I mean, today, I’ll be honest with you, we had one failed mediation in the prison And we’ve had, I would say, about 15 successful ones. So it’s a good ratio.
53:49 We had some teething problems. There’s obviously a lot of unique dynamics that aren’t there on the streets, et cetera. And being the first time it’s being done, you learn as you go along to a degree, you know? And right now, we’ve got seven very committed, highly motivated young people that I’ve been trained as violence interrupters. They’re all in custody for violence, but they’ve been given opportunity.
54:16 We’ve invested in them. If you’ve seen the interrupters movie, Kobe, Kobe Ricardo Williams, and a gentleman called Alfonso Quonsuenqui came down from Chicago. We brought, so I must report them down, and they actually trained the young people in the prison. What did they think of London? They, well, they loved it.
54:36 I mean, there’s two sides of it. Well, what did they think of, I mean, how did it compare to where they were coming from? Well, the rates of violence are obviously much, much lower. Right. But I think dealing with the young people in the prison that we dealt with, not just the violence and structures, but the other young people that they met, you know, they said that these guys are real guys, you know, and they can feel where they’re coming from, they’ve been where they’ve been, and the emotions and the rawness, the problems, the same problem, do you know what I mean?
55:03 It’s just a different context for them. Is the different context the availability of guns? Yeah, I would say that. If we had the availability of guns… I think it’s more than that. I mean, we have a real context here. We’ve got a guy in Connecticut that just shot 30 kids, which may or may not be something that’s a pattern of what you deal with on a regular basis. But I mean, the level of violence in the US is just so high.
55:26 I mean, I’ve been to Chicago. I’ve been to LA and San Diego and New York City and bad areas. And I mean, it’s just hard to even explain sometimes. Like some of the levels, it’s just… I mean, I even felt a major aggression level when I was in LA in October, just walking around Venice Beach.
55:43 It was just like this whole of project power at all times and I just wondered what your thoughts on that. I mean, you were in Chicago, you must have felt some serious aggression levels. What do you think the difference is? Or is it simply the availability of firearms like pizza? I think it’s definitely more than it’s not any one thing.
56:05 I think the availability of guns definitely doesn’t help the states. I mean, if we had the availability of guns that the states do, we would have, without doubt, more shootings, you know, because we’ve got a lot of guys with the impetus to commit that sort of violence. Do you know what I mean? In terms of my experience with that in Chicago, there were some, you know, some hot spot areas that we touched. We went to Englewood West, West Garfield Park, I believe we went to the west side, went to Little Village, which is a Latino community.
56:38 But I mean, everywhere we went, we were with Cease Fire staff. So Kobe, actually Kobe was our guide. Whilst we was out there, so we went to all the different neighborhoods he dealt with in Englewood. Like, that’s Kobe’s area, you know? So it was like, it sounds crazy.
56:52 It was like family, to be honest with you. We was out there doing barbecues, et cetera. But at the same time, you’re looking at the walls and there’s bullet holes in the walls and we’re on a street corner and there’s like maybe 15, 20 guys And I remember, I’ll never forget, a squad car passed by. And it actually does go to show, like, in terms of law enforcement, the two strands of thought. There were the guys that supported it, and then the guys saying, you’re hiring a bunch of expenders.
57:17 Do you know what I mean? And the first squad car that passed it, hey, guys, great job, because they appreciate what Cure Violence, East Fire, Chicago, were doing in working. And the second squad car came up and was like, But they weren’t necessarily negative. They were like, hey guys, what are you doing here? Because they must have saw that we weren’t from the US, whatever.
57:39 I said, no, we’re out here with ceasefire. We’re here to learn about the model, et cetera. And they’re like, do you know where you’re standing? Do you know where you guys are? And he goes, this is a hotspot.
57:51 And they looked at the killed violent ceasefire guys and were like, tell them what else happened here, you know? And then they kind of drove off. And that, you know, I’m not going to lie, that made me stand up a little bit straight up for a split second, because it does give you like a slap in the face, why this is reality, and this is the environment that we’re in right now. That’s like a whole nother episode, the whole police presence reaction. Yeah, I mean, we’re actually almost up with our hour, but that was my next question, because how much of it is the reaction of the police and the way the police treats the community, and you know, as opposed to London and the US, but that might have to wait.
58:23 What’s the best way that your typical Londoner can get involved with what you’re doing? Or even from a peer standpoint, What can people just do differently, in your opinion? Keep an open mind. In terms of what can we do differently, we need to start looking at violence differently. It’s not just a criminal issue.
58:45 There’s a public health issue right now. If you look at needle exchanges, heroin’s still illegal to buy, use, and sell in the UK. But I can go, not that I do. I can go to any one of a number of places in the UK can get clean needles with which to inject heroin. It’s done on the greater understanding that it reduces hep C, it reduces diseases, also offers a key point for interventions to forward these individuals to support services, et cetera.
59:14 But there’s no requirement. If you were to say to someone who’s coming for clean do I come for this needle, but you need to tell me who you’re buying from, how much you’re buying from, what’s his number, where is he? No one will go, but at the same time, There’s no guarantee that a needle you give me is not going to be used to deliver a fatal overdose. Does that make sense? And that’s the thing.
59:36 If I get one thing across is that we need to open up our understanding of what violence is. It’s not bad people. It is behavior. We need to tackle the behavior as opposed to the individual. Criminalizing, I mean, I’m not saying don’t get me wrong.
59:50 Someone does something and shoots someone in the coot. He doesn’t need to spend some time in prison. He’s committed an act. needs to repay his debt to society but doesn’t end there you know you come out with the same thinking there’s no it you know I mean what we really change we’ve just locked the problem up a little way comes back and I wanted to ask you a lot about the about your feelings about the prison system are we yeah we got this is gonna open up another big thing about the prison question it’s interesting when you say about violence because you as a human what you were saying earlier Pete You you do inherently associate a violent act and you kind of typify that person as a bad person, you know And I think it’s hard for us in inherently as humans to just remove that violent act from a person Yeah, it’s just difficult. It’s not it’s not easy as opposed to recovering drug addict. You’re like, okay That was in the past but a recovering violent person I don’t know if that’s as easy for someone to accept But wait, if you can give Pete a quick answer to your question about the prisons and then I got to wrap this up, what were you asking?
1:00:53 Well, you know, I just wanted to know what you thought about the prison system as it stands. Yeah. I mean, it’s too broad of a question. There were so many things in there, you know. Yeah.
1:01:04 But you do see it every day, don’t you? No, I do. I mean, I’ve, Savannah Street’s been very, very fortunate. The first prison that we worked with was Cuckamwood Young Offenders Institute and What’s it called? Cuckamwood Young Offenders Institute.
1:01:15 Institute. And what makes me believe that this institute stands head and shoulders above is that they are innovative and they are forward thinking and they’re doing a lot of things that some other institutions aren’t. I think that the figures do speak for themselves, you know, you’ve got, I’m talking nationally now, you’ve got a recidivism rate of 50% reoffending within the first year of release and 75% reoffending within two years. So something’s not working, you know, we need to do more and I believe what could, what do we need to be doing differently? I think through the Gates service, so that a young person or an adult when he’s released into the community isn’t left to his own devices per se, there’s intensive support. I mean there are support structures in place now but we need to build on that, like intrinsically a lot more needs to be done and have almost like a hand holding process. Like you’ve got a young person for example that’s done a three, four year sentence, or a two year sentence for example, he’s come out and he’s got to go to his youth offending team for his, if he’s on ISP, which is that Intense Supervision Surveillance, etcetera, where he’s going to be monitored, he has to go to different meetings, he has to attend an education, etcetera. If he doesn’t attend, it was going to be recorded as a breach of his licence. If you breach, you know, more than once or twice or three times, etcetera, you get reported back to prison. And you’ve got a young person
1:02:40 That’s been in prison for two years, he’s had everything done for him for two years, he gets woken up, he gets fed, he goes to education, everything’s done, then he’s dropped in the community and he’s expected to get to where he needs to get to by himself. When you’re talking about learning violent behaviours, I mean, you can pretty much guarantee can you not that by sending somebody to prison, rightly or wrongly, I mean the big question with prison is it punitive or is it for revenge or for rehabilitation? Well then you can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to send somebody there for whatever motive. They’re going to meet other people who have criminal lifestyle and who have violent tendencies in a situation that’s charged, which is inevitably going to lead to violent behavior. So is sending people to prison a positive thing at all?
1:03:28 I won’t lie. Prison can work for some people. I’ve seen a young person that’s, or a few young people that have had their sentences and prisons work for them. They’ve decided you know what this isn’t for me I’m not like these other guys that are in here and these guys are like so far behind me. I’m gonna do things differently and they get a chance to go on to a role which is like they release. They get into education or some sort of apprenticeship program and then you’ve got the other the other side of it whereby you’ve got someone that’s come in for whatever reason and he’s assaulted like once, twice, three times in a short period period of time And individuals react differently to that, you can become a victim, go within your shell, you wanna, they say string up, they wanna commit suicide, go on Suicide Watch, because they can’t cope. Or the flip side, they learn, okay, you can either have done to you or do, and have had enough of being the victim, and they start assaulting people.
1:04:23 Doesn’t sound like you’re a big believer in the system. I’m not, but I appreciate the complexities of it. But I think the prison system, as it stands is clearly feeling and well, there’s not enough money, clearly. Yeah, of course, there’s a lot of money in the States and like 2% of all the US citizens are. Yeah, of course, there’s another issue again, privatizing prisons.
1:04:47 You look at the statistics, the jump in people being incarcerated post-privatization. Yeah. There’s a correlation. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know if that’s the only reason that’s happening.
1:04:59 I haven’t got the statistics to hand, but there’s a conversation before. Jason, how do people get a hold of you? How do they get a hold of surviving our streets? Brilliant. Okay, you can hit us up on www.survivingourstreets.com or we’re on Twitter at SOS London.
1:05:17 You can drop me an email, my email address and the email addresses of the trustees. I’ll roll on the website. You can get in contact with that. You can call us. And are you always looking for help? Are you always looking for donations?
1:05:29 Yeah, I mean that’s the biggest thing. Right now we’ve not had any funding in. Every penny or pound that we’ve earned, we’ve done through service delivery. So we’ve brought this up from the ground up. And this was intrinsic in our strategy in that we are working to achieve self-sustainability as soon as possible. We can’t be reliant on funding in this environment, in this climate.
1:05:53 If you go to the website, we’ve got a donate page and you can find out different ways of donating a one-off, a monthly, and you can get an idea of what certain amounts could do for us, you know. Okay. Well, I know we could talk hours about this, but thanks for kind of at least putting it to mind. I don’t think many people have heard of this whole concept of interrupting, you know? I think it’s kind of like the old school way of someone does bad, you stick them in prison in a hole, hope they’ll be rehabilitated even though it’s not obvious.
1:06:22 So it’s nice to see at least a creative way of kind of approaching this. Can I just say one more thing before we go? Go ahead. All right. I’ll just give you an example.
1:06:32 We’ve got one, we’ve got a number of star guys that are violence interrupters in cooking with YY. We’ve got one guy, you know, he’s got over 40 convictions previously. He was inside. He had a little over 20, 30 nickings and nicking is like you get written up for violent behavior, etc. engaged him since September and since September to date he’s had one incident whereby someone stood up like they were going to attack him he defended himself but however this person now there was an issue on the landing that he was on and the officers were able to get this person out of his soul and get him to one of our interrupters to walk up and down the landing and he went and spoke to the people spoke to the young people on the landing and got everything calmed down And we’ve got and when you ask them, you know, you know what you’re about and he says I don’t start fights anymore I stopped them. Okay, that’s pretty cool. So there’s success. Yeah, most definitely Well, it’s interesting to hear about that prison issue. That must be a whole nother bag The whole nother can of worms. All right, that’s it for us guys. Thanks so much Jason Pete. Thanks for being here I thought you all wish we had another hour. I know all the best in Moscow this weekend. Yeah Thanks for the opportunity to have me guys. We’ll be here next week to get Gabriel’s download from drinking ayahuasca in the Peruvian jungle.
1:07:50 If you want to watch any of our shows, we’re on YouTube channel London Real TV. If you’re listening to us on iTunes right now, if you just take 10 seconds and give us a quick comment. We would love it. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter. Come check us out and join the party.
1:08:05 Until then, it’s about the journey. Thanks guys. Brilliant. Thank you. All right.
1:08:15 Bye.
