Good Morning Britain weather presenter Alex Beresford is told by knife-carrying youths in a new documentary the situation is “lawless” and they carry blades because “they don’t want to die”.
Alex’s cousin Nathaniel Armstrong, 29, was stabbed to death last month near his home in Fulham, South West London.
Days earlier, Alex, 38, intervened during a knife crime debate on ITV’s GMB, arguing that building more prisons was not the way to tackle the epidemic.
He investigates the topic further in Tonight: Knife Crime And Me and comes face to face with gang members.
One drug dealer in the West Midlands, “D”, shows Alex his knife and says people that work for him all carry them.
D, 25, says: “The way I describe it at the minute, it’s lawless. Everyone for themselves.
"And everyone is carrying something, pretty much that’s the way I look at it now.
“There is fear, there is no police. You don’t see any policemen driving round in patrols.
"You ain’t got to worry about getting stopped and searched.
“I have had people pulling knives out on me four or five times in the last six months.
“When we were younger we put snooker balls in socks, stuff like that.
"They were weapons, occasionally there’d be a knife. Mainly it was bats.
“Now it’s every kid goes and gets a knife out of their mum’s kitchen drawer.
“I have seen the change in the city and how bad the younger kids are now.”
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Alex returns to Bristol where he was brought up and speaks to a teenager at the Empire Fighting Chance boxing club.
A youth, “Mo”, tells him: “My teenage times have been hard. Sometimes I just carry a knife.
"I know... you are going to get caught by the police but sometimes you know you have just got to risk it.
“Imagine like – you just don’t want to die.”
After filming for ITV’s Tonight programme, Alex is still unsure what is the answer to this huge problem.
He says “time and determination” is needed by those in power around the issue.
Alex told the Mirror: “When I met D, I could tell he was really nervous, why wouldn’t he be?
"He’d never done TV and he was putting his reputation on the line.
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“We have to be grateful he did because without his voice you don’t have a true understanding of his circumstances that led him to make the decision to run a drugs gang.
"When he pulled out a six-inch blade, I thought, ‘That could cut through me in a second’.
“Part of me wanted to ask him to hand it over, but I knew he was never going to leave unarmed.
"He was smart and very aware knife crime has got way out of hand.
"But something he said really got me,
‘You don’t see police any more, you know you’re not going to get stopped’.
"National statistics show as a white male he’s also less likely to get stopped.
“While I was in Bristol I met ‘Mo’, a schoolboy who carries a knife when he feels he has to.
“I’m hopeful Mo has the right help, as one split-second unthinking decision could see his whole life go in another direction.”
- Tonight: Knife Crime And Me airs on ITV Thursday at 7.30pm.
