Freedom of Information Request Reference No: I note you seek access to the following information:
I am interested in obtain two reports provided for you by London Metropolitan University. The report is:- Operation Stabiliser: Gang and Group Based Delinquency in Hackney (2005) by Hallsworth, S. and Young, T. and also - Urban Collectives: Gangs and Other groups, Report for Operation Cruise, by Hallsworth, S. and Young, T. (2006)
DECISION Please find attached to the end of this email a document entitled "Urban Collectives: Gangs and Other groups, Report for Operation Cruise, by Hallsworth, S. and Young, T. (2006)" Regarding the second report entitled "Operation Stabiliser: Gang and Group Based Delinquency in Hackney (2005) by Hallsworth, S. and Young, T." It has been decided to fully exempt this report under sections 31(1)(a)(b) & 40(2)(a)(b) (3)(a)(b) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act).
Specialist Crime & Operations
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LONDON ~ . metropolitan e• ; • .~ university • •
FINAL DRAFT
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. . . . . . . . . . . Urban Collectives :
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Gangs and other Groups
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A Report prepared for the Metropolitan Police Service and Government Office for London, by Simon Hallsworth and Tara Young , Centre for Social and Evaluation Research, London Metropolitan
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University
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Forewo rd
Following a number of incidents involving groups of youths across London in 2000, I established Operation Cruise within the Metropolitan Police Service with a remit to examine the nature and scale of gang related incidents across London and to provide policy advice to communities and law enforcement agencies .
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Though a survey conducted by Operation Cruise bought to light the existence of many such groups across the Metropolitan Police District areas, it became clear that, as a police service, we knew little about the general nature of gangs and even less about whether these groups were developing into the threat often sensationalised in the media . Our original research brought to light there was little consistency in the way people defined the gang and applied the gang label . As a consequence, I came to realise that unless we gained a more accurate grasp of what the gang menace and phenomenon was, we were in danger of applying the term in a highly problematic way. After all, not all groups of young people who hang around are gangs, even if they look like they are! Consequently, if we want to use the term gang accurately we needed to know precisely what groups it would be appropriate to apply it to . In the context of a society that has, as the authors of this report observe, `rediscovered the gang' getting real about its nature, and the risks and dangers it poses was urgent.
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It was against this background that the Metropolitan Police Service decided to commission the Centre for Social Evaluation Research at London Metropolitan University to study the gang problem . We wanted to know what had been written on the subject and what this literature had to teach us ; we also wanted to obtain a better grasp of how to approach the problem of the gang. Together with our communities, we are dedicated to making London a safer place; we wanted to consider what interventions could be directed at reducing the risks gangs and other groups caused .
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I believe this report provides answers to some of the questions we sought to find about gangs . It carries academic rigour, and was composed following a long process of field research across London and beyond, with young people and practitioners . Its findings are both stimulating and provocative and are intended to promote public debate on issues that impact upon us all. This is a valuable document. I would like to thank all those who have participated in its production. I particularly single out Simon Hallsworth and Tara Young and commend them for their commitment, dedication and hard work.
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Commander Andre Baker New Scotland Yard Metropolitan Police Service
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FOREWORD ........................................................................................................................ II EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ..................................................................................................1
1 . INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................... 7 RESEARCH AIMS AND OBJECTIVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
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STRUCTURE ... . .... . .... . ..... .... . .... . . .... .... . ..... . .... ..... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . ..... . .... . ... . ...... .... . .... . ..... .... . .... ...
2 . THE CLASSIC AMERICAN GANG RESEARCH TRADITION ..................11 SOCIAL ECOLOGY AND THE GANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 ANOMIE, STRAIN AND THE GANG
. ..... . ... . ..... . .... . ... . ......... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . .... . . .... . ... . . ..... .... . .... . 14
SUBCULTURE AND THE GANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 THE CLASSICAL TRADITION REVISITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9
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3 . CONTEMPORARY US GANG RESEARCH . . .... . ... . . . ... . .... . . .. . . . ... . ... . . ... . . . .. . . .... . . .. . . . . 24 ADMINISTRATIVE CR IMINOLOGY AND THE GANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 THE CULTURAL CRIMIN OLOGICAL TRADITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
THE GENDER TURN .. . .... ...... . ... . .... . ..... . ... . .... .... . . .... . .... ..... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . ..... . .... . ... . . ..... .... . .... . 3 3
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4. THE BRITISH TRADITION ........................................................................................ 40 THE PERENNIAL NATURE OF THE GANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
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SUBCULTURE AND PARENT CULTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1
SUBCULTURE AND STYLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 THE REDISCOVERY OF THE GANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2 5. LEARNING THE LESSONS . .. . . . ... . . .. . . . ... . . ... . . .. . . . .... . ... . . . ... . .... . . .. . . . ... . . ... . ... . . . .. . . .... . . .. . . . . 54 LESSONS LEARNED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4 TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
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6. RETHINKING COLLECTIVE DELINQUENCY ............................................. 62 THE PEER GROUP (PG) . ..... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . ........ . ..... . .... ..... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . ..... . .... . ... . ..... . .... . .... . 64 THE GANG . ..... .... . ..... . .... .... . ..... . .... ..... . . ... . .... . ..... . ... . ..... . .... . .... . ..... .... . .... . . ... ..... . ... . ..... . .... . .... . 68 THE ORGANISED CRIME GROUP (OCG) .... ..... . . ... . .... . ..... . ... . ..... . .... . .... . ..... .... . .... . . .... .... . .... . 74
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THE CRIME NETWORK .. .... . ..... . .... ..... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . ..... . .... . ... . ...... .... . .... . . .... .... . ..... . .... .... . .... . 79 CONCLUSION .. .... . ..... . .... ..... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . ..... . .... . ... . ......... . .... . .... . ..... . ... . .... . . .... . ... . . ..... .... . .... . 80 7 . TOWARDS AN INTERVENTION STRATEGY . . ... . . .. . . . .... . ... . . . .. . . .... . . .. . . . ... . .... . . .. . . . . 82
RETHINKING THE SUBJECT OF INTERVENTION : GROUPS NOT THE GANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
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TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF INTERVENTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 CONFRONT ING THE RISKS POSED BY THE PEER GROUP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
CONFRONT ING THE RISKS POSED BY THE GANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 CONFRONT ING THE RISKS POSED BY ORGANISED CRIME GROUPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
8. CONCLUSION........................................................................................................108 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................112
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BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................112
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Executive Summary Research aims and objectives
Following rising concerns about the street gang, The Metropolitan Police Service an d
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Government Office for London commissioned the Centre for Social and Evaluatio n
Research at the London Metropolitan University to study the gang phenomena in the UK . The research had three key strands . The aims of the research were :
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To review classic and contemporary accounts of the gang phenomena and produce a literature review
To identify gang structure and organisation as it may operate in the UK ; and
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To assess what works and what can be done to reduce the risk and dangers posed b y
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gangs and other delinquent group s
This report presents the results of the literature review and outlines a provisional attempt to
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address the problem of the street gang and other delinquent groups . By analysing the composition, structure, organisation and criminality of a variety of groups, it presents a general theory of the kind of delinquent formations active in the UK . The report concludes
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by offering an alternate way of understanding collective delinquency and presenting an intervention philosophy designed to help counteract the problems posed by group delinquency.
The literature review
Profiles the history of American and British research on the gang and highlights th e different conceptual perspectives on the gang as these have developed in each
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country. Traditionally, the gang, in American terms, was conceived as an ethnically homogenous turf-based fighting group with distinctive rituals and symbols . Following an initial engagement with American gang culture in the 1960s the British research tradition moved away from studying `street corner societies' and focussed
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instead on examining youth subculture and style. With the rediscovery of the gang this focus has now changed .
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Far from being a problem of defective individuals collective delinquency is a social phenomena that is heavily influenced by the environmental conditions in which
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people live . Evidence shows that gangs typically emerges as a response to social,
economic and political exclusion and marginalisation, while group solidarity is often solidified in the face of external challenges to the gang or its members .
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Involvement in the gang is principally motivated by benign reasons such as the desire for friendship or the need to belong . What is distinctive to the gang however is its relationship to crime and violence. These are viewed as in some respect intrinsic to
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the identity and practice of the group and there use is validated as a vehicle through which to accumulate material goods illegally, as a space in which a viable masculine identity may be proved and consolidated, or as a transgressive recourse by which the
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Far from being different to there peers gang members are remarkably similar in most
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other respects
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boredom of everyday life is spectacularly transcended .
Most delinquent groups/gangs are not structured, organised, hierarchical units, but fluid entities with shifting membership, little cohesion and a limited shelf life . In other words, gang membership is often a transitional adolescent phase for most young people who drift in an out of groups and delinquent behaviour .
• Recent years have witnessed a shift in gang research from an interpretative
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sociological perspective (which sought to understand the dynamic of the gang in situ by observing the lived experience of young men and women within their own environment) to a more qualitative administrative approach .
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Though group identity is sustained by the cultural innovation of its members it is
also as much constructed and reconstructed by the popular media . Through the
vehicle of `moral panics' gangs have been constructed as `folk devils' and suitable
enemies . Indeed the contemporary rediscovery of the gang can itself be constructed as much a product of the response it has provoked as an issue of dangerous groups
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who live in dangerous areas .
Early gang literature adopted and reproduced highly androcentric and misogynist representations of the gang and its members . Within this gaze females were
portrayed as sexual deviants or gender transgressors . Contemporary literature on the gang shows how forms of masculinity and femininity associated with it can be understood as a mechanism through which males and females with little material or
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social capital `do gender' as a situational accomplishment .
Far from considering the range of delinquent groups who engage systematically in crime, gang research has traditionally and disproportionately focused on Black and
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other minority ethnic group experience . This ethnocentric gaze has itself created the context where it is now difficult to disengage the concept of the gang from ethnic
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groups who have, historically, come to represent the archetypal gang member .
Rethinking Collective Delinquency
This section argues that the key to understanding delinquency in collective life is to look beyond the structure of the gang towards conceiving it as one delinquent formation amongst others within a criminal network . All of these must be studied alone and in relation to each
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other
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Different forms of street collective are distinguishable from each other in relation to the degree of risk and danger they pose to the wider population .
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The report identifies three types of collective and each can be grouped according to
the degree of risk it poses on what we term the Cruise Pyramid of Risk . These three groups are respectively: the Peer Group, the Gang and the Organised Crime Group .
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The peer group is the most common form of group that engages in delinquent
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behaviour but poses the least threat . As a derivative of the peer group, the gang, is a rarer phenomenon but poses more risks than the peer group . It is situated in the middle of the pyramid of risk . The organised crime group sits at the apex of the pyramid and poses the greatest risk to others .
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Peer groups are relatively small, unorganised and transient entities that coalesce in public spaces . Members are usually friends who share similar life trajectories and
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experiences, and simply `hang around' together. Delinquency and criminal activity is not integral to the identity or practice of this group but it can occur in certain situational contexts . Offending by this group is periodic, spontaneous, intermittent and opportunistic. The offences are often low-level nuisance/anti-social in nature
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with little to no engagement in serious assault or acquisitive crime .
The Gang is a relatively durable, predominantly street based group who see
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themselves and are seen by others as a discernible group and for whom crime and violence is intrinsic to the identity of group practice and solidarity . It is a mutation of the peer group . Crime, especially violent crime in the gang is instrumental as well as expressive as it involves that construction and reconstruction of a distinctive form of culture and masculinity.
Gang formations in the UK take two principle forms : The territorial fighting unit and the economic gang. The former lays claim to a particular territory over which it
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attempts to impose sovereign control . This group specialises in a particular form of criminal activity and it is this that promotes solidarity within the group . The gang will recruit, coerce and intimidate others .
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The organised crime group is composed principally of men for whom involvemen t in criminal activity is intrinsic to their identity and practice . Crime is an occupation and business venture. In economic terms organised crime groups exercise
disproportionate control over the illegal means and forces of crime production. It is likely that this group would have mutated out of the gang who stands in a
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subordinate relation to it.
Towards and intervention strateg y
This section makes the case for a balanced and proportionate response to group
delinquency; one that recognises that group delinquency (especially in its more extreme
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forms) has its roots in multiple deprivation and extreme marginalisation . It highlights the dangers of meeting social exclusion with repression or by recourse to policies that are predicated themselves on exclusion. While recognising the need for effective law enforcement the report emphases the overriding importance of utilising pro-social and preemptive intervention strategies . Principally, this section supports the view that the way to
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address peer group/gang delinquency is through bottom-up community-led integrative initiatives derived from local knowledge and implemented by local people . In short, it offers
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an alternative intervention philosophy that takes account of the following factors :
Different types of delinquent groups pose different risks and so require different form s of intervention. Applying a one-size-fits all model or uncritically utilising an imported off-the-shelf package could be counterproductive . Intervention strategies should be tailor-made and shaped to fit the issues that pertain to particular areas and groups that
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operate within them .
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A sensible, proportionate and balanced response to group delinquency is preferable t o law and order techniques . Utilising heavy-end suppression techniques to tackle the risk s and dangers posed by delinquent groups is socially destructive unless it is balanced wit h alternative non-repressive strategies and interventions .
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Where problematic issues emerge in relation to the behaviour of particular groups car e needs to be taken to locate where the group sits on the pyramid of risk and what
measures would be appropriate to address the particular risks it poses . Research shows that aggressive and repressive measures can have a unifying affect on the group and
facilitate its transformation into a higher risk group . These tactics should be avoided as
An ideal prevention/intervention strategy would put in place initiatives that seek t o prevent or limit movement up the Cruise Pyramid of Risk and encourage downwar d
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movement within it and its expulsion from the pyramid altogether .
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wherever possible.
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1.
INTRODUCTION
Over the last few years there has been an upsurge in media and political interest in gangs and the risks and dangers they are alleged to pose to British society . The nature of the threat identified in such narratives range from nuisance behaviour posed by groups of young
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people `hanging around' to stories of group rape and gun related violence . While much
reporting appears directed at the risks posed by indigenous criminal groups, these fears have been recently been conjoined with reports of foreign criminal gangs now active on British soil. These include criminal groups from the Balkans, the Near East (including Turkish and Kurdish), China & Jamaica . The offences in which these groups are allegedly involved include orchestrating the illegal import of firearms, drugs and sex slaves .
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Cumulatively, the impression promoted by such reports is that structured organised criminal groups and local youth gangs are becoming more prevalent (and visible) while the offences in which they engage have become more serious . Indeed, according to a recent BBC report, instrumental `gangland' style violence is increasingly affecting innocent people and striking fear into the local communities (BBC News 2002), while according to an Ofsted report a
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`growing gang culture' is now observable in Britain's schools . '
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In response to what is often intimated as a gang epidemic, government ministers have responded to public concern by pledging that they both recognise the problem and are serious in confronting it . A recent Home Office white paper directly identifies the `frightening number of youth gangs on street corners' ; while the (ex) Home secretary, David Blunkett, lamented the extent to which `organised criminal groups are now targeting the UK' .n In order to demonstrate that political will is backed up by action, new powers have recently been delegated to the police to deal with the gang menace . These now provide them with the authority to disperse or arrest groups of young people congregating in public
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spaces especially in areas known to have a problem with teenage gangs or with individuals
causing distress (or likely to cause distress) to local residents (Home Office Circular 04/2004) . At the same time a 'US style' crackdown on organised criminal groups has been unleashed . Spearheaded by the newly formed Serious & Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) '° its mission
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is to deter and disrupt organised criminal activity in the UK and to `turn back the tide' o f organised criminals migrating from international frontiers .
Though well debated by the media, and taken seriously by politicians, there remains little
academic research on gangs conducted in the UK . Insufficient information is available on
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the prevalence of gangs, their structure and the risks and dangers they pose to themselves and others. One problem this poses for practitioners is that there is little information
available that might enable them to better understand the gang phenomenon in a more sober way; one which could counteract the sensationalist viewpoint adopted by the tabloid media . Another problem to arise from this deficit in knowledge is the propensity for individuals to turn towards American literature to find answers to the gang question . While this academic tradition remains a useful point of reference problems remain with uncritically accepting its
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findings . To begin with, it is not an established fact that the kind of phenomena identified as gangs in the US also exists here in the UK, or in the same form . Secondly, far from making the complex reality that is the gang more readily understood by evoking the lessons of American gang research, its application could misrepresent the very reality it is supposed to be representing. Finally the term `gang' is by no means neutral - it comes to us replete with a
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package of meanings and significations acquired from America (e.g. the image of the gang as represented in such films as West Side Story or Boys `N the Hood) - which if,
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unproblematically applied to make sense of what British youth do, could misrepresented and overstate the danger they pose .
Research aims and objectives
Following rising concerns about the dangers posed by gangs, coupled with the lack of accurate information on them, the Metropolitan Police Service has commissioned the Centre
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for Social Evaluation Research at London Metropolitan University to study the `gang' phenomena in the UK . The remit of the research has three key strands . These include:
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1 . Conducting a literature review of recent and relevant documents on the gan g phenomena ;
2. Identifying delinquent group / gang structure and organisation as it may be observed to operate in the UK;
3. Assessing what works and what can be done to reduce the risks and dangers posed b y
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gangs .
This report presents the results of a literature review and outlines a provisional attempt to address the problems posed by delinquent groups in the UK . By analysing the composition, structure, organisation and criminality of different forms of delinquent groups, we develop a general theory of delinquent formations active in the UK. The report concludes by
developing an intervention strategy that is designed to help address the risks and dangers
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posed by them .
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The report begins with an historical overview of literature on gangs as this has developed in the UK and the US . We begin by examining the classic American gang research tradition that
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begins with the pioneering work of the Chicago School and trace the subsequent development of this tradition through the `strain theory' of Robert Merton to the subcultural approaches of Albert Cohen and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin . In chapter 3 we consider more contemporary developments within the American research tradition. We examine, in particular, the development of an empirically-based administrative criminological approach to the gang, and consider, in opposition to this, the development of more ethnographically grounded attempts to understand gang culture as developed within the cultural criminological tradition . We conclude this chapter by examining recent
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developments within gang research that highlights issues of gender as a basis for gang affiliation and conduct . In chapter 4 we consider the British research tradition . In this section we show how early attempts to apply the insights of American subcultural theory to
the British context were superseded by a refocusing of research effort away from the territorial gang towards youth style and subculture . The chapter concludes by examining the
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contemporary [re]discovery of the gang and assesses the state of play of current research . In chapter 5 we examine the lessons this review of the gang literature has to teach us and develop on the basis of a critical engagement with this literature a framework for
reinterpreting collective delinquency in the UK. We conclude by recognising the gang as only one group among others that also require consideration . Finally, drawing upon historical
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texts and recent ethnographic research, a general model of collective delinquency is
developed in chapter 6 . The report concludes by examining best practice in relation to
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confronting the delinquent groups that are identified here .
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2. THE CLASSIC AMERICAN GANG RESEARCH TRADITION
Given the limited amount of research conducted on gangs in the UK, most of what is
known about them is derived from the United States where the phenomena has been, and
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continues to be, widely researched . Before considering what the British research tradition
has to offer, we will track the history of gang research as it unfolds in the American context . Though, as will become clear, different theorists approach the gang phenomena in different ways, there are commonalities within the American tradition as a whole, which can be [simply] reduced several key overriding themes : that is that gangs are (a) a predominantly working class male phenomena ; (b) that typically emerge in poor deprived areas ; and (c) are predominantly delinquent in nature. Moreover, within the American tradition there has
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been a tendency to focus upon minority ethnic groups creating, what is predestined to be, an over-representation of ethnic minority involvement among gang members . Though this view has recently been challenged (see Campbell (1984) and Miller (1998)) these core designations still remain.
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We begin this review by considering the pioneering work of the Chicago School looking, in particular, at the seminal work of Frederic Thrasher (1927) and Clifford Shaw & David
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McKay (1942) . Not only did these theorists reinvent the sociological study of urban delinquency their work has contributed to, and heavily influenced, subsequent American and British attempts to understand gang structure and formation .
Social Ecology and the Gang
In an attempt to understand the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency in urban societies, the
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Chicago School pioneered one of the first theoretical analyses of the gang .' The Chicago
School scholars reasoned that human behaviour (including criminality) was heavily influenced by the social conditions within that environment . In what would become a regular refrain in subsequent theories of the gang the Chicago School was the first to argue
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that stable, organised environments with settled homogenous populations promoted lawabiding behaviour whilst disorganised, unstable and diverse populations encouraged delinquency and crime.
Using a `social ecologicaP framework Chicago School scholar Fredric Thrasher (1927)
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understood the gang to be a youthful response to the `social disorganisafion' apparent in
Chicago during the 1920's . He argued that social disorganisation was the result of cultural conflict between diverse populations thrown together as a consequence of mass
industrialisation and migration. In a turbulent environment (where different cultures vied to maintain the vestiges of their own tradition) the confused young were driven into forming their own social organisations . The gang, considered in this way, represented an opportunity for young men to acquire status and recognition, and begin their struggle as individuals and
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as members of a discernible group for independence and economic prosperity. Thus the gang became a conduit through which the young could resolve cultural conflicts and construct new identities forged by rules, loyalties and rituals set to their own agenda . In sum, it offered the urban poor a `substitute for what society fails to give . . . it fills a gap and affords an escape' (Thrasher, 1927 : ?) . From this frame of reference, Thrasher identified 1,313 gangs
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within Chicago . These `interstitial' entities evolved from spontaneous group activity and where solidified by conflict with other groups . This view, as we shall observe, (below) has
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been further developed in contemporary American literature .
In a similar vein, Clifford Shaw & David McKay (1942) argued that the ecology within deprived inner urban areas mitigated against the orderly transmission of values stressing lawabiding behaviour. Put simply, the interaction between people and the built environment in which they lived had a significant affect on their behaviour . disorganised environments were by their nature characterised by social disruption and cultural disequilibrium and this created a space in which delinquent values could emerge and be disseminated . What drove this
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process forward they argued was the migration of migrants into the expanding urban metropolis . As different ethnic migrants arrived in Chicago they would gravitate to areas that offered the cheapest accommodation and engage in the competitive quest for surviva l
1 The Chicago School was named after the sociology department at Chicago University where they worked .
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with other [poor] groups . As one group managed to acquire more wealth, so it would move
on and out to more affluent areas . Other new groups would move in to fi ll the empty spaces and the process would repeat itself. Ecology theory rests on the hypotheses that human
behaviour is not [greatly] influenced by individual characteristics or personal interaction but on a set of natural forces emanating from social conditions . By far, the most important
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natural force is competition - in this case competition by urbanites for scarce and limited resources available to them. Within the city environment the competitive struggle for
survival by groups leads people take adaptive measures and create other specialised natural spaces that enhance their chance of survival - i .e. crime and the formation of gangs . Thus the Chicago School scholars concluded that urban centres retained high levels of
delinquency despite significant changes in the population, which led them to deduce that delinquency (within a given area) was the product of economic instability and living
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conditions rather than the individual characteristics of urban inhabitants .
The idea that criminality could be a response to .social environments was, at the time, novel. It challenged the dominant view of delinquency as biologically or genetically determined and provided the principles on which much subsequent criminological thought on gangs was
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based. Notwithstanding the uniqueness of urban ecology theory its neglect of culture, and the presumption that city was a `living' organism, lead to its unpopularity as an explanatory
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tool for understanding deviance and ultimately its demise . It is arguable, however, that urban ecology remains - despite its limits - an important resource on which subsequent theories on gang formation have drawn . Moreover, the ecological model presented by the Chicago School helped to forge a new way of researching youth delinquency. In this sense, rather than trying to understand delinquent behaviour by formal interviews conducted outside of the environment in which young people lived, the Chicago School chose to study individuals within their social world . The use of participant observation methodology and
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ethnographic research as a tool for studying the gang began with this tradition .
`Social construction theories such as those developed by the Chicago School also remain
important because, if we accept that collective delinquency is determined by social environments, then it must be studied in relation to it . This is one of the lessons that contemporary quantitative and administrative approaches to the gang appear to have
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forgotten. It is, however, not only the interaction of structures and processes within the local urban milieu that creates the context in which entities such as gang occur . The nature and organisation of industrial capitalist society itself is also a crucial factor in creating the basis for the delinquent solution - which might resolve into group-related delinquency. This
factor was systematically explored in the work of the American criminologist Robert Merton
considering Merton's work in some detail .
Anomie, strain and the Gang
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and it is to his work that we now turn . Given his importance and influence it is worth
For Merton a society can be understood in terms of the social ends it induces its members to aspire towards and the availability of the means by which these ends can be legitimately
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obtained . In America people are socialised into a value system that celebrates the acquisition of status with the accumulation and display of material wealth . Within this value system people are led to believe that everyone is able to achieve these ends and, ultimately, live the `American dream'. To this extent what is unique to America is that its value system also perpetuates the view that everyone irrespective of culture, biology, social difference or socio-
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economic position has equal access to success (Merton 1938) .
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Just as American society defines what people should aspire towards, so this value system also proscribes the legitimate means by which these goals can be socially attained. Ideally, this is [supposed] to be via success at school, college and university and by successful navigation through the occupational hierarchy. Crime and delinquency enter this equation Merton suggests because, whilst the ends to which members should aspire are universalised (i .e. available to everyone) the legitimate means by which these ends are supposed to be secured are not . In other words, not everyone is able to obtain access to the schools, colleges, and work places necessary to succeed and not everybody will succeed in them . At the same time
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American society places a far higher premium on securing socially desirable ends than it does on obtaining them through legitimately proscribed means . What this creates is a disjunction between means and ends, and this creates the basis for `strain' within the structure of American society, which provokes what Merton identified as various `delinquent adaptations' or `solutions'.
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If you are wealthy or are born into an affluent family then, from the outset, you have
privileged access to the means by which success and wealth is supposed to be obtained .
Wealthy children routinely go to wealthy and prestigious schools and universities that are
unavailable to the poor who are denied access to this privilege. Their parents are also likely
to hold prominent positions within the occupational hierarchy and together with a privileged
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education this population is well positioned to obtain the material success they have been taught to desire . Unsurprisingly, this population is likely to accept both the ends society equates with success as legitimate, as well as the means by which this is supposed to be socially realised . For this reason Merton terms this population `conformists' .
For those who lack such `innate' privileges and who have been bequeathed lower life
chances the stage is set for a series of alternative adaptations some of which may resolve
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themselves into delinquent solutions . This occurs as a response to the psychic shock they experience in resolving the contradiction between being socialised to desire things society does not allow you possess (though the limited means it makes available to realise them) . It is this experience of `strain' (hence the name strain theory) that Merton argued explained criminality. Many people will, Merton argues, come to accept that they cannot succeed in
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`living the dream' through legitimate routes and thus obtain the grail of material wealth they have been taught to equate with the good life . But most, nevertheless, conform to the
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established rules and struggle on regardless . This population Merton terms the `ritualists' . These individuals conform to the means society holds out as legitimate but realise that desirable ends are unobtainable.
Others, however, realise that they will not succeed through legitimate means but instead of resolving their frustration into ritualism, they become what Merton terms `innovators' . In other words, they continue to aspire to obtain material success and status but develop alternative means to acquire it . Acquisitive crimes, such as shoplifting, robbery, theft and
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fraud are, in Mertonian terms, a form of innovation considered in these terms . To cite a
case of collective delinquency well known in the British context, the Kray Twins remain paradigmatic exemplars of this spirit of innovation. Born into an impoverished family in an impoverished neighbourhood in London's deprived East End they had limited life chances . Lacking access to the legitimate means by which a good life could be bought they resolved
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the `strain' of unrequited desire by innovating in Merton's terms . In this case, by mobilising the one resource they did possess (which was a propensity for violence) that made them, b y the 1960s, millionaires and the darlings of England's tawdry celebrity circuit .
Merton identified two other forms of deviant adaptation . As these can also help explain
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group delinquency they bear considering here . Both arose out of what he saw as an
individual or groups rejection both of the ends society held out as desirable, as well as its legitimate means . One response to strain resolved itself into what Merton termed
`retreatism' . This entailed abandoning the goal of material wealth as well as engaging in the legitimate means by which it is supposed to be appropriated . This delinquent solution typically resolves itself into what can be self-destructive behaviour such as heroin addiction or alcoholism. Another response to strain also involved abandoning the goal of material
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wealth and replacing it with another goal . Radical political mobilisation would exemplify what Merton aptly termed `rebellion' . The rise of new age travellers would be a non-violent expression of this impulse . The action of terrorist groups like the Red Brigades or the IRA exemplifies a more violent movement.
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Implicit in strain theory is the assumption that since the working and lower classes are less likely to have equal access to legitimate means of social advancement (education, finances,
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employment etc), they are more likely to engage in non-conformist (i .e. deviant) ways of realising their goals . As with the Chicago School, this theory also tends to predict more crime and delinquency among the poor than the affluent, thus the collective delinquency of the wealthy (corporate crime and fraud) are not studied to the same degree . Like the Chicago School, Merton also offered an explanation of delinquent behaviour that is sociological and does not reduce it to an individual's biology or biography . In this context crime and deviance is understood as a rational adaptation to the social situations in which people find themselves . Which is also to say that, under the right conditions, anyone could
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potentially become a criminal.
Where strain theory falls short is that it deals in structures and not processes . It does not explain why some people conform whilst others innovate or retreat when each share a similar set of life chances . Given that large numbers of people live in poverty, one obvious
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criticism of Merton's approach would be to point out that it predicts higher levels of crime than actually occur . The irony is that the majority of people conform and are not
criminogenic despite experiencing a considerable disjunction between the ends they have
been taught to desire and the lack of available means to gratify them . Finally, this theory also fails to explain a well-recognised aspect of group delinquency which is its irrational and
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expressive nature exemplified, for example, by engaging in acts such as vandalism or `gang
bangs' which do not yeald a material reward . For this we need to turn to subcultural theories and eventually to phenomenology .
Subculture and the gan g
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Drawing upon the legacy of the Chicago school (specifically in relation to the ethnographic research methodology it had pioneered) and heavily influenced by the legacy of Merton this tradition sought to examine the criminal behaviour of groups specifically those who appear like the gang and challenge the conventional culture of society .
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In Delinquent Boys: the subculture ofthegang (1955) Albert Cohen, took issue with Mertonian strain theory . He argued that it is not the strain of being thwarted from achieving economic
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success that creates delinquent adaptations that might lead to the formation of the gang . On the contrary, it was a more proximate source of frustration . This he argued was derived from the experience some working class young people had when come to realise that they are destined to lose `status' in a social system organised around middle-class values . Cohen believed this to be especially acute in the school system .
Schools, in Mertonian terms, are part of the legitimate means by which people seek to achieve material success . As institutional ensembles, however, schools are organised by
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middle class people, according to middle class values, which most middle class children will successfully succeed in navigating their way through precisely because they are middle class .
The experience of not being able to win out in the terms schools establish as legitimate (such as obtaining high grades in exams) is experienced, Cohen argues, by some young working class men as `status frustration' (Cohen 1955) . Status frustration resolves itself (psychologically)
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in to a form of `reaction formation' . In effect, to deal with the anxiety caused by the prospect
of failing, some working class men respond creatively to their situation by forging a group or gang whose values consciously repudiate those of the middle class school system that has
failed them. Against a dominant order that stresses the importance of forward thinking, hard
work, delayed gratification, reserve and abstention from violence, the gang celebrates instead
subculture to which they belong (Cohen 1955) .
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behaviours that are utilitarian, malicious, and negative, and these come to be revered in the
Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960) also found a greater proliferation of gangs in working-class communities and agreed that collective forms of delinquency occur when aspirations are blocked. Where they diverged from Cohen, was with the view that working class youth aspire to middle class values and suffer psychologically as a consequence . For
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these subcultural theorists, working-class youths certainly have aspirations beyond their means, but these are not necessarily middle-class . Consequently, they do not experience `status frustration' or `reaction formation' . In a view closer to Merton than Cohen, and by evoking Edwin Sutherland's `differential association theory' which posited that crime occurs when there is a surplus of justifications that validate it over those that promote law abiding
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behaviour (1939), Cloward and Ohlin proffer a more rationalistic view of why working class
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young people might join gangs .
Like Merton, they also believe that delinquency occurs because there is a structural disjunction between what society codes as success and the social means made available to realise it . As the capitalist system is organised in ways that systematically preclude the poor who simply cannot compete equally for success it is inevitable that some young people will defer from complying to its norms and rules . Although they may experience strain, these young people are free (by virtue of structural inequality) from moral constraints, such as guilt, anxiety etc, and organise themselves into subcultural units that provide support,
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approval and ultimately a rationale for delinquent behaviour. Since deviant behaviour, like all forms of behaviour, is learned from wider social relationships (Sutherland 1939), the type of
delinquent/criminal behaviour selected is dependant upon peer group and other criminal networks operating within a given locality. (Cloward & Ohlin 1960)'
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The Classical Tradition Revisite d
What we see in the classic strain and subcultural theories is a movement towards
understanding deviance as the consequence of personal characteristics and socialisation rather than structural conditions. Essentially, deviance and group affiliation is the
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consequence of the inability of an individual to control the unpleasant psychological
manifestations of strain or frustration, which invariably spill over into law-breaking
behaviour. Moreover, there is a sense of inevitability in the texts, which suggest that working class culture create a value system within the young that manifest itself in group criminality. Integral to the gang literature is the assumption that the dynamics of group membership are so intense that those who become involved in gangs become more criminal the more entrenched in the gang they become and thus more distant from the norms and
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values that define law abiding behaviour. These assumptions, however, are the subject of a set of important critiques that bear considering not least because they remain important today .
In what marked an important challenge to the gang literature, Millar questioned the extent to
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which the kind of deviant counter-cultural values often associated with gang existence, were in fact the products of a pathological delinquent subculture . As Millar noted, being seen to
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be `tough' was hardly a delinquent value so much as a characteristic feature of working class masculine culture . Indeed, far from expressing a counterculture different to and distant from that of dominant culture, gangs simply expressed, albeit in an intensified way, what (certain aspects) of working class culture already contained . In his words, it constituted `a long established, distinctly patterned tradition with an integrity of its own' . In a form, which greatly diverged from the middle classes, this culture coalesced around what Millar identified as six `focal concerns' . These are `trouble', `toughness', `smartness', `excitement', `fate' and `autonomy'. For Millar, what brought working class youth into sharp conflict with
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mainstream society was not the values to which they subscribed (which are widely shared) . The real focus of conflict was that the societal normative legal code was underwritten not by the values of the working class but by the middle-class . What his work also stressed was that the delinquency initiated by gangs was typically expressive and principally non-violent in form, even if aggression was a competence young men had to acquire . Like other
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subcultural theorists, Millar emphasised the fact that gangs and youth collectives are no t usually engaged in a random outpouring of violence. The difference between the gang
member and other young people therefore might not be quite as great as is often imagined.
David Matza (1964) also concluded that there is little difference between juvenile delinquents
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and their law-abiding peers . Far from being submerged in a counterculture external to the dominant one most young men were fully immersed, he argued, in its conventions and
mores . Delinquency is by and large mundane and intermittent. What makes it attractive is not a commitment to a pathological counterculture but the need to transform the mundane routine realities of everyday life into a site and space of excitement . Whilst this process sanctions a conflation of toughness with masculinity which can promote what today is referred to as `antisocial behaviour', for Matza, this culture - and the behaviour it promotes -
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does not herald the advent of a committed criminal career. On the contrary, it equates to a commitment to `subterranean values' . Delinquency (individual and collective) is thus something young people drift into - and subsequently drift out of. Indeed as he warns (and it is as well to remember) that most young people will have abandoned delinquency by the time
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they achieve adulthood.
For Matza, the hold of the dominant culture on the lives of young people is expressed both
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in the fact that it is something they do not break from and by the fact that it is something they re-enter after they drift. Their commitment to the dominant culture, and its mores, is also something that can be observed in the forms of validation delinquents deploy to justify the rules they do break. These Matza and his colleague Graeham Sykes term `techniques of neutralisation' . These are essentially stories that legitimate rule-breaking behaviour. Examples of this would include `they got it coming to them', `everybody does it', and `no one got hurt' . While these narratives express a justification for delinquency on one hand, what they also indicate on the other is just how far the offender in question has actually internalised a
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moral perspective in order to feel the need to engage in them .
If one were to derive from the classical literature a crude picture of young people involved i n the gang, then the young working class people we find here are typically represented as th e antithesis of `good' middle-class children. They are understood as a population who band
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together with malice and out of frustration at their marginalisation in a society whose
structure has denied them access to the means by which wealth and status can be legitimately obtained. The group would be populated by young people who had, in the face of wider exclusion, internalised alternative [sub]cultural deviant values which are tolerant of and which encourage criminal behaviour as an alternative means by which there material
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situation and social status can be enhanced.
Before we turn to consider more recent gang research, it is worth assessing what this classic research tradition has to teach us today . To begin with its strength derives from the sociological insight that deviance in general and collective delinquency in particular is a social phenomena that requires a social explanation . Gangs do not form because people are malsocialised or because of faults in their psychology ; on the contrary their delinquency is
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explicable by references to the choices they make which are, in turn, shaped by the social conditions in which they live . To understand the gang therefore it is necessary to understand social conditions and assess why certain choices were made .
In addition, what this tradition provides are tools that enable us to look at group delinquency
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in ways that recognise, and explain, many of its characteristic forms . From the Chicago School we inherit a research tradition whose insights (and not least methodology) remains
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crucial to understanding group delinquency. In particular, their stress on the relationship between the `natural' ecological condition of space and the emergence of the group is important because, unless this crucial relationship is recognised, we run the risk of detaching the group from the environment that spawned it . As we shall observe later this process is well advanced in many forms of contemporary gang research.
Merton's legacy, like the subcultural tradition that followed it, also remains important for helping us understand our present conditions . From Merton, and the inheritors of his
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tradition, we have been given a set of theoretical tools that allow us to understand group delinquency not simply as an act of evil but as a rational response to the society into which they are socialised . What subcultural theory accomplished was take this insight forward by asking us to consider the various micro-social and economic processes that lead some people to make the choices they do. In this sense they balance Merton's attention to structure with
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a focus on process . Finally, in the critique that subcultural theory itself provoked, we are
given a timely reminder of just how unwise it is to buy into the common sense of `gang talk', which conceives the gang as an alien other . As the critiques of Millar and Matza have
demonstrated, this is not the case . As they show, there are more commonalities that unify the delinquent youth with mainstream youth than the differences that separate and
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distinguish them.
Where strengths are, there are also weaknesses and limitations and these, too, must be recognised. It is arguable, that what this gang research tradition offers is essentially an andocentric approach to understanding the gang . It is an exclusively male tradition, which incorporates a `male-gaze' both from the perspective of the researcher and the research subject (Campbell, 1984) . Within this tradition, `Gangsterism' was assumed to be an entirely
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male activity and part of the male adolescent experience . In other words, it was assumed that `ganging' is not what women did or were in fact capable of doing . As a result much of the early work within the gang research tradition remained essentially gender-blind. (Chesney-Lind, 1997) This may well have been because females engaged less in criminal behaviour and tend to be less violent than their male counterparts or because the female
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involvement in crime was not considered serious enough to warrant detailed inspection or analysis . Whatever the reason for this absence, Chesney-Lind (1997) reminds us that
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historically, and on the rare occasions when (predominantly) male researchers did decide to research female criminality the women viewed as deviants were those who typically engaged in `sexually unacceptable activities' or status offences such as `running away from home', `being in need of supervision', engaging in `habitual truancy', and the like'. (Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn: 11 )
When it came to studying female involvement in the gang it was routinely denounced as an anomaly and dismissed by many researchers . Thrasher, for example found only 5 or 6 `girl
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gangs' in his study of 1,313 . He argued that females do not harbour the `ganging instinct' of boys ; they don't fight and so are not involved (to any great extent) in street gangs but in `sets' and `cliques' (Thrasher 1927) . Similarly, A Cohen (Delinquent boys) found very few girls `running with the gang' and concluded that female subcultural delinquency differed from
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that of their male counterparts in so far as it did not present itself in the form of a `carousing, street-based fighting group' (Cohen, 1963) .
A second criticism of the gang related tradition is that to all intents and purposes, its gaze was not only focussed upon men to the exclusion of women, but upon minority ethnic
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groups to the almost total exclusion of all forms of group delinquency perpetrated by white
people . One consequence of this exclusive gaze on the minority was that it helped to forge what constitutes a recurrent thought in the trajectory of common sense `gang talk', which is to see the gang as a problem, predominantly, of minority ethnic groups . By concentrating exclusively on the gang - to the exclusion of alternative forms of delinquent collective - so it could be argued the roots were laid for a malaise that continues to haunt criminology today . This would be to ignore other delinquent groupings, which are not gangs while creating the
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basis for an all-encompassing label that would generate a research industry disproportionate to the scale of the problem being represented . This failure would not only lead researchers to imagine and re-imagine the ethnic working gang as the most serious form of delinquent group, it led to the development of a research tradition that remained blind to the kinds of
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group delinquency that white, middle class adolescents could engage in .
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3 . CONTEMPORARY US GANG RESEARC H
If we were to stand back and survey the developing history of contemporary gang research
in America, then the first point that could be made about it is that we are not looking at the
development of a unitary research programme . On the contrary we are looking at a research
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domain, which is neither homogeneous nor unitary . If we look closer then this burgeoning
industry can usefully be subdivided into three broad strands of enquiry . In what follows we critically examine in turn each of these research problematics drawing attention to their respective strengths and weaknesses .
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Administrative Criminology and the Gang
By far the most prevalent and dominant tradition of gang research in the US today is that conducted under the aegis of what might be classified as the administrative criminological tradition. Within this tradition the gang is merely considered to be a social problem the good society confronts from its ethnic outside and which, for its own safety and protection must
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be suppressed. At the heart of this enterprise we find a convergence of interests between academics and policy makers around the need for `action' and `evaluative' research dedicated
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to discovering `what works' in crime prevention . In relation to gang research, what this has given birth to is a largely empirically based programme of research dedicated to the pragmatic goal of establishing the efficacy of a variety of programmes designed to tackle gang problem. The role academics have played in this has been directed at seeking to understand the prevalence of the gang, its structure and dynamics, and establishing for policy makers what works, or does not, in confronting the risks and dangers it poses . This strategic knowledge has been used to inform (through a series of recommendations) ways to control
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or suppress it .
To this end, this tradition has produced a flurry of works that attempted to accurately classify and typify gangs units according to membership, geographical location and boundaries, level and type of criminal delinquent activity and cohesion . This in turn has been undertaken with a view to identifying weaknesses within the gang that could be used a s
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a basis for developing approaches designed to curtail it. During this early `action' phase the findings of several leading American researchers (Klein (1971, 2001), Spergal, Short and
Strodtbeck (1974)) were particularly influential and set the future tone for much American research on the gang.
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These contemporary studies concentrated not on identifying the social processes that
contribute to gang formation but on understanding the link between group structure, cohesion and delinquency . To this end, the results emanating from them claimed that the gang had evolved into highly organised violent formations . In his work on gangs in Los Angeles, Klein (1971) discovered violent fighting groups that coalesced around internal group mechanisms, which helped forge group solidarity. One of Klein's key assumptions was that the gang became stronger, and its solidarity more developed, in response to
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`external pressures' directed against it from outside agencies . Although he identified poverty, unemployment, weak family socialisation and the threat of violence as key factors in forging group cohesion, he emphasised the role that external pressures played and suggested that community organisations and intervention workers acted as such `external forces' .z Quite controversially, in so doing Klein reduced the role that violence and the perennial threat
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from other groups (gangs and threatening law-enforcement agencies) played in solidifying the group which led to the conclusion that the `external forces' likely to cause the gang to
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persist as a threatening entity were precisely those `soft' services that were employed to help its members ; e.g. detached work programmes and `gang' events . Subsequently, Klein called for a `lassiez-faire' approach to the problem of the gang and the complete withdrawal of all support services that worked with them (Decker 1997 : 11) . Klein's `withdrawal` theory was tested with questionable success at a Group Guidance Project in Ladino Hills where the emergent findings was a decrease in group cohesion but an overall increase in delinquency particularly serious offences (Decker 1997 : 11) .
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Working from the same position Short and Strodtbeck (1974) described the Chicago gang s they observed in a language not dissimilar to Klein in Los Angeles . Gangs, they argued , were fluid entities, with shifting membership, little cohesion and limited shelf life . In
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common with the earlier work of Millar and Matza they argued that the activities of the gang members were not radically different from `ordinary' delinquents, however the maintenance of status and respect played a crucial role in gang formation and subsequent delinquent
activities . Their hypothesis proposed that the maintenance of status (either by the group or individual status within the group) could provoke involvement in violence and criminal
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behaviour as gang youth worked to reinstate status challenges and rebuke threats . For Short and Strodtbeck the threat to status could come from many sources including other
individuals, adult institutions such as school, employers and other gangs (Decker, 1997 : 12) . In his own attempt to address the vexed question of what it was that held gangs together Hagedorn (1988) stressed the importance of conflict between groups of young people `hanging out' and law enforcement agencies . These he contested contributed significantly to the formulation of more rigid and structured gangs . Huff also (1989) found that inter-group
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conflict within dancing groups and rivalries between different street corner groups could themselves work to transform peer groups into gangs .
What unifies these approaches is that each conceives an external threat as an important factor in provoking group (gang) solidarity . Each also predicts that the level of threat to
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which a group is exposed is an indicator of the amount and type of delinquent behaviour the group will engage in . Klein, Short and Strodtbeck all believed that if the gang experienced
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little threat to status (from external forces) then they would be less likely to engage in delinquent or violent behaviour. In sum, the overarching view of the gang mediated by these academics was of a fragile group with little permanence and stability, which, if left alone, (literally) would fade away.
In some sense the gang issue did fade away from view for a short period of time (during 5060s) . Decker suggested this was, perhaps, the result of being `left alone' but concluded that it was more likely to be the consequence of a withdrawal of funding from gang research allied
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to a shift in public awareness of the gang as a pressing social problem (Decker, 1997 :13) . What this suggests (and this issue is something British commentators would have far more to say about - as we shall observe below) is that the appearance or disappearance of the gang
2 The reaction to external threat model is echoed subsequently echoed by Saunders (1994) in his work on gan g
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is contingent less upon gang behaviour but more upon the interest that the public and
policymakers express towards it. When interest in the gang is high, funding is made available to study the phenomena . This, in turn, confirms the presence of the gang and fuels
(sustains) public anxiety; which, in turn, provokes more research that confirms the problem
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in the manner of self-fullfilling prophecy .
A number of empirical US studies on the gang did bring to light the important link between the removal of employment opportunities, the absence or failure of regenerative efforts and the presence and reproduction of gangs and gang culture . Given that the causes of the gang were understood within such studies as being as much about multiple deprivation an d exclusion as it was about the lethal behaviour that gang membership was thought to
encourage, this led many researchers to advance humanitarian as well as law enforcement
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solutions . What is noticeable about the American experience, however, is that it was predominantly the more punitive recommendations that were `cherry-picked' and implemented . As Spergel and Curry (1990 : 299-300) note, suppression tactics (arrest, incarceration and intensive supervision) are the most commonly used response to the youth gang whereas the creation of new jobs and or training opportunities are the least selected
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tactic.3 The trend towards a social policy agenda predicated upon the wholesale criminalisation and suppression of the gang at the expense of developing a more humane
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response to its causes was summarised well by Millar (1990) . The failure of America to solve its gang problem is explicable in terms of its [political] `pervasive reluctance to face squarely the issue of the social context of gang crime' (Miller, P in Jackson 1992)4 .
Though the administrative tradition in gang research has helped provide some important empirical data on the extent and nature of the gang as well as helping identify some of the conditions that provoke its appearance, much of the work conducted within thi s administrative tradition remains highly atheoretical and empiricist in focus . A major
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limitation of this tradition is that it has reduced itself into a position that aspires only to characterise and typologise the gang, quantify membership and document illegalities . Often
banging and drive-by shootings . 31n Jackson, P .I (1992) The Police and Social Threat : Urban Transition, Youth Gangs, and Social Control . Policing and Society Vol. 2, pp 193-204 pg.195
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contemporary research projects are restricted to narrow school-based comparative studies in communities where ethnic minorities are over-represented ; which means, by default, that reaffirmation of the gang as a problem associated with minority ethnic groups . The
administrative tradition can also be criticised on two other grounds . First, though factors like poverty and unemployment are often cited in these empirical studies, there is little
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attempt to theorise, specifically, how and why gang formation is shaped by wider socio-
economic and political environments. To this extent, an appreciation of the profoundly important role played by recession and systemic poverty is typically marginalised . Often, and when it appears, it is simply listed as a background factor without being systematically studied; a position which, by default, leads to a representation of the gang as - literally - the sole author of its depravity. What this vision of the gang has also encouraged is an analysis that connects it with various visions of an urban underclass steeped in what Charles Murray
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would identify as `moral turpitude' (Murray, 1990) . In this process the lessons of the subcultural tradition that sought to humanise the gang member have largely disappeared in a world that now imagines them instead as a pathological expression of a class which needs to be suppressed.
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Though the administrative tradition does attend to the crucial role that control agents play in reproducing group solidarity, its attention to the social response to the gang may also be
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criticised as partial and problematic . As we have seen, having identified `soft' responses to the gang as themselves a key to their reproduction, commentators such as Klein have contentiously argued the case for dismantling such attempts completely. What is noticeable about this experiment is that while it legitimated the removal of youth workers, it did not do the same in relation to the more coercive responses directed at the gang and the urban poor more generally. Nor has this tradition systematically thought to think through how the mass incarceration strategy that came to prevail itself helped reproduce a violent gang culture . Mass incarceration it could be observed far from solving the gang problem instead created a
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gulag, which would itself act as an incubation chamber for gang development and for the wider dissemination of gang culture across American society.
4 ibid. pg 201
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Finally, while surveys and questionnaires are important tools in the army of the social
researcher, the empiricist focus inherent in this research tradition has itself led to studies, which far from revealing the cultural forces at play within the gang, reduce it instead to a series of decontextualised statistical tables. In this respect much of the vibrancy that
characterised the work of the classic research tradition engaged in ethnographical research
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has been lost and with it the sensitivity to context it pioneered .
The Cultural Criminological tradition
The work conducted within the administrative tradition tended to construct the gang as a serious risk that needed to be managed and the role of the academic as somebody who
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would unproblematically work to help policy makers secure this end. This view however has not been universally accepted . A number of sociologists and anthropologists, influenced by traditions of thought such as phenomenology along with more critical traditions in social science, have established a rather different relationship both to the gang and to the work of control agents than that, which prevails in the Administrative tradition . If we look
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specifically at what distinguishes this tradition from its administrative adversary in the mainstream then a number of key distinctions can be made . First, in contrast to the
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empiricism that prevails in administrative criminology, the cultural tradition places a far higher emphasis upon grounded ethnographic research. Second, this tradition is also far more sensitive to the phenomenology of the delinquent and delinquent behaviour than statisticians in the mainstream. In this sense it attempts to excavate the lived life world of the gang and by so doing seeking to apprehend the raw experience of risk, danger and transgression intrinsic to its behaviour . Third, this tradition is also different from the administrative mainstream as it locates the analysis of the gang within an analysis of the wider socio-economic context whose presence also crucially shapes and determines its
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presence. Fourth, and contentiously from the viewpoint of practitioners, this tradition does not view the efforts of control agencies as necessarily benign . On the contrary, this tradition conceives the effort of control agencies such as the police, institutions such as America's expanding penal complex, and America's punitive culture as being as problematic as the gang menace it confronts . Finally, as we shall observe, the nature and purpose of the gang is
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theorised in ways that attend to a range of behaviours and functions that are not necessaril y criminal.
In what may be viewed as a critique of Klein's position (which conceived the gang as a fragile and temporal entity) longitudinal ethnographic research conducted within this
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tradition have shown that many gangs are both longstanding and durable (See Moore (1978, 1991 ; Campbell; 1984, Horowitz ; 1983, Virgil ; 1988, Padilla 1992, Brotherton (2003)) . For these ethnographic researchers the gang exists precisely because the social conditions which create it, persist. These social conditions connect with the impact of wider socio-economic changes within American society ; the impact of which has been to create the preconditions in which urban gangs have taken root and thrived .
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In the space of two decades America has undergone a process of profound economic restructuring in its movement towards a service sector economy . This process has occasioned a decline and reduction in America's manufacturing industry that historically constituted the basis of employment in many urban axeas . . This shift resulted in the loss of many manual and semi-skilled jobs for working class communities, and not least America's
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minority ethnic populations . In the face of entrenched economic decline, that would see the economic base of many cities literally destroyed, so the seeds were sown for the construction
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of urban ghetto's whose populations were forced to exist in conditions of abject poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment Qackson, 1991 ; Huff 1989) . It is within these environments that populations subject to political and economic exclusion and hyperghettoisation (Wacquant, 2005) characterised by the evaporation of employment opportunities, (Moore 1978, 1991), multiple marginality (Virgil 1988) and mass incarceration that gangs have appeared and prospered.
The gang appears in such environments precisely because the conditions of life within the
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ghetto compel young people to discover alternative ways to entertain, protect themselves, achieve respect and status, find economic security and escape the futility of their life (Moore 1978, 1991) . In effect the gang meets a range of personal and social needs for its members
in the context of a harsh and unforgiving environment . While the `codes of the street' (Anderson, 1999) to which these young urban males live can excuse and justify extreme
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violence against rivals (as for example in the case of drive by shootings and `gang bangs' (see Saunders, 1994) ; as well as other illegalities such as robbery and drug distribution and use ; the gang also proffers its members a space for sociability and friendship as well as a space from which they can escape and transcend the boredom of everyday life.
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Though himself highly critical of the gang research tradition, the work of Jack Katz presents a unique interpretation of group behaviour in the face of threat in his analysis of what he termed the `seductions of evil' (Katz, 1990) . What makes his work relevant is that he
provides an important series of insights into the inner worlds of young delinquents . This he does through an analysis of the phenomenology of crime . Intrinsic to his approach is a need to recognise that youth involvement in groups and delinquency cannot be readily understood by seeing it in rational and instrumental terms . Young men, he observes, enjoy
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`walking the ways of the baddass' not least because they are seduced by the experience of appearing evil. It is something they take pleasure in . Reminiscent of the view adopted by Matza, Katz argues that in a world that is often mundane and boring and where realistic exit strategies are limited, young men will engage creatively in circumventing the mundanely of their world by reconstructing it in sensational ways . Run down estates take on the trappings
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of sovereign empires that must - like the nation state - be defended . By congregating together young men take on the role of urban street warrior(s) defending their territories
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from incursions by outsiders . By engaging in violent acts and, as importantly, weaving extravagant legends around their violence, so the profane world is remade as a liminal space of excitement and danger . Conceived this way the collective life of the gang can be considered as a space where the ordinary features of urban life, and the boredom that often characterise it, is spectacularly transcended . Subsequently, the gang member is less a calculating rational actor and far more a transgressive edge worker who dwells at and beyond the limits (Katz, 1990) .
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The overriding image of the gang that can be derived from the array of literary works that have addressed it typically represent it as a static, pathological fighting group . This view, however, has been criticised by a number of authors who have shown that the gang is not a static simplistic entity capable only of violence . Considered from an anthropological
perspective, the gang has been conceived as a rich and complex site of cultural production .
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Indeed as some contemporary gang researchers have shown the gang can be an indigenous group which has a longstanding history, political trajectory of development and whose organisational form is characterised by complex traditions and ritual . In an important
ethnographic study David Brotherton Luis Barrios traced the development of the Latin Kings, a large Latino New York gang, through the 1980s to the present day . His work
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tracked how the Latin Kings attempted, under the guidance and leadership of a charismatic leader, to evolve from a traditional fighting gang heavily implicated in crime and drug
distribution, into a social movement (Brotherton & Barrios 2004) . In this process the gang made a conscious attempt, (continuously thwarted by law-enforcement), to reduce not only the level and type of violence in which its members engaged, but to embark on a programme characterised by the progressive politicisation of its members .
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As the work of Brotherton and other commentators have shown, the contemporary
development of the gang has evolved not only as an adaptive response to changes in the economic order but also to the political and judicial response it has provoked . Though the US has developed many grass roots projects directed at working with gangs and gang members (the kind of projects actively dismissed by Klein as unhelpful), by far and away the
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most pervasive response to the gang has been techniques predicated on suppression and repression. These have included the formation of dedicated gang suppression units,
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increased prison tariffs for gang members and in some states special legislation designed to prevent groups from gathering together in specific places, wearing specific items of clothing or engaging in particular activities . As Brotherton and others have shown the repression directed at the gang has been intense with the consequence that America's mass incarceration society (which has the highest rate of incapacitation of all western states) now routinely imprisons thousands of gang members .
Far from eliminating the existence of the gang, what the penitentiary system has done is to
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provide (in addition to the ghetto) even more desperate spaces in which a violent gang culture thrives and reproduces itself . Indeed as Brotherton and others has shown, much of what today constitutes the trappings of gang style (loose fitting trousers, untied shoelaces and an elaborate system of hand communication) was itself forged in the American Penitentiary system. This culture it could be remarked has not only been re-imported into
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mainstream American society, via commercial enterprise, it has also been exported abroa d where it now defines the uniform of ghetto youth in the UK and across Europe .
In conclusion, this richly diverse research tradition has drawn attention to the harsh and
severe social conditions that provoke gang formation and has explored the consequences of
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the severe censure and repression members experience . In keeping with the subcultural
tradition in whose footsteps it follows, this tradition depicts the gang as a rational adaptation to hostile conditions whilst not losing sight of the destructive consequences gang
membership has on individuals and the community . This includes an analysis of the damage inflicted by inter and infra-gang rivalry, a sober appreciation of the relationship between gangs and drugs as well as identifying the effects of extreme repression in a law-and-order
The Gender Turn
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society with a mass incarceration agenda .
The final strand of research within the contemporary American gang tradition we will
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consider here emphasises the influence of a gendered culture. What makes this strand distinctive is its focus upon the decisive role that gender plays on gang membership and
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formatio n
Influenced by feminism, much of the early work undertaken within this tradition lay in reevaluating the role of women in relation to the gang . This work was spurred by the recognition that, while male criminologists had made a number of important contributions to the task of understanding the world of the male gang member, whenever they spoke of women what was said rarely extended beyond the world of trite generalisations and crass stereotypes. To an extent this was fuelled by the belief that women were, as Sutherland and
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Cressey (1966) argued, essentially `law-abiding' and were thus removed from a dominant
male culture that bred gangs . Considered this way, the kind of crime a person committed was shaped by their gender. Men, being men, would tend towards committing crimes like violence and robbery while women being women would engage in sexual promiscuity, infanticide, fraud and shoplifting (Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn, 1999) .
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Considered through the stereotypical and sexist lens of this traditional male gaze, females in the `gang' were typically considered `bad girls' because according to the assumptions these
researchers typically brought to bear, `good girls' as such did not normally join gangs . When
female participation was considered worthy of analysis it was relegated to auxiliary `bit parts'
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within the male experience (Campbell, 1984) . In practice women in the gang were thought to exist either to gratify the sexual appetite of the males or act as their lowly assistants by providing them with shelter and alibis. Within this essentially negative and essentially
misogynistic representation the women who belonged to the gang were assumed to be either sexually permissive, cheap and available (in other words `sluts ; or were alternatively construed as `maladjusted tomboys' - in other words as women who had betrayed their
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`normal' gender role by behaving like men (Chesney-Lind, 1997) .
With some deference to these important (but inflammatory) texts which constituted a definite shift in view from male participation to female, these works were essentially a `child of the times' in so far as they were composed in a social milieu that supported very traditional (white middle-class) views of femininity and female behaviour . Within the socio-
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cultural settings from which these writings were produced women were perceived as bound to the home and expected to behave in ways that were befitting of a `lady'; i .e. possessing
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manners, being presentable, exercising chastity, expressing fragility and composure, and above all demonstrating a capacity to observe the rules . Any behaviour that ran contra to the traditional views was considered to be outside the realms of `normal' femininity and, therefore, deviant. Like much of the early gang literature on male groups, female subjects were drawn from minority groups such as the Italians, Jewish, and Irish, but the predominant gaze was upon the African-American/African Caribbean and Mexican American communities . It is clear from reading these texts that there was a lack of understanding about other cultures and cultural behaviours . What this meant, in practice,
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was that the behaviour of different ethnic groups was judged according to the traditional mores of white middle class America. Unsurprisingly this led to a proliferation of works that were entirely judgmental, ethnocentric and, at their worst, racist .
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Inherent in the texts is the view that women minority ethnic groups did not conform to the dominant cultural ideal of femininity . Thus we find male researchers commenting
extensively on the ways girls looked and dressed (their `unruly hair', `slouched behaviour, where deportment and dress-style were considered evidence of gender violation and thus
expressive of a deviant personality . Consider the comments of Rice (1963) who described a
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female gang called the Persian Queens as `extraordinarily unqueenly queens', who were
`exceptionally unattractive' due to their `slouching swagger' (Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn, 1999:29) . Note too, Wale Brown's (1977) depiction of the Holly Ho's in his work on Black female gangs in Philadelphia. He described them as `football players with big shoulders and fight scarred faces who greatly resemble the warring Amazonian women referred to in ancient mythology. `Like the Amazons', Brown concluded, `the Holly Ho's appear to be fearless, aggressive women who will fight men and women alike' .' Unsurprisingly this way
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of thinking about women legitimated a bizarre series of responses designed to change delinquent women by restoring them to their `appropriate' gender role . These included the construction of charm schools aimed at [re] socialising young women by re-educating them in manners and etiquette . In sum, the prevailing philosophy was that one could groom and coach young women from behaving like boys, and out of the gang, by turning them into `real
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ladies'.
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The classical [mis] interpretation of females in gangs presented little examination of why young women join the gang, and where it appears, the explanation is centres around some sort of deficit. The deficit-model assumes that for maladjusted females gang membership provides them with a place where they can find the things they have lost . For example, the gang offers security, meaningful relationships, education, protection and friendship; in essence, the gang provides young women with meaning and identity . Gone are the notions of subterranean delinquent values, the search for excitement and wild transcendence that male researchers believe motivate and animate male gang members . Men, this line of
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thinking appears to suggest, join gangs to get things and achieve things women - by contrast - join because they are sad and needy. From this position the analysis of female involvemen t
5 Brown, W (1977) Black Female G angs in Philadelphia. In Chesney-Lind and Hagedorn (1999) Female Gangs in America. Pg.62
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in gang life is reduced to the psychosocial theoretical explanations and interventions, which , ultimately, simplify and misrepresent the female experience : it denies women their agency.
In opposition to this superficial and stereotypical way of thinking, contemporary female gang researchers have sought to present an analysis of women's involvement in the gang in ways
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that demonstrate that women are not the maladjusted agentic gender traitors they are too often presented as being. In her pioneering study of women in New York gangs, Anne
Campbell was one of the first academics to present the gang from a female perspective . In her work Girls in thegang - and subsequent work - Campbell clearly illustrates the tumultuous lives of females gang members . She argues strongly that young women in the gang are not inherently `bad girls' with deviant personalities (or deviant sexualities) but young women who are responding to the rejection of mainstream society . She asserts that female
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association with the gang `is a public proclamation of their rejection of the lifestyle that the community expects from them (Campbell, in Chesney-Lind & Hagedorn 1991 : 116) . More recently, Jody Miller has also sought to challenge the assumption that woman who fight in gangs are in some essential respect violating what it is to be female, in this case by showing how the women she interviewed experience themselves as women even when engaging in
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violence every bit as brutal as their male counterparts .
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The attempt to rethink the way in which women are positioned in relation to the gang has been accompanied by a parallel attempt to reconsider the nature and role of masculinity in defining why gang members behave in particular ways . Intrinsic to this research is that behaviour is shaped by a particular species of masculinity . Work conducted in this area has been particularly influenced by the pioneering work of Connell (1987, 1993, 1994, 1995) . While observing that historically and contemporaneously masculinity has been defined in very different ways between social classes and different ethnic groups, Connell argued that within western culture there existed a particular dominant form of masculinity. This he
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termed `hegemonic masculinity' . What made it hegemonic is that the values that characterise it dominate and prevail over other `subordinate varieties' of masculinity, which are positioned as inferior to it. What guarantees its ascendancy is that most men within the west are beholden to the norms that define it . Because these are men who also exercise disproportionate power in society this also means that the vision of the world enshrined
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within it also prevails in defining how the world was ideally organised as well as specifying how men were positioned within this world . Unsurprisingly the vision of what it is to be
male (i .e.) strong, independent, competitive etc . is also the vision that has historically been mediated through the medi a
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In terms of content hegemonic masculinity was historically beholden to the belief that men are the dominant force within society . Their power in turn is believed to derive from the faculty of reason they uniquely possess and from their successful domination and
subjugation of women (Connell, 1987) . Historically, hegemonic masculinity is also defined by its commitment to heterosexuality and by its antagonism to other forms of subaltern masculinities, particular homosexuality .
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Most men, Connell argues, are socialised into the norms and conventions of hegemonic masculinity, which in effect, establish the horizons through which they then come to see the work around them . It not least defines their expectations . In effect, to be a man is to be a person who possesses power of some kind, to possess a `natural' desire for women and to look with contempt on and fear homosexuality . Because society is organised in ways that
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reproduce male power (men after all control and own the means and forces of production) so the implicit equation that conflates masculinity with power is naturalised and experienced
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by many men as a normal fact of life.
Though by no means a researcher in the traditional gang research culture, James Messerschmidt (1993) has recently sought to use this way of thinking about masculinity in order to throw an important light on forms of group conflict . In particular he shows how the commitment to a culture organised in the image of hegemonic masculinity can help explain different patterns of delinquent group behaviour. In the case of males who are already powerful he shows how their commitment to a hegemonic masculine culture that
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already validates strong assertive males and which has traditionally excuses those who breach and contest rules as something `boys do' (a norm that has not historically been conceded to girls) can validate forms of delinquent group behaviour . Recent cases of group rape conducted by prominent footballers exemplify this, as do the reported rituals that have been identified with various `frat' fraternities on American colleges .
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Whereas for powerful men their masculinity is never bought into question precisely because they hold positions of power which already validate it, the same cannot be said for socially excluded and marginalised males . This is particularly the case for multiply deprived
populations who, while socialised into a culture that conflates power with masculinity, are
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born into a socio-economic context where their entrenched social and economic
disadvantage renders them powerless . What Messerschmidt argues is that for males in this situation masculinity, far from being something that they can readily claim or presume, is something they are forced to prove . In other words, unlike the business executive whose power is revealed in his position and the purchasing power this provides, this situation does not accrue to powerless males who have no embedded source of power at all.
Messerschmidt's thesis purports that far from simply accepting their powerless status as
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natural, some young males respond to their experience, or lack of, by harnessing the one power resource they do possess - this the propensity for violence . By challenging each other through fighting rituals and by exemplifying in word and deed their manliness (what Katz terms `the seductions of evil so their masculinity is demonstrated, revealed and confirmed as a `situational accomplishment' . In effect, by engaging in the rituals of the gang powerless
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young men `do gender' . The example Messerschmidt cites as an illustration of this form of `masculinity in crisis' is a group rape conducted by a gang of young black urban males on a
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middle class white female jogger in Central Park, New York . For Messerschmidt, what made the rape explicable, as well as the extreme violence that characterised it, was that it constituted a performance through which a group subject to extreme class and racial disadvantage could accomplish a viable male identity . Though an act of deviance in one respect on another level there acts are entirely legible according to the standards of hegemonic masculinity .
It could be argued that the turn towards examining gender has had a profound effect on the
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way in which group delinquency is theorised . As we have seen, feminist inspired theorists have successfully contested the often banal stereotypical assumptions that male criminologists often made about women whilst providing an alternative way of understanding the role of females in the gang . Likewise, for male criminologists influenced
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by feminism their attempt to study masculinity and its accomplishment has itself drawn
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attention to an important and historically under-theorised aspect of male group delinquency .
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4. THE BRITISH TRADITIO N
Unlike America which has a long standing gang research tradition, the same cannot be said for the UK, though this situation, it could be observed has recently changed with the
contemporary rediscovery of the gang . There are a number of reasons that might explain
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the absence of the gang in British research, as well as the rediscovery of it, and these bear
consideration. To begin with, it could be argued that the UK has always had its fair share of gangs but these have not been accorded the attention by the criminological establishment . A second, more plausible conjecture holds that whilst there might well have been gangs present in British society, they were relatively rare and did not approximate to the numerous, large, organised fighting groups found in the US . As such they did not warrant the attention the gang would receive in the US . Allied to this was the fact that while the gang literature might
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help explain the gang it was unable, in and of itself, to help make sense of the most
important, and visible, youth subcultures that prevailed in British society during the post war period .
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The perennial nature of the gan g
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In many respects, the first of these conjectures is echoed in the work of the American criminologist and gang researcher Malcolm Klein whose life mission, it would appear, has been to identify the gang in places its resident academics have not looked . To this effect he has, in recent years, been at the forefront of an American-led research grouping the named the Eurogang Network whose mission it is to [re]discover them on European shores . Given that the gang has not (for reasons we will discuss in more detail below) been conceived as a serious social problem in British society, and given that statutory agencies have never routinely collected information on them, there has until recently been no reliable
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way to answer this research question . If we consider the historical record, however, it would appear that urban centres such as London have traditionally provided a fertile ground in which gang cultures have taken root and thrived (see Shore, 2003) . Pearson's study of public fears about the hooligan through the 20& century also confirms that each age is also appear s
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replete with fears and anxieties about gangs though whether the fear equates with the reality is a different matter (Pearson, 1983) .
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Subculture and parent culture
When British criminologists did get around to studying the nature of group-based
delinquency what they found did not readily approximate the kind of gangs identified in the American subcultural tradition . It is this crucial difference, above all else, that would lead the British research tradition along a different trajectory to that which occurred in the United States . Gibben's and Ahrenfeldt (1966 :83) summarised well the ambivalent and sceptical relationship that British criminologists would come to have with the gang and the research
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tradition that studied it. `Gangs' they argued, `axe always present in the next district or they existed last year, never here now.' It was however in the pioneering work of the British criminologist David Downes that the real differences between the American and the British experience began to become more clearly distinguished and exposed.
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In a formative attempt to apply American subcultural theory to the British context, Downes studied adolescents in London's East End (1966) and concluded that the British experience
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of gang formation did not mirror that of America . Young working-class males did not display, he argued, either problems of `adjustment' or `status frustration' as theorised by Cohen. On the contrary they were fu lly immersed in mainstream working-class culture and displayed little discontentment with their status . Cohen's notion of `malicious', `negativistic' behaviour as an expressive symbol of young people's frustration had for Downes, no resonance in British East End life. As with Millar, the young people he studied betrayed less a morality at odds with the dominant culture so much as values they had inducted from their working class parent culture. While these youths were clearly products of their class of origin they
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were however `disassociated' from conventional middle class norms that governed the educational establishments they attended and the world of work. Early on in life, Downes argued, they came to recognise that the work available to them was by nature inherently debased, boring and tedious. The more they experienced this as their allocated lot in life the more they would aspire to compensate by seeking in the sphere of leisure a place for
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freedom that the disciplines of wage labour could not provide . What the resulting pattern of dissociation provoked however was not organised street gangs but `street-corner' groups .
While they could, and would engage in periodic delinquency and engage in wilding behaviour this was not a confirmation of a commitment to crime as an occupation so much as an
attempt to create excitement and autonomy that the labour market, by its nature, denied
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them (Downes, 1966) . 6
Though, by no means explicitly seeking to provide a theory of gang or youth delinquency, Paul Willis subsequently provided a more nuanced explanation of why certain working class males recurrently appeared attached to a delinquent set of norms that repudiated those in mainstream culture. In his influential work attempt to explain how `working class kids get working class jobs' he showed how young working-class men, in opposition to a school
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environment structured around middle-class norms and values, rebelled by forming their own subculture that embraced values that consciously repudiated it . They would, for example, code intellectual work as `feminised work' irrelevant to their material needs . Moreover, in a value system that admired personal characteristics such as intellect, restraint and self-control, his `lads' celebrated in opposition to this macho values such as toughness,
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aggression and immediate gratification, whilst also embracing a highly misogynistic and racist worldview . While the behaviours adopted by working-class men in Willis's study could be
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viewed as a rational response to a middle class educational environment (they perceived) as established to fail them, it was essentially a `negative adaptation' as, ironically, what their rebellion ultimately accomplished was the grim task of readying them for the world of mundane, unskilled, low paid work contemporary capitalism had already established as their destiny.
What the British research tradition found then was less American style organised delinquent groups that acted independently of the society that had excluded them, so much as a culture
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which, while tolerating delinquency, was ultimately steeped in the mores of wider working class culture it also reproduced . What is common to these research studies is the picture they establish of group delinquency . This is represented as a rational response to being born
6 For an excellent literary representation of this aspect of working class male culture see Alan Sillitoe's `Friday
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into a poor socio-economic class, in a milieu where upward mobility is non existent, where available work is mundane. Young working class males in effect realise what life has in
store for them and adopt a delinquent pose as a way of redeeming in leisure what the world
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of work with its disciplines denies.
Subculture and style
After an initial engagement with American gang research in the 1950s and 1960s, British criminology started to refocus its attention away from the gang and towards subculture and style. Though a focus still remained on accounting for what was perceived as problematic youth, the focus on territorial based youth collectives largely disappeared in this process .
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This reflected, in part, an attempt to engage with the reality of a post war world where gangs on the American model did not appear to exist, but this shift was also motivated by the need to make sense of an array of flamboyant youth subcultures that did . The shift in focus also reflected a growing recognition on the part of British researchers, that the defining characteristics of post-war subcultural groups such as the Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers,
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Skinheads and Punks could not be adequately understood in terms of classic subcultural theory : firstly, because the stylistic features of these subcultures were widely distributed
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across society and were thus not the sole property of a single group and ; secondly, because most members of these groups did not routinely engage in overt delinquent behaviour associated with street-based fighting units .
In an attempt to grasp the motivational forces behind subcultures - such as those of the Mod, the Punk and the Skinhead - British sociologists, particularly those associated with the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, argued that subcultures could be understood as expressive of what Phil Cohen would famously identify as a form of `resistance through
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ritual' (Cohen, 1972) . Far from seeing subculture as a product of the ecology of place alone, it was theorised instead as a rational (if imaginary) response to the material contradictions young people experienced living in the context of post war capitalist society. What the
night and Saturday Morning'
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subcultural response marked, specifically, was a symbolic attempt to resolve these lived
contradictions through patterns of innovative cultural development . In the case of the Skinheads, for example, their culture of accentuated violence could be viewed as a
pathological response to the decline of the organised working class (from which they
emerged) whose plight in a de-industrialising society they powerfully dramatised . In the
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selection of cultural artefacts they appropriated : the shaved heads, the Doctor Martin boots and Ben Sherman shirts (whose meanings changed in the process of appropriation), so they symbolically resolved the crisis of their parent class in a display that accentuated naked machismo. At the symbolic level this could be viewed as an attempt to redeem and reclaim the virtues of a labour movement that was in the process of decline through de-
industrialisation. As with Willis's `lads' what was attempted, however, was no more than a symbolic gesture. The style revolt or the subculture of violence around which they
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constructed their identities did not address the objective problems of society that produced the conditions that they were responding to . For these subcultural theorists then, what the wider society typically coded as dangerous and threatening subcultures were in fact highly creative social movements .
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Drawing upon the labelling theory of Becker and Lemert the new sociologists of deviance such as Stan Cohen also drew attention to the pivotal role played by control agents in
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constructing the very deviant groups they recoiled from in outrage . In his study of the Mods and Rockers (Cohen, 1980), Cohen showed that subcultures were themselves as much products of media reporting and in particular `demoni.cation' as they were spontaneous creators of their world. By constructing a folk devil, through the medium of a `moralpanic ; the defining features of the subculture were constructed in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The social response - often evident in sensationalised media reporting, escalation in law enforcement activity and hysterical political over-reaction -created a context in which low level delinquency among a diffuse group of young people could be reconstructed as a
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major social problem. The social response also helped to provide an identifiable set of core themes around which the identity of the group in question could coalesce .
This process it could be argued could be and has been used to make sense of the sudden an d dramatic appearance of an array of recent youth subcultures from football hooligans, to ne w
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age travellers and the acid house movement. In effect, the underlying model in each case
was remarkably the same. To begin with, a group innovates stylistically (usually they must also engage in) acts of which the wider society disapproves . The hosting of illegal festivals
and drug taking both provided the proximate cause for social unease (as was the case of the travellers and the acid house party people) whilst engagement in hostile aggression towards
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other fans provided the impetus that motivated interest in the football hooligans . Having
come to social attention -often unwittingly - populist media fans the flames of a moral panic by constituting the group in question as a `folk devil' . This occurs by demonising the group through sensational, often highly edited, reporting . In the process of reporting exceptional events are represented as the norm whilst the group itself is represented as symptomatic of a danger to the moral fabric of society. In the case of the New Age Travellers, and the far from radical rave scene, hitherto invisible and largely harmless groups were suddenly
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catapulted on the front pages of the tabloid media . Here they were reconstructed seamlessly as folk devils that presented a direct threat to the British way of life . ' Rather than escape the gaze of the media some individuals, subject to media scrutiny, begin to respond creatively to it and the diffuse boundaries that exist between pockets of people engaged in a similar activity - but not necessarily with each other - become more clearly defined as the
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product as it is their own.
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group (the `ravers' or the travellers) coalesce around an identity that is as much a media
Critical writers such as Stuart Hall further developed the refocusing of academic attention away from the world of the deviant towards the social response it generated . The recurrent moral panics that surfaced in British society during the post-war period were not, h e suggested, general responses to strain in a society undergoing change (as Cohen, invoking Merton, had argued), but more sinister exercises in the criminalisation and marginalisation of already alienated and excluded groups. In effect, through the medium of moral-panics folk devils were not only created but also set up for the brutal suppression that invariably
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followed. For Hall and his colleagues there was nothing innocent about this, nor could such
responses be considered proportionate . On the contrary, he saw it as a scapegoating strategy designed to reinforce the longstanding illusion that real threats to societal well-being were,
7For a case study of the social response to the New Age Travellers see S . Hallsworth, `Strangers in a Strange
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principally, caused by young people in general - but by black youth in particular . By
constructing youth subculture as a criminal other the state, according to Hall, was able to ensure that the social conditions that gave rise to the crisis (economic decline,
deindustrialisation, recession, mass unemployment) remained obscured. In this process of criminalisation, social problems became reconstructed as problems of law and order that
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were represented as only resolvable through law and order means . In sum, by representing youth groups as criminal others so the stage was set for policies designed to enhance and develop the apparatus of law enforcement further producing, what Hall would memorably describe as, a forward `drift' into `a law and order society' (Hall et al, 1980) by an authoritarian populist state.
What decisively separates these approaches from the kind of theorising intrinsic to the work
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of the older subcultural tradition was the emphasis on studying the social response directed towards a delinquent group as well as studying the delinquent group itself. In relation to understanding the contemporary rediscovery of the gang this focus remains important . As we shall observe below, while recent research has attempted to study the nature and prevalence of the gang in British society, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this
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evolving research tradition is, itself, by no means a rational and proportionate response to events on the streets. On the contrary, it could also itself be considered - for good or ill - as
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much a response to the proliferating gang talk mediated by the mass media though sensationalised reporting than a response to a proliferating and ever more dangerous gang menace.
The rediscovery of the gang
As we saw in the introduction, a key theme mediated through both media and politically
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motivated gang talk has been the implicit acceptance of the idea that the UK is now home to violent street gangs . This message has been driven home in various documentaries (see Despatches (2003)) and by sensational reporting in the mass media and by various
Land: New Age Travellers and British `Justice', Criminal Justice Studies .
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government ministers . The murder of Damiola Taylor in 2000 marked the beginning of the media rediscovery of the gang, though the murder of two women in what was styled by the media as a `gangland' shootings in Birmingham, 2003 can be credited with putting the gang
firmly under the political and media spotlight . Since then, the gang has rarely been far away
from the headlines . More recently, and disturbingly, the idea that the UK is now awash with
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gangs has also been articulated with the idea that weapon use is also intrinsic to gang culture . This vision of a society where life has become feral is perhaps best exemplified by a
campaign slogan oft quoted in the tabloid papers, (most explicitly the Daily Mail), which claims that Britain is now victim to `a growing knife culture' .
Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether any of this is true, what is notable about the rediscovery of the gang is the attention that has once again been placed on
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minority ethnic groups . The menace posed by Jamaican `Yaxdies' has been cited as one cause of the growth in what an Ofsted report would claim to be a `growing gang problem in Britain's schools' though the recorded actions of other minority groups such as Albanian and Russian Mafia have helped buttress this perception. The contemporary media rediscovery of the gang has also been accompanied by an explicit attempt to link it with an alleged `crisis'
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confronting the black community . This has been interpreted in terms that suggest that the core of the gang problem can be explained by the mediation of a `gansta' culture by
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unscrupulous rappers espousing a culture of hyper-violent misogyny.
In many respects the undercurrent at play in this representation of the gang menace echo long traditions of `respectable fears' concerning the terrible state of youth today . What is new is that these fears are now being repackaged in terms of a gang threat and a gang culture . In the face of these `respectable fears' about the gang, a number of statutory agencies such as the Home Office, the ESRC, the MPS and the YJB have responded, proactively, by [re] inspecting their data for possible gang-related incidences and
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commissioning research about the phenomena . Consequentially, the gang has metamorphosed from an entity `not worthy of study' to a `demonic' force fuelling (especially in the last two years) a fast growing industry. To a large extent this is because the research industry, like other industries, follow funding streams and funding streams follow fashion .
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Given the rise in serious violence between groups in some of Britain's most deprived areas , the perception is not unsupported by the reality but closely related to i t
As we have already illustrated, the crisis of the gang is of recent derivation, but there is little available evidence to support, or refute, the notion (heavily championed `gang talkers that
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Britain is being overrun by gangs . Several studies on the gang that have been undertaken
recently fall more within the category of support than refute and are highly administrative in nature. Two studies, Trevor Bennett and Katy Holloway's analysis of survey data on gang membership and drug use (Bennett & Holloway 2004) and a Home Office funded study on gun use and gang membership in Manchester (Bullock & Tilley 2002) are the most
commonly accessible pieces on this topic and these will be reviewed in detail below . A third, but less well-known and ambitious piece, is an exploratory study of gangs conducted by the
The Manchester gang scen e
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Metropolitan Police under the heading Operation Cruise. This we will also consider..
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Bullock and Tilley's study of South Manchester gangs in 2001 /2 was conducted as an exercise in `problem-solving policing' and was based upon an extensive analysis of police
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generated quantitative data and interviews conducted with 40 gang members . Their research confirmed the existence of 4 principle `loosely turf-based' gangs in the South Manchester area, the Gooch, Doddington, the Pit Bull Crew and Longsite Crew. The age range of these groups was 17 to 24, though in terms of the role that young people played within them then this appeared marginal . According to their figures only 10% of these gangs was made up of young people aged 17 and under. 35% were young adult's aged 17 to 20 and 54% 21 to 24 . The majority of the gang members were identified as black or mixed race (79%), 16% were white 4% Asian and 1% Oriental . Males composed the overwhelming majority of members
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and were, according to the authors, the prime movers in shaping gang behaviour (89%) while women composed only 11% of the members . Typically, the role of females within these groups lay in `supporting' gang members by `providing safe houses for male members' . The gangs identified by Bullock and Tilley were engaged in an array of offending behaviour.
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This included murder, rape, indecent assault, robbery, burglary, drugs offences, theft , handling stolen goods, fraud, criminal damage, and firearms related offences .
This research makes extensive use of quantitative data to profile gang members and the
crimes in which they are engaged ; in keeping with the administrative criminological tradition
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more generally it provides a decontextualised and atheoretical analysis that never moves beyond the level of description . Examining the reasons why the gangs cluster in south
Manchester - as opposed to North Manchester for example - is never considered beyond arraigning that it is to do with criminality and conflicts between groups ; no attempt is made to connect the appearance of the gangs to the history and ecology of the areas in which they appear .
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As an exercise in `problem solving', this report ends by outlining the solution to the
problems of the gangs described. Highly problematically, this resolves itself into advocating, as a panacea to the problems of the gang, a gang suppression programme pioneered in the US . 8 Quite why an off-the-shelf American import is preferable to the development of bottom up indigenous solutions we are never told, nor are other European options
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considered! As for the problems that might have been expected to accrue in the process of translating a foreign import into a British context which is different this too is not examined .
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While this study helps confirm the existence of the gang in a given metropolitan area, localised studies in and of themselves cannot provide any firm indication of the overall prevalence and characteristics of the gang across the UK.
Gang membership and drugs in the UK
Bennett and Holloway's 2004 examination of the NEW-ADAM programme provides a n
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interesting exception to this pattern. Written as a descriptive piece centred on comparing characteristics between UK and US gang members Bennett and Holloway analysed the
a Operation Ceasefire translated into the formation of Boston Gun Project .For further details see, for example, Braga, et x11999) .
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results of data gathered from the New English & Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Programme (NEW-ADAM) .
From the examination of 2,725 interviews conducted at 16
interview suites across the UK they found that 15% of arrestees had experience of gang life. Of this figure, however, only 4% claimed to be current members of a gang while 11%
claimed to have been a member in the past which would suggest that the gang might not be
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quite as prevalent as media reports often suggest. By a process of extrapolation they argued that the number of active gangs members in the UK came to a figure of 20,000 with a confidence level of plus or minus 5,000 ; that is 0 .03% of the general population of Britain if
the total number of inhabitants is 60 million .' Ultimately, what Bennett and Holloway found was not a prevalence of gangs, but rather some similarities in the socio-demographic and behavioural characteristics of UK and US gang members . To this end, their overall findings were consistent with equivalent findings in North American gang research : that is the
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majority of gang members were male and were engaged in a multitude of criminal offences . A radical departure from US data occurred when comparing participation by females and minority ethnic groups . Only 5% of all gang members and 4% of past gang members were female (Bennett & Holloway 2004:314) .'° In addition, the vast majority of individuals identified as gang members defined themselves as White . 61% of gang members were aged
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17-25 compared to 47% of this age group aged 26 plus . The medium age of current gang members was 19 . 75% of gang members (past and active) were white while 25% were from
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BME populations . The study also found that gang members were more likely to live at home with their parent or guardian than non-gang members (33% against 29%) and to be unemployed (51% against 41% for non gang members) .
Bennett and Holloway's research also uncovered a significant set of differences between the experiences in crime of those who claimed to be gang members and those who did not. Though gang members (current and past) comprised 15% of the total population of arrestees they were responsible for 31% of all offences reported, they also reported
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committing a wider range of offences than non-gang members and a greater number of offences over a 12-month period . As a population gang members were involved in 89% of
9 This figure has been rounded up to the nearest million . The actual population of The United Kingdom according to the Census 2001 is 58,789,194. www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles
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robberies, 49% of burglaries in a dwelling, and 38% of burglaries in a non-dwelling, 35%
thefts from a motor vehicle . The population of gang members was also far more likely to
possess weapons and guns (See Table A below) . Indeed current gang members were three times more likely to have possessed a weapon during an offence than non-gang members, and were twice as likely to mix with people who carried a gun. As Bennett and Holloway
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conclude:
`Gang members tend to be involved in criminal behaviour, generalists in terms of offending pattern, responsible for a notable proportion of all offences, sometimes violent, involved in drug supply offences and have tendency to carry guns (and sometimes use them)' (Bennett and Holloway : 317) .
Table A: Weapon use among gang and non-gang members (%)
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A
Ever possessed weapon during an offence Ever possessed a gun
Current Past gang All gang Non gan members s ganb-mer membe r 63 44 49 20
50
21
78
75
76
34
Ever possessed a gun during an offence
33
31
32
14
Ever fired a gun
67
71
70
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Ever mix with people who carry a gun
Source: (Bennett and Holloway, 2004)
10 In contrast to a study by Esbensen & Lynskey (2001) who found a larger proportion of female g ang members in their sample - 38% .
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Operation Cruise
In response to the rising levels of gun-related crime and increasing public fear around gangs
and gang violence the Metropolitan Police sought to unearth and understand the problem as
it presented itself in the capital. The result was the formation of Operation Cruise a `tasking'
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team, headed by Commander Andre Baker, which aimed to provide a strategic overview of the problems posed by gangs . In an attempt to gain an understanding of the scale of the gang problem within London a scoping exercise was initiated which involved the
construction of a self-complete questionnaire . This was distributed to every police area and was completed by intelligence officers . The questionnaire asked for information of the nature and criminal involvement of groups and gangs known to be operative within each force area, whether the borough `had a problem' with these groups and the level/extent, if
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any, of inter-gang rivalry between them "
The survey revealed several hundred `known gangs' in existence across London . One borough, Tower Hamlets, cited over 14 very active criminal groups whilst others, such as Islington reported no known gang activity at all, and categorically stated that they did not
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have a problem with juvenile street gangs . While this research effort confirmed that gangs were certainly perceived as a social problem across London, given the self completion
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methodology and the absence of commonly agreed defintions, it is not possible to generalise from these findings to the UK as a whole . 1 2
Conclusio n
In this chapter we have examined the British research tradition on group delinquency . As we have shown, while there is historical evidence to suggest that gangs have always been a
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feature of urban life when criminologists began to study this phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960s, they did not find American style gangs . Echoing the work of Millar (need reference) ,
11 Need to find out the year 12 Operation Cruise enlisted the services of the Centre for Social and Evaluation Research at the London Metropolitan University who, together with the Andre Baker and his colleagues across the service took the project forward. This report is based on these developments .
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what was discovered instead were street corner groups that were very much steeped in the
traditions of their parent culture . By far the most dominant focus for subsequent research lay in explicating the development of the flamboyant subcultures that appeared in British
society during the post war period . Analysis conducted within this vein saw such cultural development as a form of resistance through ritual and as an attempt to resolve the
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contradictions young people experienced in their parent class in a society undergoing
significant change. What is also noticeable about the British tradition is their analysis of the impact of control agents on helping forge the very delinquent subculture they recoiled from . Finally, as we have also noted, while the contemporary media-led rediscovery of the gang has created a research industry to explore it, to date there is little evidence that would appear to confirm the central premise of gang talk, which suggests that British society is being overrun
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by the gang.
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5. LEARNING THE LESSON S
The UK is in the process of rediscovering the gang or so it would seem from the sensational
reports that have surfaced in the media and political press . There has certainly been a shift in popular conceptions of the `public enemy' with the gang now occupying the position offolk
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devil par excellence; a role that, until recently, was occupied by the street robber (Hallswort h and Young, 2004) . Given the sensational reporting gangs have assumed it is unsurprising
that `gang fever' has gripped the UK in the way it has . What this fever has certainly licensed, is a proliferation of `gang talk' most of which appears dedicated to promoting the view that Britain's streets are awash with feral groups stalking their prey from an innocent society of victims .
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As with most fevers, however, the symptoms can appear more severe than the condition itself and a sense of proportion has unfortunately been lost in the process . While this observation is not to deny the fact that gangs and delinquent groups do indeed pose real threats to communities, a cooler, and more sober approach to addressing the issue of collective youth violence is thus required if the problem is to be tackled in an effective and
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efficient way. To see the world aright it is thus necessary to move beyond the inherent limitations of `gang talk' if we are to approach the problem of collective offending with a
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necessary sense of perspective and proportion.
One way we can do this is to reflect on the research traditions we have profiled and learn both from their strengths and weaknesses . In what follows we will summarise what these lessons are and so establish the basis for developing a framework of analysis that will better enable us to understand the kinds of delinquent formations at play in British society today .
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Lessons learned
If we take the American and UK tradition together then the work we have profiled holds many lessons we need to bear in mind in the context of a British society awash with gang talk and gang fever. Not least they demolish simplistic populist conceptions of the gang an d
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the gang member as pathologically motivated outsiders addicted to evil . What the developing
history of gang research points to instead is a rather different way of conceiving the gang and those who belong to it .
This sociologically grounded tradition, far from conceiving the gang member as an individual
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driven by some psychological deficit to become a gang member, considers them instead as rational individuals who make choices and decisions that are crucially shaped by the socio-
economic situation and environmental conditions in which they live . Gang behaviour then is primarily a social phenomenon, not a psychological problem and needs to be studied as such . This does not mean that the choices gang members take are necessarily good or sensible (most often they are anything but), only to point out that the choices made are constrained
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choices shaped by the world into which people are born which they had no say in creating .
If the pattern of adaptation selected is negative in so far as it licences collective violence and delinquency, there remains little evidence that engaging in delinquent groups, and embracing aspects of delinquent culture marks the beginning of a fully-fledged criminal career . As we have seen, most gangs do not last long and disorganisation, as opposed to organisation,
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characterise the overwhelming majority. Few have, or can command, the resources to engage in serious organised crime and engage instead in episodic low-level offending. As
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members, most individuals do not stay fixed to the group (or to criminality) but `drift in' and `drift out' as and when necessary .
Nor is it the case that the gang member and his non-gang peers inhabit different existential worlds . The popular imagery of the gang as a group of unruly feral youth existing on the edge of society and preying on a population of victims is a gross misinterpretation that needs to be challenged . As we have observed, the difference between the gang member and nongang member is vastly overshadowed by the similarities that unite them . Both may
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periodically engage in delinquency but remain, for the most part - despite the fearful appearance they appropriate, remain committed to the dominant culture and the values that define it . Considered this way the `gang' member is likely to share far more of the dispositions their non-gang peers possess than not . Both will have been successfully socialised into the culture of compulsory consumption charactersitic of free market societie s
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and as a consequence all will have been taught to associate well-being in life with the possession of desirable material goods .
If we now consider what the literature we have covered here has to say about these wider determining forces that help shape the choices to engage in group delinquent behaviour,
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there are many factors we need to consider. As we have seen this can veer from seemingly
`normal' and innocuous motives such as the desire to have a good time and `hang out with friends' in order to alleviate boredom . At the same time group delinquent life and the `subterranean values' that characterise it can also be less part of the sphere of organised criminality so much as part of the world of leisure wherein the reality of manual labour is spectacularly transcended through acts of collective transgression . Finally, engaging in crime may well be part of a mechanism by which a viable masculine identity is accomplished and
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material wealth accumulated for those who are powerless . In this sense it can be construed as a form of adaptation to a society where what it is to be successful and what it is to be a man are universally distributed norms unattainable given the inherent inequalities endemic to free market society. What this points towards is the need to recognise group existence for
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the complex reality it is .
Another important lesson the research traditions that we have studied here show is that
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group delinquency cannot be studied without reference to the social response directed against it . This works, as we have seen, at a number of different levels . To begin with as the British subcultural school demonstrated the identity of groups while always a creative response to the socio-economic conditions in which they are located are never solely an autonomous creation the group alone . Control agents and not least the mass media also perform very important roles in helping forge and sustain group solidarity as well as helping define its identity . As the American gang research tradition reminds us, the solidarity of the group is not least affirmed by its recognition as a group by control agents ; while, as British
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subcultural theorists have shown, the capacity of the media to amplify the deviant acts they
otherwise condemn through the production of moral panics, itself remains an important source for sustaining collective delinquent endeavour . An important lesson this poses for
control agents is that they must themselves reflect on how far their actions may themselves influence the conduct of the delinquent formations they wish to control .
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As our review demonstrated, the differences between the American and British research
traditions were themselves largely shaped by the discovery that what went on in the US and the UK are not the same even if there are a number of over-lapping similarities as well. To
put this another way, the kind of gang formation evident the US is not what has traditionally
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been found on the streets of the UK and Europe and this needs to be born in mind . This lesson remains important today precisely because when the label `gang' is evoked by gang
talkers its meaning comes already prescribed with a prior array of associations and references accumulated from the United States where, as we have seen, it is recognised a serious social problem.
The problem with the gang talk mediated by the mass media however is that it typically fails
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to remember this point. Thus we find most reports into the problem of the gang deploy the term as defined in American terms and according to the stereotypical image of the US street gangster. At the heart of this representation is a group that is believed to be large, organised, with hierarchical leadership, a uniform, prescribed codes of conduct and which work s towards a collectively agreed criminal goal . While this representation may well describe (as
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we have seen) some features of American gangs such as the Crips, Bloods and Latin Kings, this representation typically overstates (as we have also observed in our consideration of the
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academic literature), the inherent precariousness and disorganisation that characterises most delinquent groups . The problem with gang talk then is that it has a systematic tendency to `over-egg' its case . By imposing problematic definitions onto a complex world not only is reality misrepresented, an order and cohesion is also predicated upon groups they otherwise do not posses . Far from seeing the world correctly what gang talk produces too often is less the truth so much as a forgery .
The terrible problem with forgeries however is that people, (including self styled experts),
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have a terrible capacity to accept them as the real thing . The case of the faked Hitler Diaries, paid for by the Sunday Times Newspaper on the advice of seemingly impeccable experts, exemplifies the problem. While this escapade eventually left the Times the laughing stock of Fleet Street (not to say considerably out of pocket), the case of accepting a fake analysis of group delinquency we will now suggest is infinitely more dangerous . This now leads us to
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highlight some of the dangers and not least limitations inherent in much of the way the gan g research tradition has evolved, specifically as it has developed in the US context .
It might appear at first glance that the problem of the gang is the gang and its delinquent
behaviour. As this brief survey of the literature on collective delinquency suggests however
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this is only part of the problem . Another, equally pressing issue, concerns the way in which
we perceive and represent the gang in speech and writing . Before we get to see the world of the gang in the right way we must, as a precursor, begin by divesting ourselves of the misapprehensions that too often follow through from `gang talk' . This process must entail becoming aware of the problems that inhere to using gang talk to make sense of the world, and sloughing away the baggage of associations and signification's the gang has accumulated
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in the process of its (American) history.
As we observed in our study of the classic American gang research tradition (and this is largely repeated in its more contemporary form) when the gang was studied it was typically only ever studied in relation to a particular population group, specifically America's Black and Latino populations . Indeed it could be argued that as a consequence of this
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ethnocentric gaze it is today very difficult to disassociate the notion of the gang from the minority ethnic groups who, as we have seen, are almost always studied as archetypal gang
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members . This view unsurprisingly is also picked up and mediated by the mass media whose commentators have found no trouble in recent years in identifying minority ethnic groups as net gang producers . Thus we find today ongoing talk about Albanian and Turkish gangs but and this is the point almost no mention of gangs or delinquent groups that emanate from majority white population .
Now in making this point it is not our aim to say that there is not a gang culture among certain disadvantaged minority ethnic groups nor to suggest that these ought not to be
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studied and stopped . What we wish to draw attention to is the inherent bias that inheres in
the way the gang picture is produced which only tends to include minority groups because these are where people tend to look to find gangs . What this bias helps ferment bears consideration. First, it leaves us blind to the forms of group delinquency perpetuated by white groups in general and, not least, powerful white males in particular . Another problem
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inherent in accepting this stereotype about the gang is that at the point of practice the kind
of criminal entities it best describes are those least likely to be described as gangs . Criminal enterprises such as Enron, for example, fit the stereotype of the gang far better than most
youthful delinquent collectives to which the label `gang' is routinely applied. By virtue of definitional fiat, (normally accomplished by ensuring the definition of what a gang i s
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attached to young people alone) such groups can avoid the label and the criminalisation that accompanies its appellation.
By talking up the problem of the organised ethnic gang so this criminalising discourse can also have the added impact of further enhancing a punitive culture predicated on responding to the organised gang menace by highly coercive means when perhaps more inclusive measures might be more appropriate . By creating an `other' so a convenient scapegoat can
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be created upon which public anxieties can be fostered and mobilised . There is a need therefore to question whom we are talking about and why we are talking about them . Again, a sober realistic appraisal of the situation based on facts needs to be carefully constructed especially when there is the possibility of inciting inter-ethnic tensions .
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In a society awash with gang fever however, fine distinctions are rarely made. The problem is defined in such sensational terms that the impression generated is that society today is
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confronting a problem that is both unique and unlike anything that has happened before . As Geoffrey Pearson's historical review of the history of such `respectable public fears' eloquently highlights, successive generations have voiced identical fears about predatory youth gangs and their propensity for disorder and violence (Pearson, 1983) . The key point to note is that before we buy wholeheartedly into the image of the gang as posing a new terminal threat to law and order it is important to remember that these fears are not new . What they are expressive of is a society often caught in a terminal state of amnesia about its
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past.
At the same time we need to remain aware of the pervasive and often destructive role the media can perform in producing a fake representation of the gang . As the work of Cohen and Hall powerfully demonstrate, the fifth estate along with political elite's are ofte n instrumental in producing and mobilising popular fears and anxieties . The problem of the
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gang therefore is as much a problem of how it is defined and represented as it is a matter of law-breaking individuals . It is also important to recognise that gang research is tied to social policy and politics which themselves mirror wider media induced fears and anxieties and on occasion confirm them. There have been several surges in interest in gangs . Decker has
shown that such public interest was evident in the 1890s, 1920s, 1960s 1980s, 1990s (Decker,
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1996) and this recent rediscovery is only another instalment in a long history . The lesson we need to take away from this not to panic in the face of media [over]-reaction, nor fee l obliged to pander to it through generating empty symbolic gestures and knee-jerk reactions . Sober realistic reflection of the facts must always be affirmed.
What is needed therefore is a sensible working definition of collective delinquency . One that is sensitive to context and to history and this must proceed hand in hand with a critical
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assessment of how we think and talk about delinquent formations . In approaching these issues however we must remember that there is no one universal gang and we have to be careful about using the label to describe all youth groups . To address the issue of group offending we need to have an accurate grasp of the nature and extent of the problem in hand. In other words we need to define and determine, exactly, the danger and extent of
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`gang life' if we are to get real about gangs in the UK . This means we must move decisively
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beyond `gang-talk' and its limitations if we are to avoid the fever it otherwise induces .
Towards a framework of analysis On the basis of this critique we suggest that while the literature we have considered has much to teach us, to understand group delinquency as it unfolds across the UK it is necessary to transcend its limitations . In what follows we briefly identity how this can be achieved . This will then provide the basis for the framework of analysis we develop in the
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next chapter .
An inherent problem with `gang talk' is that it always presupposes that the problem of th e collective is the problem of the gang. Klein, for example, identifies 5 different types of gang in his research: Traditional, Neo-traditional, Compressed, Collective & speciality gangs
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(Klein, 2004) . The problem here though is that by reifying the salience of the gang so it
becomes all too easy to loose sight of other forms of delinquent formations that may be
operative within an environment which are not gangs and which should not be defined as such. To this extent, we advance the notion that the gang is only one of a number of
collectives and propose that to fully understand delinquency in collective life we must look
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beyond the structure of the gang and cease to reduce the complexity of group life to it . At
the same time we must study not only the diverse order of delinquent groups that exist many of which are not gangs and which consequently ought not to be labelled as such, but also study the relationships between them .
In arguing the case for re-constructing the domain of collective delinquency that moves beyond the narrow focus on and fascination with the gang our aim is to forge a more
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powerful way of conceiving this domain. The advantages of addressing the issue in this way are that first, this widened gaze would allow for a more complex understanding of the totality of group collectives that can be found at play within any environment than the exclusive focus on the gang typically permits . Second, in so doing so a more accurate understanding of the complexities of group life within a European context can be disclosed
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which the American fixation on the gang invariably looses . Third, while this expanded gaze is certainly broad enough to include within it a consideration of the usual suspect gang
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communities - particularly the ethnic minority group, its remit is also wide enough to permit an analysis of the forms of group offending undertaken by majority ethnicities and not least women. To this extent the position we develop permits a less Eurocentric focus as well as a more nuanced and inclusive gaze on group delinquency . Finally, and importantly, by seeking to avoid the reduction of all delinquent groups into the concept of the gang, we offer practitioners an alternative framework by which they may begin to think through strategies of intervention . Importantly, by drawing attention to a social reality that is characterised by the presence of different form of group delinquency, so this, we hope, will head off
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simplistic uniform, one-size fits measures . As we will conclude below different groups need
to be treated in ways that respect their difference and solutions to the problem they pose ought to reflect this.
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6.
RETHINKING COLLECTIVE DELINQUENC Y
In this section we develop a general model where the focus of analysis is upon different
types of delinquent street collectives rather than `gang' and upon the forms of delinquency (individual and collective) in which they engage . It must be emphasised that the model
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presented here is offered as a heuristic, which is in effect a guide to the understanding . The features we highlight as distinctive are thus not real descriptions of actual groups . What we present should be viewed therefore as an abstract visualisation of the most distinctive features of the groups in question. In sociological terminology what we thus provide are `ideal types .'
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Our analysis begins with the assumption that :
- While there may not be American style gangs the UK, it is home to a number o f different collectives that appear to have gang like features; - Delinquent collectives have distinctive characteristics and are not the sam e
consequently,
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- Many of these collectives pose risks and dangers to themselves and others ; and
- They need to be theorised in their own right .
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There are, we suggest, a number of different forms of street collectives that are distinguishable from each other in relation to the degree of risk and danger they pose to the wider population - and to each other. There are also differences in the organisation and structure of within each collective, which need to be defined for the purpose of analysis . Rather than typologising these collectives as different and discrete forms of collective life we envisage an inter-relationship between each layer of the pyramid where each band is accorded a different risk level. At the base of the `pyramid of risk' are those groups which
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pose the least risk and danger . The higher in the pyramid a groups is located, the greater the risk and danger it poses . Our aim is to define the kind of collective found at each level, to identify its salient features (including factors that unify it with other forms of collective life) and those factors that distinguish it from others .
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We suggest 3 types of collective. The group that represents the largest proportion of the
Pyramid of Risk but poses the least risk we define as a Peer Group (PG) . Located above the PG are forms of what we term the Gang (G) This category represents the second largest proportion of the pyramid and can be subdivided into those gangs which pose medium
levels of risk and those which pose high levels of risk. At the apex of the pyramid we find
Cruise Pyramid of Risk. (See Figure 1 )
Figure 1 : The Cruise Pyramid of Risk
High ris k
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e Grou p
Peer Grou p
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Low risk
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located the Organised Criminal Group (OCG) . This typology can be represented on the
It is important to clearly define what we mean by gang and delinquent collective as it has ramifications for the way society and statutory agencies perceive each group, and will affect the type and level of intervention/prevention measures employed to tackle problems associated by each. Furthermore, clear definition will limit the tendency to blur boundaries between each group (especially by the media and political commentators) which can obscure
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the following fundamental differences . In the remainder of this section we identify three different forms of delinquent collectives, outline the nature of these collectives and consider the forms of delinquency in which they are involved. In turn, we consider the structural and internal relations between members of each group (and external relations between groups) to develop a better understanding of the behavioural and contextual factors that trigger
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delinquent and criminal activity over time and space . In addition, our analysis will include a n examination of crime networks as they are observed to operate in conjunction to th e delinquent groups we identify.
The model consists of three distinct groups : the Peer Group, the Gang and the Organised Crim e
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Group and each will defined below . We conclude this section with a consideration of the crime network .
The Peer Group (PG)
Peer groups we define as a relatively small, unorganised transient congregation of confederates
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who may coalesce in public spaces . Its members will be known to each principally because they share the same space (school or neighbourhood) along with a common history and biography (they have grown up together and have shared the same experiences) . Delinquency and criminal activity is not integral to the identity or practice of the group but
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can occur in given contexts and this, importantly, is what distinguishes the peer group from the gang. This does not mean that members are not - individually or collectively involved some delinquent behaviour, but this will be episodic, intermittent and opportunistic . In
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common parlance it is likely to be low-level anti-social behaviour not engagement in serious assault or acquisitive crime.
It is our contention that this group is the most pervasive of all the forms of delinquent formation found in urban life in European societies . Nor are peer groups confined to minority populations, they exist among all socio-economic groups and both young people and old will be found among them . Nor are peer groups in any way un-natural or
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pathological (even if outsiders may sometimes deem them that way) . In fact they are a natural expression of what being human is in our kind of society . They are natural specifically because what motivates people in general to belong to a group are the kind of
positive things we all believe we share such as the desire for comradeship, friendship, being part of something and not being isolated and alone .
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The basis for peer group association varies . While ethnicity, neighbourhood age and gender often constitute what may be viewed as the basic building blocks of allegiance, religious
affiliation, occupation or leisure interest (being a member of a team for example) can also
provoke the cleavage that binds the group together. This cleavage is also what distinguishes it from something else. But even these grounds for association are not hard and fast. Peer
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groups can also be multi-ethnic and mixed in terms of gender .
In the case of younger peer groups, group belonging can also provide its members with an escape from the mundane banality of everyday life . In the case of young males this can include an escape from the domestic sphere and in the case of young men and increasingly young women, it provides an alternative to the time / space disciplines routinely attached to education and occupational establishments. In this sense the peer group offers a space
controlled by higher authorities .
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where peer identities and reputations can be found for young people in a world that is not
Young peer groups it could be observed will rarely have names for themselves, though others are quite likely to impose a label to describe them . Typically this will be in terms of
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the places they come from (the Brixton boys, the Deptford boys) the schools they attend (the Grange) or the teams they support (Millwall supporters etc .) . Membership as we have
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seen will typically occur as a consequence of shared history and thus overt membership rituals will not govern peer groups . Finally, while some personalities might dominate and prevail within the group there will not be clear leaders, or hierarchical structures or overt group symbolism. If the latter is to be found it is more likely to symbolise something larger than the group for example religious paraphernalia or a team strip . Finally, unlike the gang, the boundaries of the group will not be fixed and firm, hence the often transitory nature of these group s
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Crime and criminal behaviour is not intrinsic to the self-identity of the peer group . It does
not in other words exist predominantly to commit crime and accumulating status and reputation through crime is not what predominantly motivates group membership . What Katz termed `sneaky thrills' epitomise the typical level of delinquent involvement in which most peer groups are likely to engage. When `trouble' occurs it is most likely to be
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conducted by groups of no more than 2 or 3 people . The peer group rarely moves en masse to perpetrate crime and will not typically be involved in forms of acquisitive crime . When mass mobilisation does occur this either involves the group becoming part of a wider
territorial grouping that might either be engaged in responding to an outside threat or
engaging with others in an excursion into another's territory . Unlike the gang the peer
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group does not routinely go looking for trouble, though if trouble finds it (i.e., if its
members are assaulted by another group for example) some peer groups will retaliate. This occurs specifically in relation to honour-related slights . Overall then delinquent behaviour occurs rarely and intermittently among a group that principally exists to promote and reinforce more benevolent non-delinquent behaviour .
If we look at the `staging points' where such delinquency can occur, then among young
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people it can occur in spatially compressed spaces where exit strategies are limited such as inner city estates, or the playground . What is common to both of these locations is that young people are corralled within them . Compression will generate a climate which can become dangerous not so much because it contains volatile and dangerous young people, but because young people are compressed within these spaces and because power relations
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vary within and between groups . These conditions we suggest often `hothouse' the disputes that inevitably emerge and can thus create the basis for vendettas and disputes that may be
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settled violently . As young men have traditionally occupied the streets it is unsurprising that the street is itself as much a site for danger as it is for socialising . Given the greater freedom now claimed by young women the same situation has now become common for them as well.
It is our contention however that the single most significant staging post in which delinquent behaviour among peer groups occurs is within the `re-generated' spaces of city centres where the regeneration effort has been located into creating a 24 hours night time economy of bars,
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clubs and pubs. These contemporary `wild zones' have been constructed as ready made hothouse environments in which conflict within and between peer groups can flourish, as any cursory investigation of any city centre across the UK will bear ready testimony . In such areas we witness a volatile collision between on one hand party people in pursuit of thrills and good time and an environment that is purposely designed to exploit these socially
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induced desires . This it does by via offering consumers access to a compressed space of
earthly delights . Usually this is composed of identikit drinking warehouses where desire is fuelled and stimulated by a ready access to an unending source of chemical pleasures.
Young people in such environments are often subject to intense and unremittingly high
volumes designed purposely with the aim of precluding communication in order to promote
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drinking13. The good times they are led to expect are themselves provided by a sophisticated alcohol industry that fuels desire further by offering a range of specially tailored high volume alcoholic drinks mediated in `happy hours' where drinks are free or sold at low cost . Here the drink available is cheap and its high alcoholic volume makes it incredibly strong . The
fact that much of this alcohol looks and tastes no different from the innocuous drinks young people would have been given when they were children (as in the case of alco-pops) also mitigates against restraint and the result of this calculated exercise in profit maximisation is
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the social production of peer group delinquency that surpasses in volume any threats posed by the gang . What is new about the contemporary instantiation of this volatile drinking culture is less its novelty so much as the prevalence of these wild zones in space and over time . In other words its relation to the 24-hour city and the burgeoning night time economy (Hobbes, 2004) . While it could be objected that this is drinking on a continental model this
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would be to confuse the two cultures . What has been constructed in the UK is an environment in which excess is written into the regeneration blueprint in ways in which it is
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not in other cultures .
Though peer groups can, as we have observed, pose some danger to themselves and others, they are more likely to be victims of more delinquent street collectives . This, in turn, may lead some young groups to defend themselves by appropriating the uniform and walk of the street warrior. In other words they `thug-up' to use street parlance. In a society that has witnessed an escalation in street robbery in recent years, the fear of being a victim has resulted in a number of peer group members routinely carrying weapons, particularly
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penknives . What these two adaptations have helped forge we suggest is on one hand the pervasive but highly problematic re-labelling of the peer group as the gang, while secondly and by no means unrelated - knife use has itself spawned over stated sensational reports of a
13 High volumes act simultaneously to expel older (less profitable) customers thus creating a more uniform an d
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growing `knife culture'. Though, as we have seen, the lifeworld of the peer group can be volatile and episodic as well as risky, most peer groups are not destined to migrate into
higher risk categories of offending behaviour. Adulthood will, for most, stabilise young
people's identity in the direction of law-abiding behaviour and this will end their `drift' into
delinquency. Some groups however mutate pathologically and move onto become members
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of the gang whose nature we now consider.
The Gang
The gang we define as a relatively durable, predominantly street-based group of young people who see themselves (and are recognised by others) as a discernible group for whom crime and violence is intrinsic to identity and practice . The minimal characteristic features of the
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gang then are that it has ; a) a name, b) a propensity to inflict violence and engage in crime where c) violence and delinquency performs a functional role in promoting group identity and solidarity. While the presence of an organisational structure, a defined leader, group rituals and symbolism and a definable territory claimed by the groups as its own are also characteristic features of some gangs (specifically those found in the US) we consider these
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as supplementary features, not essential defining characteristics of all gangs ; as is being `street-based' . Whilst the organisation, ethos and structure of the gang differ from that of
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the peer group, we perceive the gang a derivative and mutation of it .
Though there are examples of girl gangs in the USA, which appear as violent as male gangs, such group are rare : gangs are predominantly male dominated groups with women performing roles within them. In the UK there are very few female gangs though many female peer groups have often been mistaken for them . Overwhelmingly the gang in the form described here will be found in poor inner city areas - in areas characterised by permanent recession and multiple deprivation, but again not necessarily restricted to it . As
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we shall observe, it is the structurally determined powerless of its members that also helps provide the impetus for deviant adaptations that can result in gang formation.
homogenous environment conducive to high consumption alcoholic intake .
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As with the peer group, gang members are likely to be bound together because they typically share a similar history and biography ; not least because they often dwell in the same
neighbourhood or estate . Like the peer group the gang also acts as a space where excitement may be generated and the mundane `boredom of every day life temporarily transcended' . Like the peer group the gang offers its members the security of belonging, a place where
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friendships are built and reputations made and established . Indeed, for most of its existence, the gang functions like, and is indistinguishable from, street-based peer groups . Hanging around - and by so doing intimidating the adult world - is most of what the gang does . Where the peer group and the gang are distinguished from one another is in the role and status that violence and crime plays within the group . Whereas in the peer groups
delinquency is not integral to its practice or identity in the case of the gang it is . If we consider the motives that might lead some peer groups to mutate into gangs then we need to
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understand the engagement in delinquent behaviour in terms of the advantages and benefits its members believe such activity confers upon them . According to the `codes of the street' (Anderson, 1999) to which gang members are typically beholden, delinquent behaviour is mobilised as a currency to acquire various forms of social capital . By engaging in violence or, at least, demonstrating in your social presentation of self a competence in it, so status
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relative to others [and not least their respect] may be generated . In and through the capacity to engage in violence so members become people of `respect' in a world where respect is
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everything. By participating in violence these perceptions also become confirmed at the point of practice. People (adults as well as young people) will fear you ; your peers will respect you; a reputation is acquired for both the individuals and the group (they have arrived.) ; and finally material goods otherwise unaffordable may come your way. By engaging in violence so a sense of power is accumulated for those who typically have very little . In the successful practice of violence sovereignty is acquired and expressed via the control the gang exercises over space and not least people who may oppose them . In this process by adopting the `ways of the baddass', so mundane reality is spectacularly transcended (Katz,
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1990) .
Gang members do not typically own and control the means of illegal production . This, as
we shall see, is what distinguishes the gang from the Organised Crime Group . The turn to violence then can be viewed very much as an attempt to acquire status and not least a viabl e
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masculine identity via mobilising the one power resource available to them - raw physical
energy. Considered this way violence is something that can be appropriated precisely because
it is ready to hand and because its exercise can produce desirable outcome within a relatively short space of time; and because its use is already affirmed within street codes as a viable
method of obtaining status and distinction . In a world where these codes prevail it could
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also be pointed out that even if all gang members do not subscribe to this heavily
masculinised discourse, they will nevertheless will feel obliged to `walk the gang walk' and `talk the gang talk' in order to buy off the risk of being a victim of the group. In this sense, wise guys are wise precisely because they do what they need to do to survive . This can involve engaging in law breaking or violence to affirm that they have what it takes to be a member.
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Unsurprisingly, within the macho culture of the gang, value is ascribed to those who embrace stereotypical male values such `toughness', `assertiveness', 'hardness', and being able to handle yourself. Also unsurprisingly this purified heterosexual masculine culture is also one that repudiates what society traditionally codes and positions as the `feminine'. This includes such traits as empathy, vulnerability, compassion, communication, emotional
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behaviour. It is for this reason that the most powerful way by which disrespect may be socially demonstrated is via highly gendered insults such as `pussy', `bitch', `ho' & queer' .
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This culture is thus, by nature, pervasively misogynist as well as homophobic (women are `bitches' while `gays' are represented as queers, poofs & fags)
Within the gang the thresholds that govern the movement towards violence are more diminished than that typically found in most peer groups . Whereas male honour slights can be avoided within most (though not all peer groups) in the case of the gang, violent retaliation now becomes the dominant means by which slights are addressed . This is because not to respond in this way would be to betray weakness (i .e . to become feminine) ; and thus
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to loose the status and honour that appear commensurate with a viable male identity. Unlike the peer group the gang is also more likely to subscribe to notions of collective honour as opposed to individual honour . When a challenge is made to gang member it is thus likely to be considered a slight to the group and thus demand a collective response to defend the group as well as the self who has experienced the insult. At the same time, not to respond
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will be coded as a sign of weakness and this could help position an individual as a potential victim .
Given their attachment to these cultural injunctions, those who possess the highest status
within the collective are those best equipped to marshal aggression as a competence within
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the group . However status is confirmed and conceded only for as long as this competence continues to be demonstrated and for as long as the individual is around (i .e. visible) to demonstrate it . In a world where this competence is often permanently challenged and is
always open to challenge, it could be observed that this Darwinian culture ensures that most gangs are highly volatile self destructive and fragile entities . Unsurprisingly many do not survive for long and self destruction as well as their destruction by law enforcement agencies
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is often their destiny.
Though gangs in the UK context will have a clear sense of its own identity (a collective consciousness) this is unlikely to be accompanied by esoteric group rituals and practice along the lines of the American gang model. While the collective may wear the paraphernalia of urban ghetto youth (with local cultural adaptations) because of its signification's with
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gangster life, it should be observed that this is a street uniform also adopted by many young men in peer groups . It is also a uniform ruthlessly marketed to young men by the culture
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industries .
If we now consider gang involvement in delinquent behaviour as offenders then the gang would be located in the mid to high section of the pyramid of risk. This ranking reflects the more important role that violence and offending behaviour performs for the group . In a practical sense unlike the peer group who may find trouble the gang will typically congregate en masse and go in search of it . The frequency of offending behaviour is thus likely to be higher than for the peer group and the degree of violence used more severe . Gangs are also
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more likely to specialise in crime than the peer group, and will be more likely to engage in acquisitive crimes, particularly street robbery . As violence is their stock in trade Gangs are also more likely to routinely carry weapons . As the gang, particularly in its territorial form often lives in close proximity to gangs in other estates, the possibility for conflict between them is often inevitable . Sometimes tensions could be longstanding within an area in the
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sense that you are bought up knowing that those who live on a separate estate are you r sworn enemies . Sometimes conflicts can be more recent but can escalate if a vendett a
occurs . What makes vendettas lethal is when they occur among groups beholden specifically to collective notions of honour . In this case every slight must be revenged in a tit for tat action in a spiral of violence their members often find powerless to prevent and feel
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compelled to perpetuate.
While it is commonplace to consider violence as something that is made by human action and as something that is mobilised instrumentally, this common-sense approach to violence is itself superficial and unable to grasp the phenomenology of group violence of this kind . In world where grief, pain, anger and mourning constitute the lived lifeworld of the gang member, so violence far from being simply something they do becomes something which
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itself shapes the world these actors inhabit . Rather like the genie who refuses to return to the lamp so it is the case with violence in the form of a gang vendetta . Rather than making violence, violence remakes the lifeworld of the actors involved in its image. This is why reason often fails when used to dissuade gang members from retaliation ; and this is why
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preventing a retaliation is so difficult .
There are two ways of typologising gangs in the UK context, one way would be to
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distinguish them by type by considering what they specialise in, the other way would be t o group them by the level of the risk they pose .
In terms of specialism, gangs in the UK can be classified into two forms . First there is the territorial-fighting unit which is principally noted for the ownership over a particular territory it claims a sovereign right to . This territory or `turd it will defend from others, including on occasions, law enforcement agencies . Often these kind of fighting groups do not exist by themselves but are often found in close proximity to others around them . It is also likely
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that these groups will be locked in an ongoing conflict with each other and this conflict, specifically if it has adopted the form of a vendetta, will itself perform an important role in
helping cement group solidarity . Indeed it is to defend oneself from the other group and to mount attacks upon the other groups members, that often provide the territorial gang with its ultimate raison de etre. Fear of attack in this sense can help produce and sustain group
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loyalty. It could also be observed here that undue publicity can also help produce a n
affirmation of the group not least because such publicity will show the groups members tha t they have indeed `arrived' and obtained their 15 minutes of fame .
The second type we would term the economic gang. This grouping differs from the
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territorial gang in so far as its members specialise in a particular form of crime . This may be street robbery or TWOCing or joy riding and it is this specialism that unifies the members and provides the group with its solidarity . In this sense the group is unified by the desire to acquire something through illegal means - and it is this risk element that also provides its members with excitement and status, and this is attached to consumption rituals where the goods accumulated are translated into other desirable goods (branded clothes etc) or are used and destroyed (as in the case of joyriding cultures) that meaning in life is affirmed .
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These types it should be emphasised are not mutually exclusive and it will often be the case that territorial gangs will also be engaged in acts like street robbery while economic gangs may also lay claim to a particular turf .
All gangs pose risks given the salience of rule breaking to their identity and practice . That
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said, gangs can be typologised into two broad categories : the medium risk gang and the high risk gang. In the case of medium risk gangs, their violence can be serious but on the whole
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such groups are likely to be fairly short lived. Most members of such groups will not `tip' into a fully-fledged criminal careers unless they are caught and processed by the CJS or systematically excluded from education . Normally, law enforcement activity coupled with their inherent volatility and precariousness will ensure the group either destroys itself or is destroyed .
What distinguishes the high risk gang from medium risk gangs is that the rate of offending behaviour in high risk gangs will be greater and the degree of harm its members are prepared
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to inflict more serious . There are, we suggest two key drivers that lead to this increase . First the success the group obtains in perpetrating violence / crime can have the consequence of leaving its members to believe that they are omnipotent. This in turn can make them feel and believe that they are sovereign, invincible and therefore untouchable. This in turn is also coupled with the growing awareness that agencies of control are not omnipresent. At its mos t
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developed, this may lead the gang to look with contempt upon law enforcement agencies . These beliefs coalesce into a mentality where gang members presuppose that they can
exercise unlimited power which ignites the desire to transgress boundaries further. The
recent highly publicised murder of an unarmed man by the IRA in a Belfast pub and the
murders undertaken by the Kray Twins both exemplify where this conflation of masculinity
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with a sense of itself as a deity can take it in practice . It could also be observed that the
further engaged in violence a member is the higher the degree of immersion in an illegal subculture will be and the more difficult exiting from the group will become .
The Organised Crim e Group (OCG)
Finally, we have what we term the Organised Crime Group. This is composed principally of
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men for whom involvement in criminal behaviour is intrinsic to their identity and practice and for whom such involvement is their raison de etre. These are not boys nor would they see themselves as a street-based gang. These are men who `do the business' where the business of crime is an occupation. In economic terms, it is organised crime groups that exercise disproportionate control over the illegal means and forces of crime production. Its
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members are likely to have mutated out of what we term the gang who stand in a subordinate relation to the members of organised crime groups who use them to service
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their needs .
If we now study the motives for involvement in organised crime groups then this could occur for a number of reasons . It could occur because upward mobility is thwarted by virtue of structurally induced exclusion and marginalisation within the legitimate economy . Which in turn creates the context for a delinquent adaptation that resolves itself into an attempt to obtain status and material wealth through mobilising entrepreneurial abilities within an illegal market context. Members capitalise on the alternatives directly available to them (knowledge
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of illegal markets, knowledge of victims ; a capacity to mobilise violence successfully, etc) . In a market where a number of intensively desirable goods and services are restricted through prohibition (as in the case of drugs) this factor itself generates the scale of customer demand for the market that illegal crime groups will exploit . Finally, and this is again consistent with
what often motivates the involvement of young men in the gang, there is a seduction to evi l
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that is attractive. Through it hedonistic impulses are gratified while power is obtained often for those with little .
In many respects the motives that impel membership of organised crime groups are no
different than those that inspire and motivate business people in the legal and legitimate
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economy. This would include a desire to make money and to engage successfully in a
cultural order characterised by conspicuous consumption . Like the entrepreneur in the legal economy successful practitioners who operate within organised crime groups will also be adept at exploiting market opportunity for the purpose of profit maximisation. As Hobbes argues :
Enterprise culture has spawned a highly flexible practitioner, skilled and culturally
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resourced for multiple entrepreneurial engagements, committed not to a subculture but to financial gain ; his practice is marked by a competent manipulation of markets and the maximisation of profits (Hobbes : 1997 :821 )
Though many successful legitimate businesses and many successful businessmen also flout
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and break rules in order to maximise profit, what crucially distinguishes these white-collar criminals from organised criminals is that the latter operate almost exclusively in the grey and
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illegal marketplace . In form, it must be emphasised, this marketplace is not wholly distinct or autonomous from the wider economy of which it is a part . The grey market is simply an extension of the legitimate economy and intersects with it at numerous points . As we shall also observe this economy is also intrinsically capitalist in the sense that it is competitive and profit driven and as such is governed by its norms . Where it departs from the legal economy is that market transactions within it are totally unregulated by the law and those who act to ensure compliance to it .
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Crime groups seek to maximise profit by engaging in a range of criminal behaviours . This
can include providing illegal services such as prostitution or protection; selling legitimate goods acquired illegally, trading in illegal goods such as drugs ; or engaging in acquisitive crimes such as armed robbery or kidnapping . The supply and trade in illegal drugs it could be observed is the principal mainstay of the illegal economy in which most organised crime
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groups operate . While some groups may specialise in a particular crime many will also multitask and will exploit any market opportunity as it presents itself .
Like gangs, many organised crime groups are also beholden to an aggressive masculine
culture and identity and live within a world where honour and respect are fundamentally
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important to their sense of personal identity . This could, imbue these groups the same
volatility as youth gangs because when slights are encountered, these would also provoke violent retaliation and vendetta . Whereas young people are likely to reach for their knives, these men invariably reached for their guns . Though violence could and is used
instrumentally in pursuit of a crime (for example using weapons in the case of an armed robbery), violence could also ensue given the unregulated and competitive nature of the economy in which they exist . As in the free market economy more generally larger firms will
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attempt to force smaller ones out of business in order to secure a market monopoly, the same process can be observed in the illegal economy . Whereas in the legal economy techniques such as buying out the opposition or selling goods or services more cheaply may be used as a means of destroying it, these are also accompanied in the illegal economy by the use of force. When this occurs those attacked may respond by adopting the same methods
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in order to defend themselves . What may result (and this is evident in a number of metropolitan areas such as the St. Pains area of Bristol, Nottingham and South Manchester),
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are protracted wars fought out with guns . And when this occurs it is also likely that what may begin as an act of instrumental violence gets overlaid with an ongoing vendetta . Finally violence can also occur when criminals whose markets have been destroyed by law enforcement activity, are released from prison and return to find that others have taken control of their market.
While most crime groups operate within the locality into which they were born, in the face of globalisation new market opportunities have blossomed which organised crime groups
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have exploited. In the face of significant demographic shifts so too has the nature of criminal enterprise changed to reflect it . In the case of the EU demographic shifts aligned to economic change and progressively porous borders have created the market opportunity that has been exploited both by indigenous crime groups but also by new arrivals . New markets include the trafficking of people, drugs and prostitution .
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Traditionally, the most common form of crime group was the territorially-based crime
family. The core membership and its leaders will typically be related and accomplices drawn
from the neighbourhood where the group traditionally lived or other relatives . Until recently it was likely that well established crime firms would have been beholden to a code of
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professional criminal ethics that stressed the importance of values such as `rightness',
`solidness', `honesty' and `loyalty' (Hobbes, 1997, 819) . Along with the ability to withstand institutional confinement these values helped cement a criminal identity.
In the face of economic change and the decline of older working class neighbourhoods from which such groups were predominately drawn this group is progressively being displaced by more flexible protean criminal networks that have adapted to the changing terrain of a
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globalising free market society. Rather like the new `flexible firms' of the enterprise society these networks operate to bring together practitioners for a specific enterprise . They expand and contract in line with market forces . Like the new deregulated flexible firm, the conditions of work within the contemporary organised crime group will be insecure and not characterised by job tenure . Nor are such groups likely to be modelled on older vertical
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hierarchies. Like the modem firm these enterprises will be more likely to be composed of flattened out structures . As Potter (1994) argues, these are `flexible adaptive networks that
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readily expand and contract to deal with the uncertainties of the criminal enterprise' . Unlike the criminal firms of the past which were rooted within the working class community of which they were a part, the newer networks are not steeped in this culture or its composite norms .
It remains important to recognise that organised crime groups are not homogeneous . Some, indeed most, will be amateur affairs operated and managed by incompetent people who barely make enough money to sustain themselves . Engagement in illegal criminality does not
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accord individuals with any more advantages in building and or sustaining business than the average small business operating in the legal market economy . The market place is precarious in nature and a substantial number of self-employed small businesses struggle to realise profit especially within the formative stages of business development and over the first few years; indeed some operate at a loss . Some businessmen/women will be responding
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to local demand and have identified a gap/niche in the market that, one filled, generates profit; others will not be so successful . Some practitioners will demonstrate more
professionalism, competency, market acumen and ruthlessness than others and use the
resources around them to generate income and so be more successful, than others, in their endeavour. In the illegal economy, as in the legal market place, the reward of success are
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high and investors will work to protect their income by translating profit into other tangible
benefits that help to sustain business and camouflage the venture . These are likely to be (but not reduced to) staff, legal advice, security and protection, offshore banking and efficient creative accountancy . It could be argued that the more proficient the practitioner and the more professional the outfit, the less likely the business will operate like a criminal
enterprise. These practitioners, and business ventures will, invariably, be more difficult to trace because they will also be more competent at hiding their activities . As with the street
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gang the distinction between medium and high risk also applies within the context of the OCG. The successful planning and implementation of criminal activity, especially operations involving multiple personnel, can so easily create an environment where the members come to conceive of themselves (and the group) as omnipotent and powerful . Presumably, the more powerful, and sovereign-like the group, greater the potential to
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increase its market share and enhance profit -the driving force of many legitimate as well as illegitimate business ventures . Greater market share secured by the group affects its internal
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dynamics altering perceptions of what the group is about . Indeed, success in the market place can lead to grandiose conceptions within the group, a deity complex, as it or individual players perceive themselves as a leading force to be reckoned with . The inflated egoism of which successful groups may be tarnished with might, in the perusal of more market share or maintenance of current status, lead to an escalation in the nature and volume of crime committed .
While it might be tempting to see organised crime as a problem of social outsiders, this
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would be to simplify a more complicated reality . As John Lea (2004) has recently argued, in the deregulated global market place many seemingly legitimate businesses have engaged in practices that are distinctly criminal as the collapse of the bank BSSI and corporations such as Enron demonstrate. As fraud within the EU demonstrates organised crime is also something in which state bodies can engage often in collaboration with organised crime
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groups . Considered this way the organised crime groups we have considered here are no t the denizens of an autonomous black economy, but part of a crime continuum that als o
includes corrupt criminal business organisations as well as institutions of government .
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The Crime Network
Far from being only one form of delinquent group, as we have seen, there are many . One lesson that can be derived from this is that it is important to study the totality of groups within an area and not succumb to the temptation to concentrate on only one group to the exclusion of others (for example the street-gang) . As important as it is each group as an individual entity it is also necessary to study the nature of relationships that inhere between different groups, as these are located on the pyramid of risk : groups after all operate not only
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in proximity to each other but in relation to and with each other . These relations may well be characterised by trust, friendship and mutual respect or, alternatively, fear and enmity .
An important set of social relations are those that inhere between groups and individuals who collectively engage in a particular form of criminal endeavour . This set of relationships
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can be grasped by the idea of the crime network. This can be defined as the articulation of groups and individuals who come together in space and overtime for the purpose of engaging in criminal
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activity.
Crime networks are, by nature, composed of social relations between different actors who mobilise different skills and competences and these may take several forms . Indeed, different forms of criminal endeavour will be characterised by different forms of articulation between different actors . A drug distribution network, for example, will employ a different set of expertise from a certain network of individuals competent in the production and trade of illegal narcotics than one dedicated to the theft and distribution of cars and mobile
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phones .
A crime network may be concentrated within a particular area, or it may be more spatiall y diffuse . Groups within it may for example be located (to use NIMS terminology) acros s boroughs, in different cities or indeed different countries . A criminal network may operate
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wholly in the illegal `black' economy but more often it is likely that it will operate in the grey economy as we saw in the case of the organised crime group . In other words, while certain
parts of the network may be composed of groups for whom crime and illegality is integral to
their identity and purpose, the network may also be composed of actors ; i.e. legal actors such as business organisations and/or financial specialists or young people . The relationship
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between individuals may be congenial in which individuals are rewarded (remunerated) for their efforts or exploitative (such as in the case of drug mules, sex workers or `shotting~14
where individuals are coerced - either psychologically or physically - and brutally exploited.
Like other economic actors it is the case that the market place in which they engage is characterised by competition and conflicts of interest . When seeking to understand the nature of a crime network it is thus important to recognise that there may well be more than
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one set of groups articulated in more than one network operating within a particular
marketplace. As what distinguishes the illegal from the legal marketplace is the absence of legal regulation governing market transactions, crime networks are by their nature inherently risk prone in ways legally regulated businesses are not . Where a business might resolve its problems by recourse to a lawyer, in the illegal economy people may well reach for their
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guns . This may well occur when other groups aspire to take control of a market place a particular group claims as its own . Internal conflicts between actors within a network may
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however also be evident.
Conclusio n
In this chapter we have developed a framework for reinterpreting group delinquency in the UK. While this includes a consideration of the gang, where it departs from other typologies is that it makes reference to other delinquent groups we argue should not be conflated with
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the concept of the gang and which consequently need to be considered in their own terms . These are respectively the peer group and the organised crime group . As we have argued these groups all vary in terms of the risks they pose and each possess different features as
la Shotting refers to the practice of `employing' a young person to sell or deliver drugs in return for money or drugs.
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well as similarities that need to be recognised . As we have also argued it is not enough to
study delinquent groups in a way that ignores the relations between different groups as this inheres to a particular area . On the contrary it is necessary to study the totality of groups
that operate within an area and importantly the nature of the crime network in which they
are articulated and the economic marketplace in which they ply their criminal trade . With
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this framework in mind we will now consider what may be done to address the risks we
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identify.
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7 . Towards an Intervention Strateg y
In this chapter we consider what interventions may be appropriate for addressing the risks
and dangers posed by delinquent groups . We begin with some reflections upon the aims and objectives of intervention by examining what, in effect, it must aspire to achieve . We then
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develop a philosophy of intervention . We conclude by examining the nature of the
interventions that may be directed at reducing the risk posed by different delinquent groups within the hierarchy of risk.
In terms of the method we have used to formulate our intervention strategy this is derived from a reading of the evaluation literature, from conducting evaluations of projects that address collective delinquency and from conversations and interviews conducted with
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practitioners . While one popular approach to the question of what is to be done about the group appears to be to summarise what has been done elsewhere and hold this up as a model for practitioners to evaluate, this is not the approach we adopt . It is our premise that rather than thinking that the problem of the group can be resolved by simply importing this or that (usually American based) intervention, community safety practitioners need to
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rethink what they do at the local level with the resources and interventions that currently exist. As we shall make clear, an effective strategy may not require the creation of a
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dedicated local `gang' unit, nor need it require anew battery of coercive powers . Often, and for the most part, it will entail mobilising powers that already exist, investing in underfunded services and or bending existing services in new ways .
Rethinking the subject of intervention : groups not the gang As we have stressed in this report, the problem of group delinquency includes the gang but
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is not reducible to the gang alone . As we have shown, there are different delinquent groups and the gang is only one of these . As we have also demonstrated different groups pose different risks and consequently require different forms of intervention . Interventions that might, for example, work best to confront a `gang war' might not be appropriate to address problematic behaviour among peer groups ; while Organised Crime Groups require the
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mobilisation of different tactics to that of a juvenile gang . Applying a one-size-fits-all model
as an intervention strategy is, we believe, destined to failure. A sensible way to think through interventions designed to address the problem of group delinquency is to accept from the
beginning that its remit must include all delinquent groups in an area where distinctions are
recognised among them. To put this in different terms, the question is not `what shall we do
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about this particular gang or gangs, but the totality of groups that pose risks and dangers to themselves and others within a determinant area? This focus thus requires recognition of
the problems posed by volatile peer groups, gangs and organised crime groups, but also and crucially the relations that inhere between them ; i .e. the peer group and the gang, the gang with other gangs and the gang with organised crime groups .
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Towards a philosophy of intervention
Recent years have witnessed a movement towards a society dominated by governments that believe problems of crime and delinquency can be confronted by waging a war against them . Recent times have brought a war against drugs, a war against sexual predators, a war against
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crime, a war against terror, and now, a war against gangs appears inevitable . The notion of war, it could be remarked, is intimately bound up with a particular imagery from which it
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cannot be dissociated : the idea of the good confronting the bad, insider versus outsider and of just armies annihilating enemies that deserve the violence directed against them . It is a potent imagery and, because of this, populist politicians like to mobilise it . Indeed, it would appear that a war of sorts has already begun . Government ministers have already singled out the gang as a suitable enemy and numerous punitive measures have been deployed to bring the gang under control.
New police powers groups allow for the dispersion of more than three young people
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gathering in a public space; while street wardens and housing officers beholden to a hard line anti-social behaviour agenda are now distributing Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Abscess) to alleged gang members and other deviant youth . These orders are being used to suppress youthful activity by specifying whom they are able to socialise with, where they can legitimately go, what they can or cannot wear and how they are to behave . In addition, entire
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neighbourhoods are now being reclassified as `anti-social behaviour zones' within whic h these `get tough' tactics can now be liberally unleashed.
Now, clearly, hard edged and robust law enforcement measures must play a key role in any strategy designed to reduce the real risks and dangers posed by delinquent groups, (we
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consider these further below) but placing suppression at the centre of a general intervention strategy is essentially misguided. We have learnt, retrospectively, that suppression will not always work to secure what it aspires to achieve and, more than that, it is an unproductive and socially unjust approach unless it is balanced with alternative non-repressive strategies and
interventions . The United States experience of dealing with gangs and delinquent youth has much to teach us Europeans about what happens when suppression is considered the principle end to which anti-gang strategies are directed . As we shall observe, the lesson is a
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salutary one in how not to do things . The tactics and techniques utilised across the US in pursuit of its `wax against the gang' demonstrate considerable imagination, which include : banning groups from congregating in specific areas and places, prohibiting gang members from congregating at all. Prohibiting the wearing of particular clothing, subjecting convicted gang members to a range of punitive community sanctions (such as preventing them from
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sentences .
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receiving social benefits, further education, social housing and welfare) and longer custodial
In spite of the repression (directed specifically against America's poorest populations and disproportionately represented within minority ethnic groups) and despite the high influx of gang members into America penitentiary system - the highest in the western world - the gang `problem' has not been reduced . Instead, what heavy-end suppression has achieved is a situation where poor people, existing in conditions of hyper ghettoisation, are now routinely subjected to paxa-military policing and a social order where young urban males have been effectively criminalised. Indeed, for commentators such as Wacount (2005) what such
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tactics have helped produce is what he terms a `deadly symbiosis' between the urban ghetto and the expanding penitentiary complex .
Before the war against the gang in the UK starts to assume US style proportions we need t o consider whether this particular `Atlantic crossing' is one we wish to accept . The UK prison
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population is already the highest in Europe and is set to increase further if the war against
gang is initiated with the same vehemence as in America. As group delinquency (particularly in its more extreme forms) has its roots in multiple deprivation and extreme marginalisation we are in danger of simply meeting social exclusion with more exclusion ; for this is what
current strategic intervention initiative such as the ASBO, Curfew Order and dispersion are
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ultimately doing. They exclude and they exclude by coercive means . It would be as well to remember a statement by Campbell (1984 :6) which alerts us to the link between the media and the gang. As she eloquently notes the problem of the `gang' does not disappear when one is not looking at it; they continue on even when no one is watching . The media
reincarnates the gang when news is slow and when gangs `return' the are not `new' but revived in a different guise to suit objectives . In other words, the gang is with us and has always been with us but sometimes we don't care to look. At this time we are looking, and so
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must be careful not to see something that is not there . At the same time it is as important not to reclassify what is already there in the wrong way!
A sensible and proportionate intervention strategy must not be designed in ways that further aggravate the difficulties already confronted by urban youth just because the gang has
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become newsworthy again. While individuals and groups who perpetrate serious crimes should certainly face the full weight of the criminal justice system, it is our contention that
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outright group suppression as a general approach to dealing with groups is a mistaken strategy that must be avoided . What, then, might a more balanced and socially just model of intervention look like ?
We suggest that it is one that affects a more appropriate balance between tough law and order responses and a range of proactive and pre-emptive interventions . Rather than aspiring to eliminate groups it is more profitable to accept that problematic group behaviour is an ineluctable inescapable reality of life in many areas . Rather than believing that the problem
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of the group can be resolved - through its annihilation - we suggest, instead, a more limited goal. How, then, do we delimit the harm delinquent groups do to themselves and others in a world where being part of a group is also part of what it is to be human? This means principally (though not
exclusively) addressing not so much the group qua group but the problematic behaviour and activities in which groups engage . Ultimately, the aim is to make obeying, as opposed to
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breaking rules, the most sensible of choice and create intervention strategies that can b e assessed in terms of whether or not they accomplish this aim .
With this in mind let us consider the principles that should underpin any effective
intervention strategy . To do this we would like to return to the pyramid of risk and to the
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model of collective delinquency we developed earlier as it is helpful in helping us think about the different risks different groups pose by seeing where they lie within the pyramid . It is also useful as a heuristic through which to think through issues of intervention . We start from the premise that if individuals, or the groups to which they belong, break the criminal law then steps must be taken to apprehend the perpetrators and utilising the judicial process to bring them to justice. Law enforcement tactics and criminal justice responses are certainly paramount in actively curtailing delinquent and criminal behaviour and may play an
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important role in preventing delinquency. The fear of arrest and the experience of being prosecuted have been known to dissuade some individuals from engaging in criminal activities and repeat offending but, it must be recognised, there is little evidence to suggest that this will always occur . If the aim of intervention is to make the obeying of rules the most obvious choice then a range of other interventions, over and above prosecution, need
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to be established and these must have, as their aim, the function of incorporating people . They must be investment directed and ideally should aspire to incorporate and compel
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compliance to rules through more positive means . However, current responses to group delinquency have leant too heavily on the judicial process, making this the first response in some cases which has unwittingly drawn more young people into the criminal justice system net to be prosecuted and monitored .
A consideration of where each group is situated within the pyramid, together with an assessment of the risk/threat they pose, would prevent this happening with individuals or groups that inhabit lower-tiers or those who pose the least harm to themselves and others .
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To operate effectively, it is also necessary to address the problems posed by different groups in ways that recognise the profound differences between the groups themselves . What this entails is ensuring that the right balance of interventions is conceded to different delinquent groups . The intervention that is directed towards volatile peer groups, gangs and organised crime groups need to be different from each other . Underpinning this must be the
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recognition that `what works' for one group may be inappropriate and counter-productive for others. In other words, the response should reflect group position and the penalty
should be commensurate to the act . In addition, any intervention strategy should seek to limit movement up the pyramid towards the apex and encourage expulsion from the
pyramid altogether . An ideal prevention/intervention strategy would put in place initiatives
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that:
a) Ensure that peer groups located on the lower tier of the pyramid are prevented fro m gravitating up into high risk categories ;
b) Intervene to ensure that, where possible, those groups or members of groups located i n high risk categories are bought into lower tiers of the pyramid;
c) Encourage members to exit out from the group they are currently in . In effect these
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individuals would `jump' out of the pyramid altogether, an d
d) Initiate work designed to curtail the delinquent and criminal behaviour in which group s enter when this expresses itself .
In sum, it should generally be the case that interventions directed at groups located at the
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base of the pyramid of risk are likely to emphasise proactive and non repressive interventions over the use of repressive sanctions . The kind of work conducted by youth
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workers, conflict mediators, arbitrators and community workers would all fall within this category as they presuppose some kind of conversation and negotiation with delinquent groups and their members . Conversely, for those near the apex of the pyramid the situation would reverse and favour law enforcement over proactive and non-repressive interventions . The rationale for this is simple . At the apex of the pyramid we find career criminals . This is not the case at the base . Treating peer groups as competent career criminals is both likely to criminalise those to whom the label ought not to be deployed and, through the process of
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stigmatisation, propel individuals and groups up a level within the pyramid .
Finally given that group delinquency in its most lethal form would appear to be associated with areas subject to multiple deprivation it must be emphasised that an effective intervention strategy must be accompanied by interventions designed to reduce the material and social exclusions that promote and encourage problematic group behaviour . Indeed, n o
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matter how well balanced an intervention strategy for gangs / groups might be, unless effort is directed towards resolving the material basis of marginalisation : poor living conditions,
failing schools, political failure, permanent recession and cutbacks in youth provision failure will be inevitable. With these broad principles in mind, we outline what can be done to
address the risks posed by peer groups, gangs and organised crime groups . As we study
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intervention alternatives we will also draw attention to their respective strengths and limits .
Confronting the risks posed by the peer group
The challenge when confronting the risks posed by the peer group is to ascertain whether the group is perceived to be a threat or is an actual threat to themselves or the local community .
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To this end, it is necessary to first identify the type of threat posed, to understand the dynamics between the peer group and the local community within a given area and to appreciate the intricacies of modern youth street culture .
At first sight, some street-based peer groups are considered a threat simply because they are
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[constantly] hanging around in the same places . The presence of a group of young people, particularly male in public wearing symbolically sensitive clothing (hoodies, baggy pants,
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bandannas, baseball caps and or shell suits) can produce, or heighten, a sense of fear and insecurity amongst certain sections of the community, especially if the group is animated and or being a nuisance . The forthcoming response should be to unravel and unpack the symbolic from the actual ; that is, identify what is fact and respond to it accordingly whilst (at the same time) being sensitive to the social lives of the young people . So, for example, if the peer group is 'hanging about' and their presence is causing a disruption and or anxiety amongst the resident population - but they are not posing any real threat - then it is the reaction and labelling of the group that should be challenged rather than the group itself.
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Alternatively, if the group is actually causing a disturbance, what is causing the negative reaction then their behaviour should be challenged accordingly. The issue here is what measures should be taken to challenge group behaviour and by whom .
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As we have learnt using overtly aggressive and repressive measures to dealing with youth groups can backfire in so far as it does not work to quell the disturbance it is tasked to
tackle, but often exacerbates and inflames young people into further action . As Klein et al
clearly state, a principle overriding effect of external intervention could be to transform an anti-social peer group into an angry street gang by constituting itself as an external threat
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around which the group can unify. Sensitive policing and community-led initiatives would go some way to minimising the perception of threat and should be mobilised to stop the group from forming into a more cohesive unit . Heavy-end law and order tactics are to be avoided as far as possible .
The key to dealing with peer groups is not to treat them as a unitary suspect community, but as a group of young people who need to be actively engaged within the context of an on-
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going interactive conversation . Given the poor social conditions in which many young people live it is also worth noting that the terms of engagement should not be to prevent groups from forming but to address and manage their needs and the inevitable risks and dangers such groups confront and pose. To accomplish this an array of different skills must be appropriated from a wide cross-section of practitioners qualified to deal with youth
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groups in different situations .
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The effort and skills needed to tackle the issue of youth group should be interdisciplinary and the tactics applied require intense partnership between statutory and community agencies working with young people . If the aim of intervention is to affect an appropriate location of effort then it is important that such teams are not dominated by enforcement officers or organised by community groups without police presence . A designated problemsolving team15 should include the whole gamut of agencies across boroughs, including, but not restricted to housing officers, council estate wardens, educational providers, youth workers and services, social services, beat police officers and member of anti-social
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behaviour teams, and this group should - at the very least - work together in order to ensure open channels of communication and clarity of information on youth groups in their area .
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If tackling the issue of peer groups is to be productive then any effort needs to be integrated and consistent rather than inconsistent and piecemeal with a concerted effort by each group to maintain integrity, equality, commitment and confidentiality between partner agencies ;
which means each agency should acknowledge and appreciate the remit and commitments of the partners . As a matter of importance the team should meet regularly to consolidate efforts
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and maintain a healthy degree of partnership working .
Dealing with boredom and monotony
Far from being a symptom of errant youth it is more accurate to see the street as an exciting environment and staging post in which young people congregate, meet friends and socialise . A number of social conditions force some groups of young people to conduct their social
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life in public spaces ; most often these are overcrowding or disputes within the home, lack of youth provisions within a given area and a lack of financial resources . Arguably, each of these conditions exclude young people from engaging in more socially acceptable activities (cinema, swimming, youth clubs and sports) leaving them with few alternatives but to hang around on the streets and complain that they have 'nowhere to go' and 'nothing to do' .
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Continual boredom creates conditions in which young people have to improvise with the facilities around them for entertainment, which means relying on themselves to create a
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simulating and enjoyable environment .
For some young people this means'catching joke','cussing', or 'terrorising' others in their group but this activity can also involve non-members as targets for entertainment and or abuse. Such 'playful' banter has - when levelled continually at, say, one particular person - the potential to tip over into verbal or physical violence escalating into serious forms of offending. Young people with limited power resources will use what ever means necessary to garner it for themselves and antagonising other people is one way of harnessing the fear and
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or respect that accompanies overt power displays . Equally, entertainment is likely to take the form of 'scribbling' and 'scratching' names, places etc into public and private property and to
involve the consumption of alcohol and illegal substances . All told, the methods chosen by
is Note that we use the term `problem solving team' not 'antisocial team' so much in vogue . The former
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some young people and the process by which they go about'having a laugh' are experienced differently by others and perceived not as benign activities but as threatening, unacceptable
behaviour. The groups create a discomfort because they conduct 'too much' of their social life outside in the streets seemingly transforming public spaces into dangerous places .
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Tackling the issue of group delinquency requires an intervention strategy that is specifically
tailored towards the young people the area and to the social conditions in which they live . It is not acceptable to introduce a `one-size fits all programme' just because it is available and known to 'work' with a particular population. Youths in the area will know what they need and, if consulted, will advise on methods and practices that may work to engage them . Ultimately, intervention packages should include both street based and centre based interventions . On a macro-level this would take the form of creating new job and
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educational opportunities, and tackling social deprivation within a given area to alleviate the inequalities experienced by such youth. At the miso-level interventions should include the utility of existing youth services geared towards providing entertainment and stimulation to youth groups . If no services are available then, at the very least, there needs to be a plan to adequately furnish the young people with well equipped youth centres, qualified centre-based
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youth workers and affordable (if not subsidised) well equipped leisure-based amenities .
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Micro-level interventions would seek to encourage young people into some another activity other than 'hanging out' on the street if there street based activity resolves itself into threatening behaviour. This would not only limit the amount of time the young people spent on the streets, but would also keep unoccupied peer groups out of the path of other, more delinquent, groups - such as the gang or organised crime network - with a predilection for grooming young people into criminal activities . Ideally, the young people should have regular and consistent access to facilities after school, during the evenings, at weekends and, mostly importantly, during the entire school holidays if they require them. It is vital that these services are
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adequately funded [on a long-term basis] so that they can offer activities that can compete with the 'thrill' of hanging out.
stresses an array of interventions many of which are non repressive whilst the latter does not .
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It must be recognised that some young people are not inclined to participate in centre-based
activities and would rather hang about at street level . Reasons for this are numerous and will
vary according to group, but could include not wanting to participate because of intimidation from rival group or individuals or because the group prefers to construct it's ow n
entertainment . Whatever the reason the group should not be excluded from participating in
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the same activities or from attending the same centres as other youth in the area - as this provides an external threat to mobilise against. Self-excluded groups should given every opportunity to be involved at a later date and ideally, an outreach capacity should be
employed to monitor (in a non-oppressive way) and work closely with the group in order to (re) engage the young people . It is imperative that the outreach workers are not law
enforcers (e.g. policemen, ASBO wardens etc .) but skilled youth workers trained in engaging
Confronting territorial and relational dispute s
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hard to reach groups .
A group that inhabits the same territory may, over time, lay territorial claim to what they perceive to be their 'turf' . Despite being rundown poorly equipped areas youth that occupy
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such spaces are vehemently attached to the patch (housing estate, park, street, football pitch) they have laid claim to and will protect it in the face of intrusion. Instinctively, young people
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with little facilities will protect the little they have got and will fight for what is theirs especially if they have had to do it before . Violence and robbery may well be the price a group or individual will pay for a territorial transgression though it would be a mistake to view territorial violence as intrinsic to the lifeworld and identity of the group . Peer groups may actively engage in violence if it comes their way, but at the very least, they will often dress up (or'thug up') to signify to outsiders that they are a formidable enemy and not easy victims . 'Thugging up' maybe projected outwardly in the style of dress (hoodies etc) symbolically displaying competencies (toughness) and a propensity for fighting or posturing,
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glaring and gearing. Given that the streets can be dangerous for young people in general and young men in particular another response adopted by young people is to go around armed with a weapon.
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Whatever the method the action employed by groups is taken meant to convey fear and
intimidation which will invariably stop the other from attacking them . These signals will be
picked up by others external to the group including members of the public and some people will be suitably dissuaded from infringing on certain demarcated territories . Others will not
and will take the threat as a direct challenge to themselves and animosity will spill over into a
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series of group challenges . The nature of street-based altercations is that incident follows
incident until someone or something'stops it' . The first tactic that needs to be developed to address the risks posed by the peer group is to ensure that there are enough youth workers present (in a given area) who are equipped to deal with conflict situations . As noted above, conflicts amongst groups of young people are common and typically occur in public space . One is never going to eradicate the threat and actual violence between youth groups so the emphasis should be on deterrence and managing violence when it occurs - and before it
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escalates. Rather than attempting to address street based issues posed by groups in an institutional setting it would make more sense to deploy an outreach worker to where the trouble is . However, this does not mean, it should be emphasised, that outreach or project workers are left to determine and deal with the issue by themselves - it would be more sensible to co-ordinate the services of all agencies involved via a problem-solving group .
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Examples of this could be the following ;
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a police officer may find him/herself called by residents to an estate to address the anti-social behaviours of a group of disaffected youngsters gathered together. As part of their role the might choose to involve group workers rather than embark on a hard-line law-and-order response such as ordering the group to disperse or issuing and ASBO (if this was a common occurrence) . teachers at a local school may be aware of growing conflict between groups from different schools which may manifest itself in the form of bullying and or violence
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on the way to and from the school premises . As an intervention measure the school could deploy a conflict manager to tackle the issue or, better still, utilise the outreach resources based on the estates and surrounding areas .
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In each case, before an enforcement solution is used the role of youth and communit y workers/stakeholders should drawn upon with the aim of finding a resolution to the
problem in a proactive and non-repressive way -unless the situation is extreme or grave .
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The outreach project workers should be expected to be able to help define problematic situations that may trigger group involvement in delinquent behaviour and be attuned to identify potential flash points or situations . In order to reach this level of knowledge outreach workers should have enough knowledge of the young people and the areas to
which they gravitate in order to build an historical profile of underlying factors leading up to a given situation . If the individual is new to the post then they should be helped to build knowledge by someone with greater knowledge even if this information is held by an external agency. In this sense they would be well prepared to adequately interview
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protagonists, victims and bystanders . Similarly, they would be able to build upon and add to, an array of strategic knowledge that could inform future interventions and be used (subject to the appropriate guarantees of confidentiality) to inform wider joined up community safety partnership interventions .
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In addition to being conflict managers outreach/project workers would also need to be able to perform the role of mediator s and arbitrators or involve trained mediators and
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arbitrators if this is required. As trusted adults these individuals could, by way of an example, begin to help young people understand why their presence may be construed as threatening to older residents in the way that they do . This role could also include attempting to arbitrate between opposing positions by protagonists where a conflict arises . To work effectively the outreach workers need to be accorded the power to offer material incentives to groups of young people if this is what is required to avoid their engagement in acts of collective disorder or anti-social behaviour. To this extent they must have, to hand, access to resources as and when required. If, for example, a group of young people congregate because they
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have nothing to do then the workers could identify what they would like to do (for example, play a sport) and help provide the young people with a facility where they can play it . While the promise of access to leisure-based activities may in the first instance be the most useful resource to be mobilised to persuade young people to disengage from anti-social group behaviour, this can subsequently be superseded by more ambitious patterns of intervention
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thereafter when the young people are suitably engaged . In other words, the activity is the
magnet that gets the young people through the door so that some additional work can be done. This can include, but is not restricted to, centre-based work directed a s
re spons ibilising young people through training, education and providing them with
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knowledge that will help them attain their potential.
Whether this work is performed by youth workers themselves or is referred onto another agency is open to discussion but ultimately centre-based work should be done in places that are attractive to young people and are 'fit for purpose' . The ubiquitous under-funded shed with pool table is simply not the answer and is not an acceptable response . Providing young people with shoddy, periodic facilities simply confirms the contempt young people often believe the adult world has for them . It does not instil trust or create a conducive
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environment for making changes ; young people need investment, real tangible long-term investment by well-trained professionals . They can see whether any action is piecemeal and will not invest in it. It could perhaps be emphasised that the offer of available space at the local Youth Offending Team headquarters might well not be appropriate in this
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circumstance given the negative connotations young people may well associate with it .
As we have mentioned above, intrinsic to the success of the above is the [relative] absence of
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law and order and the language of law and order . Certainly, young people need to be warned and educated about what will happen if they break the rules and what the consequences of carrying weapons are, however, where possible, the language mobilised should be informative rather than criminalising and devoid of the threat of ASBOs and the like . In other words do not deploy the language of criminal justice unless this is absolutely required . Language such as this will only serve to alienate young people further as it adopts a preaching narrative abhorrent to young people the majority of whom are able t o comprehend the consequences of their actions - should they face them . It might be
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profitable to engage particular young people, to use the dynamics of the group to pass on/distil certain information (otherwise unpalatable from adults) from one person to another (e .g . one member of the group becoming a peer mentor) . It is often the case that young people are better at disseminating information to their friends than adults are especially if the individual identified as peer mentor is respected and liked. The individual
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tasked with being a peer mentor should be in a position of power within the group in orde r for them to be affective and, it should be noted that within a group this could quickly change. It is vital therefore that workers have a history of the group to work with .
The ability to be flexible and negotiate is also a skill that outreach youth workers need to
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be proficient in . Far from subjecting young people simply to edicts specified in the form of commandments there needs to be a conversation that is more democratic . Sometimes it might we useful to excuse some low level delinquency (smoking or alcohol taking for example if, in return, the young people in question agree to modify other behaviours (like not doing this kind of thing in places that might for example upset local residents .) At the same time the terms of engagement have to occur in the context of a conversation in which young people's desires and demands need to be heard . This is important to note because
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too often policies that effect young people are often conducted without reference to what they might want. `Leave this place', `do not enter here', `do not do this kind of thing around here' etc and so on.
Also avoid where possible a casework approach to individuals in peer groups . The problem
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with case work is that it typically locates the nexus of risk and danger within specific individuals, while failing to adequately recognise how far these risks arise as an emergent
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property of young people congregating in a particular space at a particular time . By constructing the problem as a problem of defective individuals so the response is typically to address these problems through individualised forms of intervention such as cognitive therapy (often conducted well away from the site where the problems arose in the first place) . What is needed are approaches better attuned to dealing with problems posed by collectives in ways that recognise the collective in question as the site of intervention .
There is also a good case to be made for thinking creatively about the kind of public spaces
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young people are forced to inhabit . Far from seeking to push young people away from public places where they cannot be seen (and perhaps do not want to go) it might be advantageous to find ways to improve the public space where they do `hang out' . With this in mind far from attempting to exclude them from the streets the aim should conversely be to provide them with shelters, and tables and chairs to sit on, to further pedestrianise public
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spaces and not least build wider pavements . As Jane Jacobs (19**) persuasively argued, if young people are on the streets they are visible to other members of the public ; in other
words encourage, and take advantage of, the informal social control mechanisms and street level surveillance exhibited by members of the community .
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If enhancing a natural street surveillance is to be considered as an intervention strategy then it is important to facilitate the development of forums where information and concerns can be relayed to the right people . From our research it was all to clear that, too often ,
communities were not actively engaged with community safety practitioners when dealing with the issue of crime and disturbance in their area. This could be for a number of reasons one of the most common being lack of trust between members of the community and community safety practitioners . Historically, we know that the police had overlooked the
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value of community and made little attempt to mobilise community intelligence in an active way and created forums that were not representative of the local population . This situation has recently changed and now police and community safety providers are committed to pursuing local knowledge when dealing with local issues . However, a legacy remains and it is still very much the case that certain communities are dissuaded and remain resolutely
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unhelpful. In order to change the stalemate effective information systems must be established so that communities can rebuild trusting relationship with the police and law-
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enforcement professionals . There is also a need for the creation of places and spaces whereby valuable information can routinely channelled to problem solving teams . The police form one conduit though which intelligence can be filtered, however the events that worry people might not, in the first instance, be law and order ones and thus need a different response . In this case steps need to be undertaken to ensure that alternative nonstigmatising conduits are established where information can be [re]directed and mediated . Community forums - which would be staffed by community workers/ youth workers -axe
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indicative of one successful alternative; one-stop shops represent another.
Finally, and importantly, if a rapid and effective response to problematic situations is to occur then it ought to be, as far as possible, delegated to local problem solving teams working in geographically delimited areas . As our research has bought to light, events on the street happen in fast time but bureaucracies operate typically (and inevitably) in slow time.
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To this end, the young people have `dealt' with issues `in their own way' long before the
police get involved - if they get involved at all as many young people do not report to the police . The reasons for this are manifold and include not least the fact that young people
often prefer to deal with their problem[s] as they happen (immediately, within a few days)
rather than wait for the police to get involved. Too often they believe that a police response
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is too slow and that, when it materialises, it was not `enough' or appropriate . To minimalise the potential for young people to `sort things out' for themselves they need a fast and responsive service that can be accessed quickly and confidentially. The skill is to provide a response system that can operate in `fast time' or at least in the fastest time possible . This requires in-depth knowledge of young people within a given area and the interrelationships between groups - in other words it would mean a real investment in getting to know the young people well enough to detect changes in behaviour and areas of tension . Youth
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centres simply cannot respond with the flexibility and speed to provide such a service therefore an outreach capability is essential .
Ultimately, it is our contention that the key to effectively managing problems posed by group delinquency among young people must be locally led and locally accountable . What
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we have summarised above are the necessary components that effective proactive and investment led social infrastructure of service provision must possess to be effective . While
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a great many areas have some of the above, it is worth noting that few have all because consistent, long-term funding for tertiary services are absent. The tendency towards short term, inconsistent funding is affecting local capacity to co-ordinate a pro-active effort against delinquent groups .
We have attempted to outline an effective strategy of intervention to deal with the issues of delinquent peer groups . In doing so we have maintained the position that however disagreeable a group of young people are they can, with careful treatment, be worked with
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and `turned around' . However, if the group's behaviour cannot be modified then, and only then, should more coercive powers to address it be initiated and this in turn needs to be implemented on a graduated scale . If a group (or members) become involved in criminal acts like assault or engaging in street robbery then it is our contention that far from suddenly seeing the problem as one of the `gang' - and as something for `gang busting' units - it is
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more profitable to address the problems posed by the individuals in question using existing
law enforcement means . Crimes that necessitate a law enforcement response should be dealt with by the police through pre-existing channels and processes available to law enforcers under the statutes of the law. If a group (or a set of peer groups) still appears intent on
engaging in a street war, despite attempts to engage with them in a more proactive and non
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repressive way, then it would be right to deploy more coercive measures . But, this must
occur in active consultation with other agencies working with young people . Too often we have been told this has not happened. As we discovered from interviews conducted with youth workers and YOT staff, too often coercive powers such as ASBOs were being deployed without consultation. It is also worth observing at this juncture that the
consequence of administering inappropriate sanctions might well be to create a system of intervention that is schizophrenic in so far as it pulls in two completely different directions .
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Thus while attempts are being made to include excluded young people on one hand the application of coercive sanctions simply excludes and alienates them further on the other . In effect the policies are dangerously at risk of coming into contradiction with each other .
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Confronting the risks posed by the gang
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The gang is a transmutation of the peer group in a direction such that violence and criminal behaviour becomes integral to group identity, ritual and practice . As a gang however shares many of the features of the peer group intervention that is directed towards reducing the risks posed by the gang also needs to incorporate elements of those recommended for tackling the peer group. As with peer groups gangs are also friendship based, as with the peer group the gang will expend most of its street life engaging in benign, repetitious and monotonous activities . Consequently many of the investment led interventions we have
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detailed in relation to the peer group should be exploited when dealing with them .
There are we have argued two different kinds of gang (medium risk and high risk) each posing different risk that needs confronting in different ways . As we have illustrated above the `risk-factor' ascribed to a group is not necessarily linked to the type of crime engaged but rather the rate of offending behaviour and the degree of harm caused . Therefore, a high-risk
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group would engage in more serious forms of offending and inflict a greater degree of har m to a victim or society than a medium-risk group .
It is likely that a number of groups within a given area will be `turf-based' street groups that periodically perpetrate other entrepreneurial crime (drug dealing etc .) . Nevertheless, their
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raison de etre is most likely to be centred on defending their particular area from intruders,
mounting raids or intimidating others . The major risk factor posed by such gangs - and what often animates and propels violence forward - is the escalation of vendetta . Vendetta has the potential to transform minor incidences into serious situations with remarkable speed and occurs when the member of a gang suffers an insult, injury or fatality by another group, which impels the group, to retaliate in kind ; which, in turn, brings upon it a counter
retaliation . Vendetta, in the context of an honour-based is premised on two main principles
dishonourable not to retaliate .
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(a) each provocation must be met in cycle of revenge ; (b) it is considered inconceivable and
To manage the risks posed by such gangs we suggest that a three pronged strategy. First, it is imperative to ensure that the social infrastructure of investment led proactive provision
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outlined in the section on the peer group is in place . This is necessary because (for the most part) territorial gang members will not be behaving as we have argued in radically different
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ways from the peer group. It is important therefore to have in place mechanisms that facilitate positive dialogue between group members and established community projects/ problem-solving teams . As the gang is distinguishable from the peer group by the importance its members attribute to violence, steps need to be taken to ensure that groups know that harsh consequences will follow acts of violence ; especially if a counter retaliation is expected . In the Boston model of intervention, known protagonists were contacted and warned in advance, and no uncertain terms, about the consequences of revenge.
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As important, however, is the need to create the conditions where conflict can be dealt with in alternative ways . One possible solution would be to attempt to initiate peace between warring factions by instigating suppression/conflict meetings . In this instance the group (or representatives) would be brought together to discuss the situation and negotiate terms for their existence within a given area. For this initiative to succeed it is imperative that a) th e
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steps taken are agreed by all parties involved and b), that those tasked with the job of
brokering such truces are qualified to manage conflict situations, and are trusted by all
partied involved . In other words, they must be impartial objective mediators . In relation to
this, it must be recognised from the beginning that the aim of suppression should not be the elimination of the group, but rather to manage the conflicts and to prevent escalation
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between groups.
If, after this effort, there is no solution and the groups continue to engage in vendetta-based violence then a more coercive approach needs to be adopted . However, repressive tactics should be aimed at the main protagonists and not at the more marginal characters . In other words, the full weight of the law should be directed at the perpetrators of the crime rather than bystanders and on-lockers . For this reason `solutions' such as curfews would be
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inappropriate because they involve imposing an undiscriminating sanction that is quite likely to impact negatively on innocent parties as well . If a group is engaged in street robbery, for example, then current statutes outlining the procedure for dealing with this particular crime (as exemplified by `safer streets' programme should be enforced, and so on.
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In saying this, every effort should be taken to ensure that the remaining `players' do not seek to avenge the `wrong-doing' by retaliating again . Such is the nature of vendetta that it is not
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possible to account for every incident, but whatever initiative is put in place to deal with it, needs an extensive historical knowledge of each group involved. To this end, outreach workers could spot potential `flare-ups' or identify future targets and even pre-empt future eruptions.
As the experience of gangs in both Bristol and Manchester and London has found it is vitally important to enrol the local community in a collective effort to confront the risks that gangs pose ; after all the community has to live with the consequences of group violence . It is also
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likely that members of the community will be able to provide strategic intelligence that can help confront the risk gangs pose . To mobilise this resource would entail massive investment in local communities with gang problems, many of which will be multiply disadvantaged and, at the very least, would need to be given, good tangible reasons to support such effort . Given the general distrust of law enforcement agents and the potential risks for those who
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work with them steps need to be taken to protect those who do tell . Nevermore so is this the case for those young people directly involved in gang violence . As the experience of
statutory agencies working in areas known for their gang problems, has shown, one way of addressing developing community capacity issue is to work with and help support
community based organisations. Mobilising, not least, the knowledge and experience of ex-
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gang members is also an option as their experience may allow then to connect with often seriously alienated groups of young men in ways that other workers may not .
Gangs are by their nature volatile and dangerous entities and in the context of a group conflict it could well be the case that certain individuals (perhaps the younger age groups) will find themselves engaged in activities or levels of violence they did not expect. These individuals need to be supplied with exit strategies which are non-stigmatising and which
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operate in `fast time' . If someone wants to exit because they feel under a real threat, they need to have a contact point available to call, agents who will listen sensitively to a request for help, an agreed process in place that can allow them to be moved out of danger if this is what is required . They must also be given to understand that their confidentiality will be
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respected.
Where areas are known to be staging places for routine group violence involving the use of
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weapons then, as occurs in areas such as Tower Hamlets, developing a responsive law enforcement capability to routinely police such areas and behaviours could also play dividends . Patrol Officers involved will quickly come to know who they are dealing with and will come to understand the history of such events . Given this knowledge patrol officers will be able to displace people, disarm and or gather in weaponry . As a consequence streetbased groups will become aware of such policing and hopefully realise that their activities are under surveillance and that they will be stopped and held accountable for their actions under
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current stop and search or stop and account laws .
Only if gangs are identified as armed and only if engaged in ongoing patterns of violence should a specialist multi-agency group be convened to confront them . This should not be
established on the lines of this or that American model . It must simply be a mechanism for drawing together a problem-solving team with a specifically mandate and remit to realise th e
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interventions outlined above in a joined up and comprehensive way so that effort is
consistent and holistic . From our research, the best interventions we found were those that aspired to work and pull together resources and interventions that already existed . The
moral here is that bottom up models work more effectively than top down ones . In addition any `heavy-end' repression measures should be towards the most prolific members or those
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identified and certified to be the `leaders' rather than the whole group or marginal characters . Any action levelled at these individuals should mirror that of the peer group and concentrate on redirecting these people into more positive activities (Huff 1989, Cleveland and Ohio study)
The entrepreneurial gangs pose a different set of risks and need to be managed in a different way to street-based fighting groups . These groups are composed of individuals who
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systematically engage in a criminal purpose or act for financial gain ; this could be street robbery, illegal drug selling or TWOCking etc. Because of the criminogenic nature of the group it is likely that the behaviour of this group will come to the attention of law enforcement agencies (more so than street-based turf groups) because the crimes the commit will be visible and consistently showing up in police records . If clusters of offences
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occur, it is likely that this will be registered on intelligence system such as CRIMINT and consequently the intelligence community will detect it. Clearly if the crimes perpetrated are
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street robberies or vehicle crime then these will immediately fall within the remit of existing police intervention effort and would be dealt with accordingly. They do not require a specific anti gang busting unit to address the risks they pose but merely the implementation of existing powers . The individual offenders concerned will need to be apprehended and punished .
An additional strategy would involve exploiting relationships within this group . What distinguishes the entrepreneurial gang from the fighting gang is the nature of the social bond
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that exists between its members . Entrepreneurial gangs are, we suggest, likely to be bound together principally by the success they have in engaging in criminal activity as opposed to the hatred they may feel towards another group or gang . As with business relationships if the management team is removed or the workers get disheartened then the business is likely to crumble because this basis for group allegiance is removed . Taken as a truism (it is presented
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here as a conjecture rather than a true fact) weakening the infrastructure by taking out the
management or causing the workforce to be disgruntled could cause the group to collapse . It is also worth bearing in mind that most of the members of these groups are not career
criminals and will not, on the whole, develop fully-fledged careers unless they acquire the
capacity to progress from a hustler-fighter to `organised gangster' . This, as we have argued,
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often occurs because the gangster is someone who feels steadily more omnipotent and for whom the persona of the outlaw life has become intrinsic to his or her self-identity . The task for community safety agencies is to thwart this transformation by pushing high-risk individuals down the pyramid of risk and preventing by so doing their rise up i t
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Confronting the risks posed by organised crime groups
The organised crime group is the completed transformation of the entrepreneurial gang and represents the most dangerous and criminal group within our typology . Typically (though not exclusively) it will be composed of individuals for whom law breaking is a vocation .
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Such groups however are by no means homogeneous and many will vary from each other in terms of their organisational capability and will be differentiated both in terms of the scale of
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offences they commit and the level of involvement in serious organised criminal endeavour . What also distinguishes them from gangs of young people is that career criminals within such organisation are likely to own and control the resources of illegal production . They will have a central role in organising crime and criminal networks in a shadow /grey unregulated economy.
Traditionally, organised crime groups were conceived as large versions of gangs or crime families . The imagery of the Mafia as an organised ethnic other exemplifies this way of
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thinking with its idealised hierarchical structure, division of labour and so on . Until recently the presence, and in some instances persistence, of crime families predicated on familial ties reinforced this imagery. While this way of thinking about groups has exercised a powerful hold on how organised crime has been traditionally conceived, changes in organised crime, along with changes in the global economy, have led many to question whether this
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traditional view of organised crime has currency . In a globalising society, borders have
become ever more porous and thus prone to criminal endeavour . Just as economic activity in the legitimate market no longer exists simply to service local but progressively
international markets so to have the same processes impacted on organised crime which has itself internationalised as the growing global trade in illegal goods, services and people
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testified.
It is not only the dimensions of criminal involvement that have changed as the economy has changed, it would also appear that the nature of criminal organisation has itself changed in response to this as we have seen. Instead of vertically organised hierarchical entities
characterised by a functional division of labour, recent decades have witnessed the formation of a different functional unit. This operates less on the model of the older factory and
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behaves far more like contemporary, small flexible firms . In these groups people come together for a particular criminal purpose or job . Different players have different roles and some are employed for a specific skill / purpose they serve . Like contemporary firms much of this work may be subcontracted out to other groups . There is unlikely to be one single controlling mind in what should in effect be considered as a criminal network whose form
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changes in relation to the kind of criminal endeavour in which they engage .
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Far from looking at such groups as gangs, such organised crime groups need to be viewed instead as economic actors engaged in market activity both at a local level and at an international level. At the same time it is important to understand such groups as networks, and it is as a network, that they need to be considered and treated . For example, in the case of drug distribution the network may be composed of a number of major groups as producers, transporters and distributors as well as he smaller subcontractors (dealers) who manage the market at the street level. This diffuse structure offers, in some ways, market advantages to criminal elements but at the same time the diffuse nature of the network
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renders intervention possible at many points and at many levels .
Any attempt to confront OCGs must involve intelligence-led policing and in the case o f groups that operate nationally and internationally will necessarily involve partnership working between different law enforcement organisations . Though a case could be made fo r
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addressing the political and economic conditions that provoke the formation of illegal
markets, the weight of intervention directed at an OCG will necessarily involve a more
pronounced role for law enforcement agencies and the criminal justice system . In this case the location of effort will be very different from that directed at volatile peer groups . As organised crime groups exercises control over the means of illegal production and,
predicated on targeting their financial structures .
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disproportionately, its rewards, then this also makes them suitable targets for interventions
At the same time it is important to recognise that intervention against such groups also needs to be implemented with a long-term as opposed to short-term agenda in mind . An attempt to decapitate drug networks by taking out organised criminals within it illustrates this problem. Though a targeted operation may be successful in `taking-out' an organised
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crime groups it is worth bearing in mind that such effort may not create a situation where less drugs will be distributed or used. In a demand-led economy it is likely that new dealers and distributors will move into fi ll the void that is left and continue supplying the demand. Of equal importance is the displacement effect that might result as a consequence of decapitation techniques . The escalation of gun-related shootings in Bristol which followed a
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highly successful police operation to take out a number of known crime groups serves as an illustration of how suppression can paradoxically create the very symptoms of what it aspires
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to eliminate . By removing a number of established players in the local drugs economy a void was left and into it moved other violent organised crime groups each struggling to obtain a foothold in a highly lucrative market and who used lethal violence to do so . The valuable lesson to be learned from this scenario is one of impact assessment ; in other words, how will this operation impact on the local community in the long-term? In addition contingency plans need to be put in place to mop-up the address the problem of overspill that might occurs when voids are filled once again.
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It is worth observing that even when operations are successful in removing a particular group the market is unlikely to vanish entirely because customer demand for the illegal commodity will still remain and because the conditions that created it in the first instance remain unchanged . Any final solution to this problem would consequently need to be sought not so much by dramatic improvements in law enforcement effort, so much as
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profoundly rethinking the culture of prohibition, which (to date) is itself complicit in
creating the conditions in which unregulated and violent organised crime groups thrive . This however is an issue for policy makers in government not the MPS . It is worth observing, however, that should drug distribution be licensed and regulated and drug use
decriminalised, then the scale of violence and the tragic social costs of the drug wars the
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police are expected to address may be significantly reduced .
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8.
CONCLUSIO N
This project began as an attempt to examine the nature and prevalence of the gang because it was popularly assumed that an unprecedented gang problem had taken hold in the UK and was getting worse. It was to investigate this perception and not least help community
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safety providers confront it that prompted the Metropolitan Police and Government Office for London to commission this report.
In the course of conducting the research it became apparent to us, both from our reading of the literature and from our fieldwork that while there was certainly a gang problem in the UK, it was not quite the problem media-driven reporting appeared to suggest. The gang, we discovered, was by no means a new affair, and there was no compelling evidence to suggest
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that gangs were on the increase or that its members were more dangerous than they used to be. There was certainly no evidence to support wilder conjectures which appeared to suggest that there was a growing gang culture (whatever that is) or that the gang UK was now evolving along the lines of older larger, well established American varieties .
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Representations, we came to realise, are not necessarily realities and in the case of the gang we came to conclude that what is being depicted as its `truth' did not equate with the reality
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of what was happening on Britain's streets . Indeed, far from faithfully drawing attention to a new menace we believe that this is nothing less than a moral panic composed largely of longstanding fears about errant youth and minority groups but now repackaged in a new box labelled `the gang'.
The problem with fake representation however is that people often mistaking it for the real thing. As in art so to in gang talk, with the consequence that British society is now beginning to show the advanced symptoms of gang fever. This is evident we suggest in the
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new war that the government has licensed to fight the gang menace as this has been talked up in the mass media. Its symptoms are also evident in the array of coercive powers to address the `crisis' of law and order, the gang menace is alleged to have provoked . Indeed so far advanced are these symptoms of gang fever that some practitioners, evidently
believing that British society alone cannot win this war unaided, have gone as far as to
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suggest that we need to import of-the-shelf American led `solutions' in order to ensure that the foe is finally vanquished . A worrying result of all this is that many policy makers have themselves responded by accepting the diagnosis with the result that an array of `Atlantic
crossings' appears to be currently steering the policy response as this is being developed in
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the British context.
But representations are not realities and we need to recognise this fact . The proscribed medicine may also be as dangerous as the disease it is being asked to cure . This being so, we need to think very carefully about what we are talking about, who is being spoken about and why we are speaking of them when we address the problem allegedly posed by the gang . And when we do this we also need to be aware that the problem of the gang is as much a
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problem of gang talk as it is of delinquent youths running amok on inner city estates .
As we saw when we studied the British research tradition there are many good reasons that can be advanced to explain why gangs were not routinely studied as a problem in the UK and these lessons need to be remembered . Principally, this is because what goes on the streets of mainland Britain and what has occurred in the streets of America are different
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things and this needs to be recognised as such . To put the matter bluntly the gang may not be the real threat we think it is . To be more specific if we are really to understand the
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problem of group offending in the UK then the focus on the gang to the exclusion of all else might well be mistaken and dangerous .
It was this lesson, learnt from a close reading of the literature, coupled with field research that led us to the conclusion that if we are to address the problem of group offending appropriately and responsibly, it was necessary to divest ourselves of gang talk. It was also as a consequence of this that we came to understand that the gang, as portrayed in traditional and contemporary American literature, is not reflected in the British experience .
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Consequently, this led us to suggest that a number of street collectives, rather than gangs
alone, operate within our urban areas and these need to be identified and studied in ways that respect this . With this in mind, we proposed a three-fold typology of collectives each with its own form of collective life and risk level. We illustrated our typology in th e `Pyramid of Risk' . What is distinctive about the model we have developed is that it does no t
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loose sight of the gang or indeed suggest that the gang is not a problem . What the model
does is draw attention to other collectives, and the interpersonal relationships between them, that also need to be addressed if we are to grasp the truth of group offending appropriately. It is in this vein of reasoning that we developed a typology that included reference to the
peer group and the organised crime group as well as the gang . By seeing the problem of the
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group as more than simply a problem of the gang (or alternatively, by seeking to avoid the mistake of reducing all groups into the problem of the gang) our aim has been to avoid the
tendency towards reifying the gang inherent in `gang talk' both in its populist and academic forms. What this facilitates, not least, is a richer form of analysis than that conducted within the blinked gaze of gang talk. What it allows is a form of analysis that can incorporate forms and dimensions of delinquent group behaviour that cannot be explained in terms of the gang. Indeed, we would argue that the strength of this model is precisely that it also allows
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us to study the nature of group offending that extents well beyond the study of minority ethnic groups which, as we have seen, is the principle focus of gang talk . Not least this model can sanction an analysis of group delinquency perpetrated by affluent white groups and not least begin to make sense of the group offending of women whose experiences gang
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talkers have traditionally sidelined.
Working on the assumption that bad definitions are likely to fuel poor and unjust solutions
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we have posited our model instead as the basis around which to rethink how group delinquency can best be addressed . To this end we have argued that practitioners and policy makers need to refocus there intervention efforts away from the contemporary fixation with the gang in order to understand the totality and complexity of group offending in their localities . Using our typology of delinquency groups we have made the case for suggesting that different groups require different forms of intervention where the intervention effort must include an appropriate balance between proactive non-repressive interventions and
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more coercive reactive ones .
In opposition to a policy environment which believes that `solutions' to social problems can be sought by the beguilingly simplistic `what works' problem solving agenda, we propose an alternative model of intervention . Rather than advocate this or that model of gan g suppression (invariably American) as a panacea to the problem of group offending in a top
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down manner, the intervention strategy we have attempted to sketch here operates in a more holistic manner, working from the bottom up . Thus, far from advocating the creation of
new gang busting partnerships or advocating the delegation to law enforcement agencies of
even more coercive powers, we argue instead for a proactive policy predicated on mobilising the kind of expertise that ought to be present within any crime prevention partnership . As
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will have become clear our philosophy is predicated on the belief that the solution to the
problem lies in addressing its causes . That said we are not idealists but pragmatists and we recognise the inevitability of group conflict given the nature of the kind of society in which we live . Where possible the aim of intervention we argue should be to prevent people from moving up the pyramid of risk whilst attempting to persuade those in high risks groups to move down it. Our aim is not to preach but to provide practitioners with ways of thinking
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about solutions to complex problems in ways that respect their complexity .
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iii This applies to groups of two or more young people `hanging' about on the streets after 9 p .m. See http ://www.homeoffice. og vuk i° Dubbed the British FBI Op cit.
`i For a good introductory textbook on criminology see K . Williams (2001 )
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`71 Subcultural theories require the presence of two conditions : a) that require that lower class young men are discontented with the dominant social system and b) they adhere to a different normative and value structure . For a critique of the subcultural position, see S . Box (1981) Deviance Reality and Society 2nd edn, London : Holt Reinhart and Winston & D . Matza Delinquency and Drift. London Wiley .
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