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by Noog » April 2nd, 2007, 6:55 am
Wey hey! Back here after a year - couldn't post and cos the internet was all new to me, didn't know how to sort it - but can now. Right, on with it...
Heres a newspaper article about a South London gang called Peel Dem Crew aka Poverty Driven Children. Its curious as PDC are notorious in South London/Brixton endz but thier leader is maintaining that PDC aren't a streetgang.....what d'yu think?........................................
The leader of one of London's most feared 'crews' has renounced violence. But as gun crime dominates the news, he finds it hard to change his reputation
Amelia Hill, culture and society correspondent
Sunday February 25, 2007
The Observer
As Elijah Kerr, founder and leader of the PDC - one of the most notorious gangs in London - explains how he is trying to turn his 'crew' into a legitimate entertainment organisation, his mobile starts ringing. He picks it up and listens. His jaw drops: 'You're kidding me,' he shouts. When he hangs up, the phone immediately rings again. This time he doesn't wait to hear what the caller has to say. 'I already know about it,' he snarls. 'I'm as mad as hell.'
Kerr - or Ja Ja, to give him his street name - had just been told that his face had been broadcast on the Channel 4 News evening broadcast to illustrate a piece about inner-city gangs and teenage gun crime. 'They won't let me shake off my old, bad reputation,' said Kerr. 'I've been fighting to turn around my life, and the lives of all the kids living on my estate, for almost 10 years now. My crew is closer to living a positive, legitimate life than we have ever been. But the hardest thing is that now, even despite all the good stuff we are doing, those outside my community still stick us with the old stigma.'
The recent shootings of Billy Cox, 15, James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, and Michael Dosunmu, 15, have sparked unprecedented fear about ever-younger gun killers, gang warfare and anarchy on London's streets. There are reports of eight-year-olds being used as gun runners by older gang members and teenagers sleeping in body armour for fear of being shot in their beds. These stories have been strengthened by official reports that more than 50 gangs have been linked to murders and violent crime in London alone.
Tony Blair hosted a crisis meeting about gangs and teenage gun crime last week, at which he agreed to a crackdown and announced a special summit this month. But despite such high-profile involvement, Scotland Yard officials admit privately that they have yet to develop a clear understanding of how these gangs operate.
Last week, in a remarkable insight into the world of gangs and how teenagers get dragged in, The Observer spent two days with Kerr and other members of the PDC, a group of young men who, throughout the Nineties, formed the most feared gang in south London. Lee Jaspar, the Mayor of London's senior adviser on policing, has said the PDC were 'as tough to crack as the IRA'.
PDC stands for the 'Pil Dem Crew', a term which has its roots in the Jamaican 'peel dem', meaning to 'rip them off' or 'steal from them'. But during our time with the founder members of the group, we met young men who insist they have left the gangster lifestyle behind. They are, they maintain, working to persuade local children not to follow them into the world of guns, drugs and crime.
The group, which now calls itself PDC Entertainments, is based around a nucleus of men aged from 15 to 32: Kerr, his younger brother Najar and their friends Ribbz, Inches, Sykes, Skippy, Birdie, Phat Si, Blacker, Justin, Temp Man and the 15-year-old KC. Other founder members of the group have fallen victim to the gun and gang lifestyle over the years: Adrian Marriot, or Ham, was shot five times in the head in 2004 after an argument with some local men.
'Whenever the issue of gangs and teenage gun crime hits the headlines, it is always the PDC - and me in particular - who is held up as being the personification of the crisis,' said 27-year-old Kerr. 'What no one talks about is that the PDC is not a gang any more: we're trying to give good advice to the next generation, and the kids listen because they know we're from the street.'
Born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents, Kerr was eight years old when his parents' marriage broke down. He moved to London with his mother and three siblings, and the family eventually settled in the Angell Town housing estate in Brixton, south London. Kerr's mother worked day and night. Kerr remembers a childhood spent looking after his siblings during the day and watching the drug dealers, prostitutes and thieves from behind his kitchen curtains at night.
When he was 11, Kerr was asked to act as a lookout by some older gang members on his estate. He become more involved in their lifestyle until, at 13, he was asked to bury a revolver in his balcony garden for three months. It was a favour that led to him being accepted as the youngest member of the dominant gang on the estate: the 28s.
For the next three years, Kerr's life slid off the tracks. He was expelled from school, began smoking crack and discovered 'steaming' - where a group would rush a shop or bank, taking the till and whatever else they could lay their hands on. At 16, the police caught Kerr steaming a building society in Bromley. He was sent to prison for three years. It was, he says, the beginning of him turning his life around. Behind bars, he dreamt of setting up a music business and promised himself that he would leave his old lifestyle behind.
When he was released, Kerr tried: he hired music studios and made a few CDs, but the business failed to get off the ground and the temptation to return to his old ways proved irresistible. 'The hardest thing about moving to a legitimate lifestyle is moving from quick money to normal money,' he said. 'That's where a lot of people fall down. You go from being able to buy and do whatever you want, with no responsibilities, to suddenly being worried that you're not going to have the money to pay the household bills.'
The PDC took over the drug business in Angell Town. Guns were ubiquitous, shootings common. But Kerr clung to at least one of the promises he had made to himself in prison: his determination to 'look after his own'. He created a 'lock-down' on the estate, whereby other criminals were largely kept out and the most vulnerable members of the community were looked after.
It wasn't until Kerr was sent to prison for a second time, in June 2003, for possession of drugs, that he really got the wake-up call. 'I got three years and nine months. I would be out in 15 months. That was my lowest and angriest time,' he said. 'Until then, I had been caught up in whole Scarface lifestyle: getting quick cash through drugs and guns and not caring about anything. When I was in prison, it suddenly hit me that if I kept going in this way, then I'll be dead or seriously fucked up by 40.'
Kerr began to think deeply about the choices he had made. Getting his music business off the ground, he realised, was the key to his future. He read every book on the music industry he could find in the prison's library, took business classes and taught himself accountancy.
Outside the prison, some of the younger PDC members, bored by the lack of action from their imprisoned leaders, formed a sub-group, nicknamed the Moslem Boys by the media. Inside his cell, however, Kerr concentrated on his future. 'PDC Entertainments was born in my prison cell, but no one told us how to make money legally, how to live on a day-to-day basis. It's hard but we're finding our own way through it,' he said.
When Kerr was released from prison in June 2004, the PDC had around 50 members and Kerr was determined to pull their lives around, too. 'We taxed the estate drug dealers to pay for studio time and bought 4,000 blank CDs,' he explained. 'We set up a system where the younger kids on the estate would sell our first album, Pray Days Change, and be paid a percentage of each sale. Then we made a video. We got more taxes to pay for that, and dedicated it to friends who had been shot.' The video, Fallen Soldiers, was not just a local success: it was played on Channel U on Sky - until the police complained it glorified guns and gangs and Sky agreed to pull it.
Despite the setback, Kerr was encouraged and persuaded every PDC member to put £1,500 towards renting an office. He adjusted the group's name to reflect its more positive outlook: no longer the Pil Dem Crew, PDC now stands for Poverty Driven Children.
It has been a long journey but Kerr says he finally feels he is breaking out from his past; he has set up a local group, Code 7, to help and encourage children to make music, and also helps older youths who want to get into filming and acting.
'The lives kids live on these estates are full of pain and fear,' he said. 'They have no opportunities and no positive role models. I know, because I've been there, that the only way to release that pain is through music. I see kids coming out of the recording booth with tears coming down their cheeks. They're rapping about their mum not being there for them, and their friends getting shot up.'
