Young black teenagers in Britain are falling into criminal gangs because of family breakdown and a lack of positive role models, community workers say.
Since January there have been 17 shootings and stabbings in London alone, as police warn that the rise of teenage gangs is the worst problem facing Britain, after terrorism.
London's Met police revealed that there were 170 gangs now operating in London, the majority of them being impressionable young teenagers drawn into violence by their peers.
Eighteen-year-old youth worker, Nathan Foster, was gunned down on the streets of Brixton on August 3, apparently as he tried to negotiate a dispute.
A week earlier 16-year-old Abukar Mahamud died from a single bullet wound to the neck after allegedly being hunted down by a gang on bicycles.
The mother of 15-year-old Jesse James, who was shot last year in Manchester's notorious Moss Side, said that her son was killed after he refused to join a gang.
Last Wednesday the government published a year-long study into the factors behind the rise of gang violence, which found that black teenagers were deprived of any positive role models on the TV.
The Reach panel of experts, from fields including education and business, said that too often role models for young black men include rappers who glamorize guns.
However youth workers on the streets of south London said that the findings were obvious to those in day to day contact with the problems of the area.
"The reason these young people are getting involving in gangs and guns is because the guys they are looking up to are doing just that themselves," says Nathan John, 23,who runs a mentoring service for young black teens in the area called Youth Enlightenment Limited.
"The biggest proportion of single parent families in Britain come from the black community. Those who are in that position are more likely to get into crime and get excluded from schools," he says.
Director of government-funded campaign Don't Trigger, Raymond Stevenson says there is a "glass ceiling" many youngsters from the working classes of black society could not break through, and that it was easy to fall into criminality.
"If you come from a broken family and have the worst housing and schooling and you never get to hear about anyone from your community making a positive contribution to society, of course you are going to feel alienated and that society is your enemy.
"All they can do is draw inspiration from gangsters and some negative hip hop stars whose experience is most like their own. Then they act out what they see on TV. It becomes an easy option for young people."
The campaign Don't Trigger has recruited around 300 UK black music artists to produce records warning youngsters not to fall into crime.
Police make a distinction between gangs and old-fashioned London gangsters, the latter being criminal networks whose sole motive is to profit financially from organized crime.
Street gangs are typically made up of teenagers and are more loosely knit. Many gangs are often linked by no more than a postcode.
The stabbing of 16-year-old Ben Hitchcock in a street battle in June was believed to have stemmed from rivalry between two south London boroughs as the skirmish happened on the borders of Lewisham and Bromley.
Members of the 40-strong gang who killed Ben carried broken bottles and knives and wore blue towels around their heads to signify Lewisham being the 'blue borough'. The colours of the local authority which controls the Bromley borough are green. Many of the gangs draw inspiration from LA gangs like the Bloods and Crips, the latter who wear blue bandannas.
Officers from Britain have travelled to the US city to pick up tips on how to police gang crime, and in June police launched a campaign in all London boroughs called Operation Curb.
Last year a similar project called the Xcalibre task force was set up in Manchester to tackle turf wars between two heavily-armed and well-established groups: the Gooch Close and the Doddington gangs.
Firearm discharges in Greater Manchester are running at a record 120 a year, with nearly a third of them being gang-related. A recent Home Office study of south Manchester revealed that in 150 separate shooting incidents over a three-year period, only one witness came forward to testify.
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