The director Guillermo del Toro once said Idris Elba has “a supernatural gravitational force” and compared him to a “Rodin sculpture … [with] all the turmoil of humanity in his eyes”. It is those qualities – being a magnetic TV and movie star and an activist seemingly carrying the burden of the world on his shoulders – that makes him so compelling in Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis.
The BBC documentary follows Elba throughout 2024, as he mounts a campaign to try to stop knife crime in the UK. The headlines have long been filled with tragic stories of young lives ended by blades, but in the past decade the numbers have almost doubled, with four people in the UK dying from stab wounds every week. Elba first got involved in 2019, posting videos online about how more had to be done to stop it. Since then, he has become more informed and more involved. We watch him meet politicians, law enforcement officers, victims, prisoners, youth workers and trauma specialists to figure out a proactive – rather than reactive – approach, and carry out interventions in the lives of those who might one day become perpetrators.
What takes this from being a good documentary to a great one is just how much complexity and nuance Elba and director Ben Steele are able to contain within its one-hour running time. It covers everything from the economic toll of recidivism to domestic violence in the home as early indicators, the lack of funding for youth programmes, the importance of mentorship and even how images of knife fights on social media can act as an incentive to carry weapons. The film immediately tackles common misconceptions around knife crime as a problem within black and brown urban communities, when in fact 69% of perpetrators are white and it is spreading fastest in Somerset, Bedfordshire and Sussex. Elba puts this gently to Tayla Pitman, the sister of 16-year-old Harold Pitman, who was stabbed to death while watching New Year’s Eve fireworks, and she responds: “Exactly, that’s the first thing that came out when Harry was killed was ‘I bet it was a black person’ and it wasn’t – it was another white boy.” But rather than just using her to vocalise a salient point, Elba extends warm empathy to the young woman, hugging her and commending her strength.
With so many lives ruined, it would be easy to get caught up in the overwhelming statistics of these crimes, but Elba manages to convey just how seismic each loss is. Tayla is not the only person he meets who has been traumatised by knife crime; the charming youth worker Jhemar Jonas’s brother was stabbed to death at 15. Faz Ahmed, who runs a knife amnesty programme, was stabbed nine times on two occasions as a young man. And most harrowingly, Pooja Kanda’s teenage son Ronan had a sword plunged into his heart in a case of mistaken identity. The programme shows us disturbing footage of the event, with Ronan unaware of what is about to happen right up until the sword enters his rib cage from behind. Pooja sits in her son’s untouched bedroom two years on and recalls how each morning she’d rush straight in to his room for a cuddle. She can only say that: “Everyone failed. The police, education systems, the families. All those failures are why my son is not on this side of the bed. Why I’m not able to hug him.”
The film is filled with heartbreak but is still ultimately an optimistic piece of work. It is packed with tangible solutions and examples of effective ways these crimes could be prevented if only those holding the purse strings would invest in solutions such as hospital interventions, knife amnesties and the scheme in Coventry (the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence, or CIRV) that takes 16-year-old Jayden – who was previously excluded from school and “felt naked” without a knife – and puts him on a path to becoming a football coach. It is made all the more maddening when the legislation Elba backed to make it illegal to purchase “zombie knives”, machetes and ninja swords was rejected in May 2024 by the Conservatives. In the aftermath of that news, he seems crushed under the weight of political indifference and can only lament to the camera: “It felt like there was an attachment to swords which may have some traditional, heritage … thing. I just couldn’t understand it.”
Still, Elba reminds us this is “a marathon not a sprint” and he will continue to do all he can to stop so many lives being destroyed by knife crime. By the time the programme ends, he has presented compelling arguments and practical solutions, met with King Charles, the prime minister and the home secretary. Despite making huge strides in his activism, he stays humble and says he considers himself simply “an amplification device”. But whether he’s a supernatural force, a Hackney boy done good or an amplifier for a noble cause, Elba is at the forefront of a vital documentary.
• Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now
