Irresponsible reporting on knife crime that depicts ethnic minority and other youngsters as inherently criminal and out of control is alienating young people and could be counterproductive, the head of a cross-party parliamentary commission on youth violence has said.

On Monday 23 January, shortly after 3pm, the regular din of children turning out of the Capital Academy secondary school in north-west London was interrupted by a sudden hush. “All the kids were running around like usual,” said one neighbour. “But then it just went quiet. I got up to draw the curtains and saw kids running away, screaming.”

Shortly before I left the US in 2015, where I’d been reporting for 12 years, I wrote a book about all the children and teens who had been shot dead in America in a single day. The aim was to both tell the stories of those who had perished and explore the themes that emerged from their deaths. When the book came out in Britain last year several people at readings asked if I’d ever considered doing something similar here.

When it comes to the roles they are assigned in Hollywood, African American actors have every right to be aggrieved. Once depicted only as nannies, pimps, prostitutes, thieves, simpletons and savages, the possibilities have grown in recent times but the opportunities are nowhere near where they could or should be.

It says something about the state of affairs we’re in when George W. Bush emerges from the dung heap of history ostensibly smelling like roses. Were Bush from a less powerful country—one that has to follow rules it had no part in making, rather than one that sets rules it has no problem violating—he would be at The Hague before a war-crimes tribunal.