TRIDENT: Stop The Guns aimed to reduce gun crime in London's black community by targeting black males aged 12-16. Research showed this group was most susceptible to gun crime's influence and social problems increased vulnerability. The campaign used music, videos, advertisements and social media to spread their message and normalize alternative perspectives. Gun crime reports fell after the campaign launched and gun seizures increased, indicating the campaign successfully raised awareness and changed attitudes as intended.

1. TRIDENT: Stop The Guns Eli, Sabrina, Adrine

2. Aim The aim of the campaign was to try and reduce the gun crime on the black community, the reason why they did this was because the problem of gun crime in London was mainly hitting the black residents, research showed that 61% of offenders and 30% of victims are of the black community.

3. Target audience black teenagers aged 12-16 were susceptible to gun crime’s glamorous imagery, so the Met tried to focus mainly on this group of people to sway their images of gun crime and demonstrate a different reality so that they would rethink about gun crime and hopefully cut back and stop the people from committing this crime at an early age. Research also showed that the a lot of the possible reasons of this crime rising in this community is because of social problems with the crime offenders, young boys growing up without a male role models, vulnerability, underperformance in schools and poverty. Therefore from the research that the Met conducted it was concluded that their demographic and psychographic group should be aimed at male black teenagers aged 12-16 with social problems, poverty, no respectable role models and underperformance in schools.

4. Focus Group ¾ Teenagers have heard if TRIDENT: Stop The Guns before we done a research about it. They think TRIDENT: Stop The Guns is a good campaign and that they have changed and helped there lives in a different way. They have also thought different about guns and they try to warn other people such as there friends .

5. Examples of commercials and similar products The Fake (firearms and knife crime education programme) is very similar to Trident as they are both looking in similar subjects, knife and gun crime, But Fake also talks about Fake imitations of firearms and how dangerous it can be just carrying around an imitation of a weapon. As part of their campaign the Hampshire polices aim was try and reduce both gun and knife crime and to stop them from happening in the first place THINK! Is a campaign trying to encourage safer driving behaviour and trying to reduce the number of people killed or injured on roads every year, for various reasons. Think! Is a campaign similar to Trident because they are both social enterprises and are government funded. Both Think! And Trident are awareness campaigns trying reducing crime levels on a certain subject, for Trident is it trying to stop gun crime in the young black community. For Think! It is trying to stop dangerous driving for adults and young adults.

6. Effective In the end after the Trident campaign was created gun crime has fallen significantly since the beginning, where in 2006/2007 it was at its lowest level. Calls to Crime Stoppers has also Risen and the Met boosted its detection rate for gun crime from up to 18% in 2003/04 to 25% in 2005/06. This was because Trident had a lot more ways of getting their campaign out there and seen by the many different forms of media and free coverage on news channels, music channels etc... Also despite the fall in gun crime, the number of arrests and seizures of guns, ammunition have risen.

7. To get people more aware they used different forms of media for example; They created Radio adverts sending their message of ‘stop the guns’ and also telling people that they could help by calling Crime Stoppers. Creating an anti-gun music track which they teamed up with grime band Roll Deep to create the track called Badman, the track was seeded to influential Club Djs, music shops, TV and Radio stations, it was also made available by Roll Deeps MySpace page, making it possible to download the track. Even six months after it was released Badman was and still is being downloaded in significant numbers via YouTube. Because the song became such a hit. The song secured free airtime on mainstream music stations. They Made short films and gave it to niche TV station Channel U – this was because their demographic showed that 37% of their viewers were young black Londoners. They sent out the message that if you know someone with a gun, then staying silent means you also have blood on your hands. The ad was designed to use the emotional power of TV and the ad showed characters covering what they touched with blood. Deglamourising the young people’s views on gun crime. The message was also backed up with press, posters, flies and on-going basketball and music sponsorships. Because of the Badman song they also made a four-minute video that was released on their website, YouTube and rwd.com, both the video and the song was very popular and featured on MTV Base and Channel U being played over 345+ on both channels. They made competition to write a fifth verse through Kiss TV and Kiss FM while Choice FM offered Free ringtones of the song to help promote the cause, Trident also has a face book page and a twitter page trying to get their point across social networks

8. Conclusion In my opinion Trident has done well and it is currently a success because their aim was to reduce gun crime in Black communities. And as far as the statistics go, currently it is working.

9. The links from our research http://www.stoptheguns.org/index.html http://think.direct.gov.uk/index.html http://www.stoptheguns.org/dropthegun.html- http://www.Thinkbox.tv http://www.hampshire.police.uk/Internet/news/campaigns/FAKE+Campaign.htm

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