Bouquets of flowers mark the spot where 15-year-old Samuel Baker was murdered three weeks ago. Balloons, candles and handwritten notes are tied neatly to a sign on the Sheffield estate where the football-mad teenager was fatally stabbed in the chest, making him the youngest victim of a surge in violence across the city.

A series of mostly-unconnected feuds has left South Yorkshire police facing what they called an “almost unprecedented” demand: five murders in just 13 days last month; six including a fatal stabbing in March.

The murder toll in just 12 weeks has reached almost half last year’s total of 13 killings, while the rising number of non-fatal shootings and stabbings has alarmed police and political leaders in a city not used to high levels of bloodshed.



The latest incident came on Monday evening when a 17-year-old boy was shot in the back outside a Premier convenience store on the Woodthorpe estate, four miles east of Sheffield city centre. It was the third shooting in as many weeks on the estate, where armed police officers patrolled in unmarked cars this week as tensions remained high.

On the same night, a 28-year-old man was stabbed repeatedly during an argument with a group of teenagers. The previous week, a turf war between rival Somali and Pakistani-heritage drugs gangs saw a man attacked in a bookmakers and gunshots fired at a house in retaliation.

“I’m horrified by the spate of serious violence and the enormous increase we’ve seen over the last few months,” said Louise Haigh, Labour’s shadow policing minister, whose Sheffield Heeley constituency includes Lowedges and Woodthorpe, two of the estates blighted by a murder and three shootings in recent weeks.

The attacks have left Haigh and others scrambling for answers. Many of those involved in the violence are believed to be youngsters not previously associated with serious crime. “That’s what is most alarming about it,” said Haigh. “It’s people connected with very low-level criminal activity, or not connected with any criminal activity at all.” Dianne Hurst, a Labour city councillor on the Woodthorpe estate, said some of those involved were “from nice families … they aren’t those that you would expect to see in trouble”.

Their fears reinforce the belief of Alan Billings, South Yorkshire’s police and crime commissioner, that gangs are exploiting vulnerable young people without a police record – known as “clean skins” – to traffic drugs outside the gaze of detectives. The National Crime Agency revealed last November that hundreds of children, aged between 12 and 18, were being used as drug mules by gangs as part of “county lines” operations, trafficking heroin and cocaine from major cities to the shires. “I think that could be a factor here but we’re not absolutely sure yet,” said Billings.

While South Yorkshire remains a less violent county than Greater Manchester or Northumbria, according to official data published in April, the scale of violent crime rose faster in the Sheffield region than anywhere except Durham last year, up 57% on 2016, three times the national average. A Guardian analysis shows that South Yorkshire last year overtook Merseyside for violent crime for the first time in at least five years, as the number of incidents has doubled since 2015. Like elsewhere in Britain, knife crime is on the rise in South Yorkshire: the force recorded 969 knife crime offences in 2017, up 68% in just two years.

“The statistics don’t lie,” said Hanif Mohammed, a youth worker whose Sheffield charity In2Change works alongside schools, MPs and the police to try to deter the city’s most troubled children from crime. The recent shootings have struck close to home for Mohammed, who turned his life around while serving half of a 10-year jail sentence for stabbing a man to death in 2008. He worked five years ago with Jarvin Blake, the 22-year-old father-of-three who was stabbed to death in the Burngreave area of Sheffield on 8 March. He said Blake and other young men with complex issues were being failed by the education and youth justice systems.

“Young people are living parallel lives from people like yourselves. They feel alienated from society,” he said. “It’s like Mad Max for them: a post-apocalyptic world where if someone offends me I have to deal with it and I can’t snitch, you have to go one further. The more violent the better: the kids feel they’re having to make a statement and make a name for themselves – for protection.”

Amid the search for answers this week, one single issue has emerged: Sheffield’s school exclusion rate is among the highest in the country. The city and its neighbours Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham all feature in the country’s top 10 exclusion hotspots, it emerged this year. One single school alone, Outwood Academy City, handed out a staggering 1,533 fixed-term exclusions in 2015/16, the equivalent of more than a quarter of the city’s total exclusions that year. The school of 995 pupils takes a number of its children from the Woodthorpe estate, where there have been three shootings in the past three months.

The academy insists its exclusion rate has dropped by 60% since 2015/16, but Haigh and others believe the city’s “obscenely high” exclusion rate is one of several problems unique to Sheffield that are contributing to the rising violence. Gill Furniss, the Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, pointed to the eradication of two-thirds of the council’s youth provision since 2010 and South Yorkshire police’s £72m budget cut over the same period.

The demoralised police force is still facing the financial cost of the Hillsborough disaster, child sexual exploitation and the legal fallout of the Cliff Richards case. Neighbourhood policing was reduced significantly under the previous chief constable though the current boss, Stephen Watson, has pledged to return more than 300 officers to the streets. “All of that has created a really toxic cocktail in which violence crime has unsurprisingly thrived,” said Haigh.

Outside Woodthorpe’s Premier shop on Wednesday afternoon, a group of bored-looking teenage boys hung around the spot where their 17-year-old friend was shot two days earlier. “Unexplained attack, mate,” said one boy, aged 16. “They just came up on a bike and shot. That’s it. He [the victim] was just one of the lads.” The boy said he and his friends had all been excluded from Oakwood Academy City and added, with a hint of a smile, that they would rather be sitting their GCSEs than hanging out on the street.

For Mohammed, whose charity looks after an average of 30 permanently-excluded pupils a week, the violence will continue rising until troubled youngsters are deterred from crime when they are still at primary school. Of the boys outside the shop, there was little relevant to them at secondary school. “They need to be looking at crime, drugs – things that are prominent in their communities. It’s only going to get worse unless we start raising prospects for those young people.”

On Monday, a 15-year-old boy will appear before Sheffield crown court charged with Baker’s murder, the youngest of a number of suspects arrested over the violence. Det Ch Supt James Adby, South Yorkshire police’s head of crime, said it was “tragic that so many of these incidents are preventable” and urged parents to reiterate the risks of carrying weapons to their children.

• This article was amended on 18 June 2018 to correct the spelling of Lowedges from Lowedge.

