The guns go quiet over the Mersey : how 321 police officers in Liverpool slashed firearm crime







321 dedicated police officers constantly harassing anyone with even the most tenuous connection to guns have slashed firearm crime in Liverpool. Which begs the question: why isn't all British policing done this way?

There has been a 33 per cent decline in the number of firearm discharges in Liverpool, dropping from 124 in 2005-6, when the city's Matrix anti-gun crime police was established, to 83 last year

Late afternoon on the Stockbridge Village estate, a desolate warren of Sixties council housing on the edge of greater Liverpool. The freezing easterly wind blowing from beyond the M57 means that today the streets are deserted. But in recent weeks, Stockbridge Village - the renamed Cantril Farm, infamous in the Eighties for its riots, 49 per cent unemployment and deliberate torching of schools - has achieved renewed notoriety: as a frontline in the long war of attrition between Merseyside Police and firearm-wielding criminals.

There are six of us, travelling in a huge, bright yellow police van equipped with mobile CCTV: three PCs and a sergeant, a photographer and me. On the side, the vehicle sports a picture of a gun in a road sign-style circle with a line through it and a black logo: 'Matrix - A Force To Be Reckoned With'.



One of several 'disruption teams' that patrol the city's gun-crime hotspots daily, there's nothing very subtle about the way they do business. 'Matrix' - not, its officers are at pains to stress, 'Operation Matrix' or 'the Matrix unit' - isn't simply about capturing offenders after a shooting has been committed, but an innovative, 'holistic' response to gun crime, drugs and gangs that also embraces wide-ranging programmes aimed at prevention and rehabilitating offenders as well.

To judge by the statistics - a 33 per cent decline in the number of firearm discharges, dropping from 124 in 2005-6, when the Matrix was established, to 83 last year - it seems to be effective. And other police forces, in Britain and abroad, including Boston, Massachusetts, plan to emulate it.



We pull up next to the pavement, looking for a man who lives in a redbrick semi behind a privet hedge. A few days ago, two Matrix policemen knocked on his door and hand-delivered a letter.



'You are now formally advised that Merseyside Police has identified you as a gun crime nominal,' it begins, printed in red capitals.



Matrix officers smash open a suspect's door at the start of a raid

'This means that there is intelligence available that links you and/or your associates to firearms. You will now be visited by police officers on a regular basis to check on your safety and that of your family, and to dissuade you from being involved in criminality involving firearms.

'There is a simple way to avoid this attention from Merseyside Police: have nothing to do with guns or others who use them.'

The letter warns that the police, working in concert with the council, Youth Offending Teams, the Crown Prosecution Service and other local agencies, will use 'all available tactics', including surveillance, the taking of children who may be at risk into care, eviction and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. 'These tactics and others will be used in a focused way against those who are involved with guns.'

There is only one escape route.

'If you want to change your lifestyle and move away from crime and firearms, there are partner agencies that can help you. We will put you in touch with agencies that can offer you training, education and employment.' A helpline telephone number follows. All that the supposed armed criminal has to do is to ask.

Matrix classifies nominals under three levels of risk: bronze, silver, and gold, the highest. Ours today is one of nine currently judged to merit gold status in the Huyton area alone: it's a label that means a daily visit from the disruption team. Fortunately, he happens to be in - police lawyers say that to call at a home more than once a day would violate the Human Rights Act. A slight, tousled figure in jeans, trainers and a hoodie, he lives with his parents and looks much younger than his 21 years. We're interrupting the virtual football game he's been playing with a friend on a laptop, but he breaks off politely and invites us in.

'I've never been nicked for a gun crime. I don't know why I'm a nominal,' he grumbles. 'It's got to the stage that other people think I'm a grass, with the bizzies coming every day.'

His mother - her denim mini stretched tightly across sunbed tanned thighs - concurs: 'When I heard he was a nominal, I laughed. They said they had information he was involved with guns. What information?'



She turns towards me, her eyes craving sympathy. 'Now I'm not sleeping and I'm getting threats in the street.'

The letter sent to 'nominals' - those believed to be linked to gun crime

The young man admits he does have a criminal record; not long ago, he reached the end of a four-year sentence for burglary. But according to him, the only reason the police are on his back now is that his father, a long-time career criminal - 'Oh, yes, he's been in prison loads of times, for all kinds' - was recently shot and wounded in a botched but targeted street hit.



'The only link I've got to firearms is that my dad became a victim,' he says. 'Ever since, the police have been harassing me.'



After we leave, the officers insist their actions are well-founded. According to the Matrix intelligence analysts, the shooting of the nominal's father was not an isolated incident but part of an ongoing feud. Only a few days before our visit, this led to a further attack, allegedly linked to that on the nominal's father, when intruders broke into the home of another man in Stockbridge Village and put a bullet through his neck as he lay in bed with his girlfriend. Miraculously, he survived, a few lucky millimetres from death or permanent paralysis.

But however accurate the intelligence may be, for now the nominal doesn't show much sign of taking up the police letter's offer of changing his life through training or education.

'I'm not interested in any of these courses or nothing,' he growls. 'If that means I have to put up with the bizzies coming round, I will.'

Overshadowing any discussion of firearms on Merseyside is the memory of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, shot dead in a car park as he walked home from football practice on August 22, 2007.



'Rhys's murder was truly shocking,' says Det Chief Supt Tony Doherty, head of the Matrix. 'But this use of firearms was also bleakly typical of current Liverpool gun crime.'

Rhys didn't die in the crossfire generated by rival big-time rackets, but from a bullet fired by an 18-year-old youth named Sean Mercer. According to Doherty, his 'gang' - the Croxteth Crew - is nothing much more than a group of people who were brought up in the same area and went to the same school. Other similar formations, named after their localities, can be found across the city, such as the Bakers Green Crew, the Hillside Crew, and the Croxteth Crew's sworn enemies from neighbouring Norris Green, the Strand Gang.

'It takes very little for them to leap into action,' says Doherty. 'It might be a fight over drug-dealing turf but it could be something as trivial as a dispute over a girl.'



Sometimes, teenagers have acted as hitmen or weapons couriers for older, higher-level gangs - the men who 'own' their estates, and thanks to the proceeds from drug dealing are seen by some as glamorous. But, adds Doherty, there have also been cases where youths have resorted to guns in vicious, potentially lethal vendettas that began as arguments on Facebook.

'They're using firearms where previously it would have been fists or a couple of baseball bats. In some cases we have seen much younger people involved with firearms and the level of underlying criminality is lower. It's closely associated with economic deprivation: these estates are difficult places to get out of, with a lack of hope and opportunity. What we're really talking about is antisocial behaviour with guns.'

Police talk to youths on the street

According to Chief Constable Jon Murphy, they 'didn't realise they were a gang in Norris Green until the media said they were. But just because they're not the Crips or the Bloods (the highly organised American gangs that started in Los Angeles) doesn't mean we haven't got a problem.'

The sheer size of Matrix, with 321 police officers assigned full-time, reflects how seriously Merseyside Police are taking it.

Several times a week, Doherty convenes a 'pivot meeting' at his headquarters at Smithdown Lane police station, where he coordinates responses to recent armed incidents by the various Matrix departments. I attended two, on days picked at random. They were enough to see why resources on this scale are justified: there may be 'only' some 83 gun discharges on Merseyside each year, but any one can cause mayhem.



The occasion for the first was a row in a pub car park that started with one man asking another why he was looking at him, and ended with the firing of a shotgun. At the second meeting, Matrix officers discussed a drive-by shooting that took place the previous night: nine bullets pumped into a BMW being driven by a member of a well-known criminal family at the end of the M62. A toddler aged two happened to be in a child seat in the front at the time, while the vehicle crashed broadside into another car, whose driver was a woman on her way home from work. Another small miracle: here again, no one was seriously hurt.

'Officers love working on the Matrix because it involves what some still refer to as "proper policing", dealing with drugs, guns and organised criminality,' says Doherty. 'The very reasons a lot of us joined the police.'

However, he adds, 'It's painfully apparent that enforcement on its own is not a solution to anything - it's part of it, but that's all.'

Integral to the Matrix is also a range of programmes run with other local agencies, such as the council and probation service, aimed at diverting former, current and potential offenders from future crimes and persuading school students not to get involved with guns and gangs in the first place.

More than 100 officers work on the Matrix disruption teams: a highly visible street presence that not only visits nominals but patrols the most dangerous areas each evening and, when appropriate, carries out raids. Early one morning, Live joined a squad as it put in the door of a scruffy terrace.



At first, the house seemed to be empty. But a man was found hiding in the attic: apparently someone had phoned him to tip him off when the Matrix van drove on to the estate. There were no guns, but as the Matrix intelligence analysts had predicted, the team did discover a kilo of what appeared to be cocaine.

A further 53 officers, almost all detectives, make up the 'reactive' squad, responsible for investigating every discharge - about a third of which result in someone being injured, and mercifully few, between two and six per year, in death.

However, preventing discharges from happening is, if anything, still more important, and about 100 officers, divided among five 'syndicates,' are assigned to covert surveillance and intelligence gathering.



'It can take six months to really understand how a group operates,' says Det Insp Greg Symon, one of the syndicate leaders. 'To find out where their weapons and ammunition come from, and where they are stored.'

Rhys Jones, 11, who was shot dead in a car park as he walked home from football practice on August 22, 2007

One example is Operation Tennyson, a year-long investigation that ended with a string of court convictions for very serious crimes. But it started small, says Det Supt Paul Richardson, head of the Matrix covert section, with a trickle of intelligence about drug dealing and a series of firearm discharges in Kensington, an area of poor housing close to Liverpool city centre.

A police 'test purchase' of crack from a street dealer led to the unearthing of what amounted to a drugs delivery 'call centre', and, after months of surveillance, the breaking of the Kensington Riot Squad: the base of a three-tier criminal hierarchy headquartered in Liverpool with supply lines from Holland, its rising levels of violence involving the use of firearms in the area.

The gang protected its business with firearms. They had an armourer, Graham Johnson, and a weapons courier, Anthony Gardner, 17 years old, who carried guns across the city to gang members whenever the leadership thought they might need to be used.

When the Matrix called on Johnson, he was hiding in his loft - with a MAC 10 machine pistol, a Browning 9mm automatic, 200 rounds of hollow-point ammunition, and a bizarre single-shot gun manufactured from a Maglite torch.

'We closed them down from top to bottom,' says Richardson. 'Sometimes, following a very simple philosophy will work.'



In all, police recovered drugs worth £600,000 and six guns, and since the operation ended with a wave of arrests last April, there have been no firearm discharges in Kensington. Ballistic analysis showed one of the weapons, a Glock, had been used in at least four recent shootings.

But although 25 people ended up going to prison, Johnson the armourer got only eight years - barely half the longest sentences awarded to members of the gang who were convicted of supplying drugs.



'I find that surprising,' Richardson says drily.

As for the converted Maglite, it wasn't the only torch turned into a gun. It was the work of David Hampson, another Liverpool armourer who was jailed for 20 years last September. He was running a cottage industry from his flat on the Longview estate, 're-activating' replica and deactivated weapons by drilling out their barrels; refurbishing old firearms, and turning not only Maglites - now built to fire a .22 round by depressing the torch on-off button - but Zippo lighters into guns. He also had some higher quality weapons for more discerning customers, including a Belgian police Beretta.



'Eroding gun culture is like turning a tanker: it's going to take at least ten years,' said Det Chief Supt Tony Doherty

Like other older criminals, he used youths to ferry guns around when they were needed.



'There are 14-year-olds who will tell you, "I want to be in a gang, because if not we're just poor,"' says Steve Moore, who was Matrix chief until he retired from the police last summer to become head of Liverpool council's Citysafe unit, working closely with his former colleagues.



'So they think gangs are edgy and cool - because the alternative is a dismal life on benefits.'

In a northern prison I meet a young man - who must, for his own safety, remain anonymous - serving a ten-year sentence for possessing guns and ammunition. Last year, he wrote to the chief constable from his cell, saying he wanted to try to prevent another Rhys Jones by helping the Matrix to get its message across to young people.



'The reason I ended up here was my flatmate,' he says. 'He was dealing drugs and they used our place to store their weapons' - a revolver and a Bulgarian-made Baikal tear gas gun, increasingly popular with UK criminals, converted by local armourers to fire 9mm rounds and equipped with silencers.

The man insists he was never involved with guns himself and unusually for someone in his position he had a steady job. But having turned a blind eye to his flatmate's activities, he ended up taking the rap for him and his associates. He was outside the flat when the police turned up to search it, and realising what they would find, went on the run for four terrifying weeks.

'They knew where I was and four of them came round. My flatmate said, "I'm not going down for this. You've cost us money, and you're going to take the charges. If you don't, there's a bullet with your name on it."'

A Matrix logo

The gang came back the following night. He moved somewhere else, but they tracked him down.



'They kept saying I had to admit: say they were my guns, my drugs. They threatened to hurt my nephews, my sister's kiddies. I think the police could have protected me. But my whole extended family lived within walking distance. And my flatmate had been part of my life a long time. He knew all of them.'



Finally, after an emotional meeting with his mother, to whom he confessed everything, he went to a police station and handed himself in.

On his first night in Walton prison, 'this big lad comes up to me in the dinner queue. He says, "Come upstairs." He pushed me into a cell where there were four lads. I thought I was going to get a beating. Instead, one of them hands me a mobile phone. One of my flatmate's associates was on the line. He tells me: "Don't worry, I'm getting you looked after in there."

'Now I want to help the next generation get away from this. I've had three close relatives die while I've been in here, and I missed my sister's wedding. The other night I phoned my sister and my nephew answered. He said, "Are you coming home soon? I miss you." That was the first time I cracked up. I had tears in my eyes.'

Insp Alison Foulkes says, 'Once he's out, we hope he's going to do a lot of work with us. Hearing it from someone like him should have a big impact.'

Another part of the Matrix jigsaw is the Violent Oender Management Unit (VOMU), jointly run by the police, Youth Oending Team and the Probation Service, which tries to resettle convicts after release and give them opportunities to build a life away from crime. But it is uphill work, especially during a recession.

'These offenders have a lot of swagger on their own estates,' says Insp Ian Noble. 'But anywhere else, they crumble. We try to help them to take baby steps that empower them to believe they can succeed.'

He introduces me to one of VOMU's current clients, a recently released 20-year-old who says he graduated from dealing on the street to storing drugs and weapons in his family home. He knows the consequences first-hand: shortly before his arrest, he was the victim of a drive-by shooting by a gang vying for the same drug turf.

'I lost consciousness, I thought I was going to die,' he says. 'All I can remember is waking up in hospital with a wound in my leg and my mum by my bed crying over me.'



He says the older men who ran his gang 'used to get the kids to do their dirty work so they wouldn't get caught. I'd never been mates with them. It was just, like, "Will you do a favour for us?" I'd never been anyone special or popular. But if people know you're with them, they don't see you as just an average Joe. I did it for protection, respect, and some money. But then I ended up in jail and I had nothing to show for it.'

Working with the VOMU, he has moved away from his family's area and spent weeks applying for jobs and courses, so far without success.

'My worry is, if I get nowhere with a job, that's how I'll end up going back to it. When I got arrested, I owed them four grand, and I thought they'd want it back, but they just said, no worries, just come back to work for us. I really don't want to. It's a waste of your life. I've got a five-year goal. I want to be out of Liverpool, with a nice house and a trade. And a girlfriend, maybe kids.'

There's no quick fix to gun crime. The Matrix, says Moore, was originally modelled on Operation Ceasefire, which worked so well in Nineties Boston it was dubbed the 'Boston miracle'. But then, 'with the rats gone, they stopped paying the piper, and it all came back with a vengeance.' The fact Boston is now looking enviously at the Matrix represents a considerable historical irony.

'If this is going to have an impact, it has to be for the long haul,' says Moore - even if, as Chief Constable Murphy points out, the police and partner agencies are braced for public spending cuts.



'I do worry the whole public sector is about to be starved and all this fantastic inter-agency work will fall by the wayside,' he says. 'For us, dealing with gun crime is a core business. But when the cuts start to bite, the core business for education won't be to work with us but to keep schools running.'

Tony Doherty is more optimistic.



'Eroding gun culture is like turning a tanker: it's going to take at least ten years. But when we started to see huge graffiti saying "F*** the Matrix" we knew the brand was working. There's a Facebook group called "Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Doherty is scum". It shows we are making our presence felt.'















