Two warring crime families have cost taxpayer £37m

TWO warring crime families have cost taxpayers a staggering £37million, it was revealed yesterday.

Hooded members of the Burger Bar Boys gang Hooded members of the Burger Bar Boys gang

The inner-city gangsters, including members of Birmingham’s notorious Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys, have been plundering the public purse for three generations, running up the huge bill for prison, health and probation costs for more than 30 years.

The figure for those costs alone is equal to nearly £40 for every person in Birmingham, say town hall chiefs.

And the total burden on taxpayers is even higher once state benefits and educations costs have been included, said researchers for Birmingham city council, who used police authority data to work out the cost of the gangs’ crimes since the 1970s.

They estimate that a murder drains £1.5million from public funds, an attempted murder more than £500,000 and criminal use of a firearm £169,000.

Commenting on the figures, city councillor Keith Barton, who chairs a council inquiry into gang violence, said: “It would have been cheaper to pay each family a million pounds to keep out of trouble.”

The Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys came to national prominence with the murders of teenagers Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis in a drive-by shooting at a New Year’s party in 2003.

Four men were convicted two years later of the murders of the girls, aged 17 and 18, outside a hair salon in Aston on January 2. The court heard that the gangs live by the creed “Revenge, Revenue, Respect”.

Fiona McEvoy, spokeswoman for the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “It’s disgusting that just two families have cost the rest of us millions of pounds that could have been spent on schools, hospitals or saved to make life easier for taxpayers.

“Whatever punishment has been dealt clearly hasn’t deterred the younger generations of these families from a life of crime and much more needs to be done to prevent such gangsters draining much-needed cash from the public purse.

“It’s totally unfair that ordinary law-abiding people are hammered for tax to bankroll the incarceration and rehabilitation of those who continually offend. The current system is obviously in need of radical reform both to make us safer and to save our money.” Jackie Mould, chief executive of Be Birmingham, a partnership of council, police, government, NHS and other public services, said early intervention to divert these families from crime would have massively cut costs and improved the lives of victims and offenders.

“If we had invested in job creation, education and training we could have spent a fraction of this,” she said as the figures were published.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, who is promoting David Cameron’s Big Society agenda for greater community action, said he wanted a rethink on tackling social deprivation.

“We spend vast amounts of money ineffectually managing the symptoms of social failure,” he said.

But he added that “we don’t necessarily have the neighbourhood groups and community organisations that are ready to step up and take over managing some of their local affairs”.

Labour’s Graham Allen, the MP for Nottingham North who has worked for improvements on tackling problem families, said: “I do approve of what Francis Maude is trying to elaborate, which is the philosophy of early intervention.

“If you help babies, children and young people develop the social and emotional skills they need to look after themselves and do well in life you are going to save billions of pounds.

“There’s a fantastic evidence base which underlines that if you invest a little bit, particularly in the young ones and their mothers, that will be repaid manyfold.

“In a sense it’s ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ by getting involved really early.”

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