Free Radical by Maajid Nawaz Page A

robbery.”
    â€œHuh, wha . . .?” It wasn’t registering in my brain.
    â€œIn other words, you’re nicked, mate. Get ’im in the car.”
    I was fifteen years old. I had no criminal record. They threw us all in the cells for the night while they inspected the “evidence.” Because I was under sixteen, they had to call and wake Abi up at 3 a.m., and tell her that both her sons had been arrested on suspicion of armed robbery. Crazy. In the morning, after all that, they handed Osman back his pellet gun in a plastic bag and let us go. On the way out, furious at being profiled, I decided to ask one last question, “Is there anything, anything at all that we did wrong?”
    â€œNo, you did nothing wrong. It was a misunderstanding. Sorry about that.” And that was it.
    This mixture of police incompetence and ignorance made us both hate them and simultaneously fear their powers. The one time I did attempt to take things further with the police it blew back in my face. I went in to positively identify a suspect who had stabbed a friend of mine. I pointed out the right guy, but they had to let him go, apparently because of a “procedural error.” Worse, I was now exposed as the person who had made the positive identification. I have lost count of the number of knife attacks we were subjected to by racists, many of my friends had been stabbed, but the police rarely managed to make any arrests and hardly ever pressed charges. The gangs would always boast about “contacts” in the police. I have no idea if this was true, but the bottom line is we were not protected. And in the absence of any incentive to change our mantra, we kept singing it loud: “Fuck tha Police.”
    Not trusting the police to protect us meant that we had to rely on our own protection, which we found among our crew and through fighting back. As our numbers increased and our confidence grew, the levels of violence we faced got worse. We’d be set upon suddenly, like once down on the seafront when pool balls were flying past our heads like cannonballs. Or when another white friend, Dan, was knifed, or that time at Southend Central Bus Station when Aaron got stabbed in the side, and Rowan fought off two men armed with kebab knives, using nothing but a crutch he’d “borrowed” from an old lady waiting for her bus. (Once they ran away, Rowan politely handed the crutch back to the startled old woman.) One of us once resorted to using a metal-tipped umbrella as a weapon, spearing a skinhead who had come down from London and decided to march up and down our high street shouting, “We hate Pakis!” He ended up on the floor in agony with a fractured skull. There was the time Ricky, Paul, Chill, and I had been hounded by a white mob chanting about not wanting “niggers” in their area “stealing their women.” Our entire crew returned in three cars the next week to bum rush the house of their ringleader. We were learning how to fight back, and the message was spreading.
    One day, I happened to come across Patrick—the same Patrick who at eleven had punched me in the stomach because I dared to ask to play football. With that one act he had changed the little boy that I was; he made me see in color when before I saw only human beings. It felt like an eternity since my days at Earl’s Hall.
    I was walking down the high street in my full B-boy gear: a red bandana, my Redskins baseball cap—because they used Red Indians as their logo—my Click suit and big trainers, the lot. And there, I saw him. That punch was something I had never forgotten. The moment he saw me coming he turned the other way; I could see that he also remembered what he’d done. This sparked the residues of anger within me, and I headed straight for him. I wasn’t with my crew on this occasion; I’d left them somewhere nearby. It was just Patrick and me again. I had my knife on my