Kodi Westcott was already feeling on edge when the bricks and stones began smashing into his house. Hurled during the third such attack in recent months, they broke every pane of glass facing the street, injuring his mother. The three boys throwing them were hooded and masked and held large knives designed to kill. They appeared to be daring whoever was inside, a judge would later say, to come out and fight.
But Kodi, who was just 16, stayed inside and called his older brother, Bailey, instead. Raised by a neglectful mother after the death of their father, the Westcott boys had shared an intensely deprived childhood on south Bristol’s Hartcliffe estate. Built in the Fifties to house those displaced from the inner-city by slum clearances and the Luftwaffe, its neat rows of houses stretch out for miles.
In drill tracks recorded together under the names G-Boy and Young G-Boy, Bailey and Kodi would flash blue bandannas, brag about ditching school to sell drugs, and rep the “13s” — a gang, or loose affiliation of friends, depending on your perspective, named for their postcode.
“On the 4’s block we lurk and attack; anything red gets shot or stabbed,” a balaclaved brother raps on one song, in reference to the group’s rivals: residents of the adjacent estate of Knowle West. Built several decades before Hartcliffe, it has been renowned for social dysfunction almost since its creation. Writing in the Forties, sociologists described residents who had moved out because it was hard to bring up children decently while those of their neighbours had “often unmentionable standards of behaviour and language”.
These two areas, BS4 and BS13, have for decades maintained a simmering rivalry despite the many residents who count friends and family members on both sides. “Westers” who spend all week threatening to attack those in Hartcliffe will often find themselves scrapping alongside them at a Bristol City game come the weekend, one youth worker told me. Only in recent years has the division descended into more serious violence.
On the January evening last year when Kodi’s house was attacked, therefore, it was clear to the Westcotts where they had to seek revenge. Bailey, 22, summoned his friend Anthony Snook, a local 45-year-old man, who appeared with a car.
With Snook driving, Kodi, his friend Riley Tolliver and two other boys, who remain unnamed due to their age, headed to Knowle West. In an attack that lasted 33 seconds, they leapt from the vehicle and used large knives and a baseball bat to inflict catastrophic injuries to Max Dixon and Mason Rist, two entirely innocent teenage boys who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Across Britain, extreme youth violence is rising. In recent months, children have been stabbed in schools, on buses and in the streets around their homes. The victims and perpetrators seem to grow younger; their weapons more extreme. Over the past 10 years, the number of teenagers killed with a knife or sharp object has increased by 240%. Across the same period, adult knife homicides have seen just a 30% rise.
The government has responded to the horror with a technocratic focus on regulating the implements used to kill. Machetes, zombie knives and ninja swords are being banned, while Amazon is blamed for selling them in the first place. But what drives children to kill remains murkier.
Outside London, Avon and Somerset saw the greatest rise in knife crime over the last year relative to population, according to police data published in January. From 2023 to 2024, Bristol alone saw 400 extra offences involving blades. Following the killing of Max and Mason and then, the following month, the stabbing of 16-year-old Darrian Williams by two younger children, the city has been undergoing a period of reflection.
Serena Wiebe was already grieving her brother’s suicide when her friend was fatally stabbed. “We kind of all grew up together,” she says. “So it was kind of like, ‘wow, I’ve lost two people that I saw as like family.’” The 21-year-old was raised in east Bristol, around Easton and St Pauls, ethnically diverse areas long blighted by drug violence which in recent years have been dubbed some of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods by Time Out, with rising property prices to match.
Here, and further east, gangs from the BS16 and the BS2 postcodes are locked in an internecine conflict. When Williams’ killers approached him, they shouted, “Is that Darrian? Are you 16?” At their trial, his mother held up a green bandana and yelled, “you killed my son for this… is it worth it?” until police officers asked her to sit down.
“They’ll just stab anything at this point,” says Serena. “I’ve noticed now that if you’re in problems with someone, the culture is you have to do something about it. Or there’s people in your ear saying, ‘you need to do something about it’.”
At a low-rise gym close to the roundabout where Easton meets St Pauls, I speak to Serena and other young people working with Empire Fighting Chance, which provides a mix of boxing training and psychological intervention to steer young people away from violence.
Those at the charity are witnesses to knife crime spreading beyond its traditional boundaries. Mariella, 19, had a close friend stabbed to death by her best friend’s boyfriend when she was 14. “I’ve seen kids that have come from relatively good homes,” she says. “Obviously they’ve experienced a few traumatic things, but they’re in situations where they’re safe, they don’t have to carry a knife. And the only reason they’re doing it is because they’re seeing it on social media.”
“Gangs from the BS16 and the BS2 postcodes are locked in an internecine conflict.”
Both women agree that the competition for social status online is crucial. When Serena recently took her 11-year-old relative’s phone and started browsing Snapchat, the first three stories that appeared were of people holding knives. “If you’re seeing it from that young age automatically you’re desensitised to what’s going on,” she says. “I’ve had to have conversations with him being like, ‘this isn’t normal’.”
When she was that age, Mariella says, there were gangs and some had knives but they were carried covertly. “Now it’s almost like having a designer bag, having a big knife in your hand in a picture.”
Both also agree that those from Bristol’s deprived inner-city and outer-rim estates feel locked out of the city’s growing prosperity. “There isn’t hope for young people,” says Serena. “I remember when I was in school all we’d be talking about is how none of us will probably ever be able to own a house because of how expensive it is. A lot of young people are like, ‘what’s the point? I’m not going to be able to have what my parents had.’ If you’re in that situation, you’re going to live with your parents forever. Where is the hope?”
Amid such despondence, postcode gangs provide an alternative form of attachment. “It’s sort of spread everywhere,” says Mariella. “There’s 10s, which is my area, Southmead. Every postcode is now grouping together and becoming like a gang within itself. It is a sense of belonging, I think.”
Since 2013, Desmond Brown has worked to break children from across Bristol out of such a cycle. I meet him in St Pauls, where his charity, Growing Futures, helps young people dealing with school exclusions, violence, and child criminal and sexual exploitation. He believes a “death cult” has developed among some children: those from stable homes are carrying and using knives because of the culture, not necessity.
Brown fields phone calls from parents who have found stashes of knives in the local park or their child’s bedroom, but do not know what to do and, often, are too scared to confront them. If they suspect their children are carrying, Brown tells them, they must search them every time they enter and leave the house. But they are the responsible ones. In other homes, he says, it is parents who supply their children with weapons.
And while family units disintegrate, the traditional structure of organised crime also erodes. Children can find accounts on Snapchat that teach them how to cook crack, take over and “cuckoo” the house of a vulnerable person, establishing their own county line. Youths need only to find a dealer and they can set themselves up as an ultra-violent entrepreneur. They fan out from Bristol into Wales and the southwest of England.
Amid violent crime and a culture of knife carrying, children are consumed by fear. Many wear balaclavas, Brown claims, because they wish to disappear, rather than intimidate. They brandish longer and longer knives so they can keep a gap from those who seek to harm them. Sitting in his office, he mimes an outlandish swordfight to me, waving his arm erratically at great distance from his body.
Officials, who are predominantly white and middle class, meanwhile have little understanding of what drives violence, he claims. Children who feel unsafe are going to arm themselves. “No matter what we say about ‘put down knives’, if you’re going to school and you live in Fishponds and you come into City Academy, you’re driving through ops [rival] territory where people will get on the bus and tell you to run your pockets, ask you who you’re repping, where you’re from, and if you say the wrong thing, you could get stabbed.”
When Kodi was sentenced last December, the judge was clear the teenager was likely to have lived in a state of “hyper-vigilance, keyed up all the time”. He had been targeted by rival gangs because of Bailey’s affiliations, because he is from Hartcliffe and because he is mixed race, said Justice May. Amid postcode hostility, carrying knives had been normalised by the adults around him. He likely regarded it as necessary for his safety.
When I speak to Mike Vass, Avon and Somerset Police’s strategic knife crime lead, he is keen to show me a densely patterned diagram detailing the influences which lead children to violence. Is their mother struggling with multiple children and a chaotic lifestyle? Who’s their male role model? Are they being sexually abused?
To combat such factors, primary schools in his patch have begun teaching their pupils not to carry knives when they grow up. “My children, their children and beyond is what we are influencing now,” Vass says with an air of fatalism. “What we’re influencing now is not for the most part going to change in a short period of time.”
Reversing the effects of decades of cuts to frontline services will take 30 years, Vass claims. His parents used to worry that he might smoke and drink; he worries that his two sons will be stabbed.
Revelations from the report prepared on Kodi Westcott by the Youth Justice Service make bleak reading on the influences that shaped him. He missed most of his schooling. His educational level was between seven and 10 years old. His childhood, said May, was one of “scarcely believable neglect and deprivation”.
After his arrest, by contrast, Kodi behaved well. Youth justice workers who examined him said that had he received more nurture his crime might have been prevented. He expressed sorrow for his actions, and May told the court she believed him.
When I visit Hartcliffe, I walk south past children zipping around on souped-up dirt bikes, and head into a large Morrisons on the outskirts of town. At the newspaper display, I see Kodi’s face staring up from the cover of the Bristol Post.
Now sentenced to at least 23 years for murder and detained in a secure children’s home, he has somehow obtained a phone, created an Instagram account, and begun posting mocking references to the 33 seconds it took him to kill and his victims “up in his coffin”.
“Love to everyone showing love to my ting,” he has written to his followers. “This is only the start trust me.”
