US Edition
A Nelson Mandela associate in charge of defusing gang violence in one of Colombia’s most violent cities is helping a Bristol boxing club tackle alarming knife crime rates.
Santiago Uribe Rocha, chief resilience officer of Medellín, formerly the world’s No 1 murder hotspot, is supporting efforts by the south-west venue to steer youngsters away from trouble.
Martin Bisp, a boxing coach who is now chief executive of the gym’s charity offshoot Empire Fighting Chance, sought international help after concluding “we cannot police our way out of this”.
Three teenagers and a 30-year-old man have been stabbed to death on the streets of Bristol this year. Mr Bisp came into contact with Mr Rocha after being left reeling by the October 2021 murder of 18-year-old Dontae Davis, who was once a regular at his gym in inner-city St Agnes.
“He’d come to us at 14 and was a kid that we cared for,” explained Mr Bisp, who previously volunteered as a trainer. “I think we were shocked at how the system had failed him. So we started to be much more intentional about our part in helping violence reduction and operating in a space where we could become much more deliberate.”
As well as working closely with Mr Rocha, who was an associate of Mandela for more than a decade before moving to Colombia, Mr Bisp shares ideas on helping communities via an international inner cities network led by Alfredo Malaret Baldo, of the University of San Diego.
“The network is composed of 24 city governments and over 40 organisations and international organisations,” Mr Malaret Baldo explained.
“One of the things that we do is to translate research into action, and in this case, we do extensive analysis of violence prevention. As part of that analysis, we went to Bristol and I spent a significant amount of time in Bristol trying to understand the context on how violence happens in the city, who are the groups involved, why and what are the levers that you can pull.
“One of the most striking findings of my time in Bristol was that Empire Fighting Chance was one of the strongest levers to reducing youth violence because of its credibility and legitimacy. They have a community which is established, especially with at-risk youth.”
Truth and reconcilation
Mr Rocha, who previously worked at the Colombian Embassy in South Africa, once had regular exchanges with President Mandela, and involved him and Desmond Tutu in intelligence sharing as part of efforts to reduce street crime.
“Colombia was very interested about the model of South Africa, not only the truth and reconciliation, but also how the peace was built from bottom up and basically done with local peace committees in South Africa,” he explained. He was appointed chief resilience officer in 2013 of Medellín and has been in regular contact with Mr Bisp in recent months.
“An entire delegation from Bristol came to Medellín,” he explained. “We exchanged some good practices of what was done in the city, from being the most dangerous to now being a city that is no longer even part of the top 50 most dangerous cities of the world.
“We talked about it and I ended up going to Bristol to gain understanding better. Empire Fighting Chance – what they do, how they build their gym and the practice. And from my experience, it’s probably one of the most amazing institutions of violence prevention that I have ever seen in my world.”
Drawing on a lifetime of work in dangerous communities, Mr Rocha warned that the UK was in desperate need of community-led networks to break up gang violence.
“If you don’t really start a systematic process of violence prevention, engaging with youngsters, some British cities will really end up in major problems of crime, violence and gangs,” he said. “If you don’t really start tackling new approaches like the Empire Fighting Chance… you will have bigger issues in the future. That’s how it started in Medellín.”
Mr Bisp added: “What we’ve learned from this process is that there are different, more sophisticated ways to tackle violence. You might have 30 kids involved in this group or gang, but often there’s a small percentage, let’s say 10 per cent, that drive most of the violence.
“So actually, the police should be arresting the 10 per cent or whatever it might be, and then we need to be working with communities and groups and citizen institutions with the remaining 27 kids.
“Because, actually, if you do that properly and deliberately, you can maybe stop the rest of them progressing into violence. We cannot police our way out of this.”