So, Santre Sanchez Gayle sold his freedom for £10 a year for the next 20 years and won the dubious reputation of being a contract killer at 15.  Shocking though it is that his hirers could use one so young to commit a cold blooded murder on their behalf, it was surely a matter of time before people like Santre were seen by those elements as suitable assassins to be used by criminals of any ethnicity.  After all, business is business. It knows no colour.

Ever since the 1950s, drug barons have used our young and older men to peddle anything from cannabis to cocaine to destroy others if not themselves.  Today, they use them as hired gunmen, convinced that they have had enough practice killing one another, or killing innocent people to earn their spurs within some ‘gang’ or other, to qualify as dependable contract killers.

The question to all of us is:  How is it possible for a 15 year old to feel he has nothing to look forward to and nothing to lose, to the extent that he is content to callously and clinically take a life for a risible £200?  He ends up in jail for 20 years, proving that his freedom could be sold for £10 a year in exchange for taking the life of a young woman whom he did not even know.  He no doubt had the short lived, macho buzz of knowing that he delivered successfully for those who had ‘bought’ his services, people who typically spend five times £200 on an ordinary night out.

There is understandable outrage in the community in which Santre Gayle lived at the thought that ruthless Turkish men could have hired him as a contract killer to do their dirty work.  I would really like to know what the difference is between that and people like them, including Eastern Europeans and others, flooding our communities with guns for our young people to kill one another.  Who provided the gun for Santre to do the contract killing?  How did his hirers know where to find him, or that he had the capacity and the disposition to carry out such a crime?  When did his schooling career give way so spectacularly to his offending career and why could not his home and his schools have given him the teaching, guidance and support he needed to have a sense of self worth, achievement and purpose?

We need to worry less about the fact that another ethnic group is exploiting our children in those barbaric ways and more about our capacity as a community to give people like Santre hope and rescue them at an early age from the descent into a degree of hopelessness that makes them into walking time bombs on our streets.

Above all, we need to demand evidence that the police are using their sophisticated intelligence and surveillance capacity to stem the supply of guns and ammunition to children and young people in our communities and not just to earn them long jail sentences for possessing let alone using such weapons.