Don’t Panic > Magazine > Josh Cole | Inside London’s street gangs
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What inspired you to begin the project?
I was approached by the Independent to do a photo feature on UK street-gangs. Having been a class A drug dealer in my youth I wanted to show a deeper side to the “monsters” that were being portrayed in the media at the time. There was a lot of talk about knife crimes and their perpetrators but no one was talking to these gangs. I wanted to give them a voice. I didn’t have full control of the editorial so it didn’t really work out. It was a learning experience for me about the British media.
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What’s your opinion of the media coverage of the riots?
In general I don’t trust the media and so don’t put a lot of value in this information. It would appear that the riots were started when a group of riot police beat a 16 year old girl, yet that information seems to have been suppressed after it was first reported.
In the coverage of the recent riots, a lot of the media has focused on “delinquents”, “youth” and “gang culture”, implying that the riots are just a manifestation of gang violence, ignoring the wider social problems. Do you think that there is any truth in this – is it just gang violence?
I think the important question here is why there are so many people who have so little respect for our society. In my opinion this isn’t about race or poverty, this is about the prohibition of drugs. Because we have made drugs illegal the government has given people an easy form of income and has created a large segment of our society which has no respect for the law and mainstream society. In the States the amount of alcohol consumed tripled under prohibition and created a huge sub-culture of gangsterism. The same thing has happened in modern society with drugs.
The government has then disrespected this part of society by taking away their youth clubs and funding for youth projects while making it harder for poor families to get an education. These things combined with a police force that on the whole has a very poor understanding of this group has created an extremely volatile situation and I for one was not at all surprised at this week’s events. We need to address the fact that prohibition isn’t working, which is also the opinion of many people high up in the police force, and to start to gain a higher level of understanding of these problems so that we can welcome this group back into society.
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