| St Cuthbert’s, Croxteth Park, Liverpool, became for a while the centre of police operations when the Merseyside police conducted interviews there after the fatal shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones. Rhys, a keen supporter of Everton Football Club, was shot on the Croxteth Park Estate on Wednesday evening last week.
“The church is very close to the crime scene, and, when the event happened on Wednesday evening, I gave the police the keys to the church, because it was a very convenient place for them to start the interviews,” said the Vicar of St Cuthbert’s, the Revd Dr David Leslie, this Wednesday. (The keys have now been returned.)
Dr Leslie conducted last Sunday’s services in the C of E and RC Emmaus Primary School in Croxteth Park. In his sermon, Dr Leslie said that it seemed as if “we have slipped into some bizarre parallel universe, where the basic rules about the way human beings communicate with one another have been suspended.”
In a statement immediately after the shooting, Dr Leslie said: “Alongside the particular circumstances of this terrible event must go questions that touch the nature of modern urban society.”
Later, on the Today programme, he cited the lack of facilities for young people and the loss of face-to-face communication as part of the problem: “We are locked into false values, a kind of commodified
culture in which people are valued more for what they have than what they are. . . Right from early days people don’t know how to communicate with one another, which means that as they get older they are likely to be more aggressive, and, instead of having fist fights, we are into knives and guns.”
The police are reportedly still searching for the weapon used in the killing, thought to be a handgun. The assailant, believed to be a young teenager, fired three shots before escaping on a BMX bicycle.
On Tuesday, Rhys’s parents, Stephen and Melanie Jones, and his older brother, Owen, aged 17, received a warm tribute from Liverpool supporters in honour of the young Everton fan, when they appeared, dressed in the distinctive blue Everton colours, at Anfield football stadium before the Champions League qualifying match against Toulouse.
The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Revd James Jones, had promised on Today on Radio 4 last week that Rhys’s family and friends “will feel the solidarity of the whole city as it turns away from violence and champions a better way of life — from within”.
Delivering a Thought for the Day, the Bishop said that ordinary people had to stand up for a law-abiding community.
“What seems to be missing in some of our communities is a common way of life where the people themselves in our homes and families, in our streets and neighbourhoods, exercise control over us all, including our young people.”
The Archbishop of York, Dr Sentamu, said in a letter to The Daily Telegraph on Saturday that the Church should support parents in discharging their responsibilities to their children.
The Bishop of Hulme, the Rt Revd Stephen Lowe, the C of E’s Bishop for Urban Life and Faith, called for better planned housing. “We can no longer afford to live with ‘sink estates’ where educational and social aspirations are low and there seems no escape from poverty which breeds despair and violence,” he said on Monday.
The Revd Mark Coleman, who chairs the board of governors of Broad Square Primary School, where Rhys was a pupil, opened his church, St Christopher’s, on Thursday of last week so that people could sign a book of condolence. “People have been coming in all day, once they heard about it, to sign the book. Classmates of Rhys came in to sign it. They said they were ‘gutted’.”
When the pupils and staff returned from holidays next week, it would really hit them, he said. He hoped to offer “a liturgical way of expressing the grief”.
Also on Thursday, the Archdeacon of Liverpool, the Ven. Ricky Panter, who had attended the community meeting on the Croxteth Park Estate the day before, said that although the church could not do much to get guns off the street, it had a great deal of local knowledge. It often knew the people involved, and could help to build partnerships between the police and the community.
“It can help direct even more energy into the disaffected areas. There are a fairly small minority caught up in this criminal activity, and a lot of it is related to drugs. There is a lot of money, and the drug dealers buy cars for young people. They have an ‘It’s cool to be bad’ culture,” he said.
The president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), Chief Constable Ken Jones, said on Monday that most young people wanted the police to tackle the issue.
The Prime Minister had a meeting with ACPO on Monday, and had “delved into the underlying causes of insecure neighbourhoods”, as well as the need to bring criminals to justice.
“This can be delivered if all of us — parents, neighbours, communities, government, police, business, and the voluntary sector — face up to the challenge and change things for the better,” Mr Jones said in a statement.
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