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Black women targeted in gun crimes

There were more than 100 people at the party, yet no one saw it happen. One minute Natasha Derby was dancing alongside a friend, the next she was bleeding to death on the floor, shot in the head at close range. Dwane Haughton, 29, was acquitted earlier this month of 23-year-old Natasha's murder. The Jamaican had pleaded guilty at Reading Crown Court in Berkshire to handling the bullet that killed her -- his fingerprint was on a cartridge case found at the scene -- but he denied pulling the trigger.

The week Haughton was cleared, three other women were shot, two fatally. Sisters Connie and Lorna Morrison were tied up in their flat in Harlesden, northwest London, and shot in the head at point-blank range. Their mother's boyfriend, Noel Patterson, 62, was killed, but Lorna's nine-month-old son was spared.

An investigation by the Observer has found that black women are almost 50 times more likely than white women to be victims of gun crime. Although women make up less than 2 percent of gunshot cases, 95 percent of female victims are black.

This includes women deliberately targeted by gunmen as well as bystanders. Experts say they are victims of a black gang culture that no longer sees women or children as beyond limits. Mafia-style tactics have been adopted with relish.

Graeme McLagan, author of Guns and Gangs, an investigation into gun crime published this year, believes the trend can be traced back to June 1998 when Jamaicans Hyrone Hart, 28, and Kurt Roberts, 19, carried out a five-week spree of brutal robberies. In one incident they burst into the London home of Avril Johnson and bound her and her husband hand and foot.

"They shot her in the head right in front of her two daughters," says McLagan. "Her husband was slashed across the neck and shot but survived. Four days later the pair murdered another young mother, Michelle Carby. Since then we have seen numerous cases of black women shot in towns and cities across the country. The attitude now is that if women happen to be on the scene or in the way, it makes no difference. The gunmen have developed a new level of callousness. They no longer seem to care."

That callousness was demonstrated to horrific effect earlier this year when three men were convicted of attempted murder. Michael Nelson, Dwight Charlton and Horace Gordon found a man they wanted to kill in a car outside a takeaway in Clapton, east London. A woman got out of the car and warned them there were two children inside, begging them not to shoot. The three men opened fire anyway, spraying 15 bullets into the vehicle injuring an 18-month-old baby, her father and a friend. Again, all the victims were black.

For Detective Chief Superintendent John Coles, who heads Operation Trident, a specialist London Metropolitan Police unit which targets black-on-black gun crime, a key factor when women or children are shot is the killers' ethnicity.

When violent black gun crime first arrived in the UK in the mid-Eighties, most of the perpetrators were from Jamaica. Dubbed Yardies, they became active in the crack cocaine trade and brought a ruthlessness more usual in the Jamaican capital, Kingston, which has one of the highest murder rates per head in the world.

"While they used to make up the majority, today only 15 percent of the cases we deal with involve Jamaicans," Coles said. "The majority of gun crime we deal with is now down to British-born gangs. There is a subtle difference between the two. The Jamaicans will deliberately target and execute women. With the British-born gangs, it's more the case that the women are in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Surveys suggest that at least half of all youth gangs now have female members and that many are becoming more actively involved in crime. At the same time, some women have found themselves targeted by gangs after agreeing to give evidence against friends or boyfriends known to have been involved in gun crime.
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