Race, Gangs and Youth Violence: Policy, Prevention and Policing 9781447322887

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“A colossus of a book… should become the handbook for anyone attempting to address issues around young people and violence.” Charlie Parker, Hiphology Ltd This book aims to challenge current thinking about serious youth violence and gangs, and their racialisation by the media and the police. Written by an expert with over 14 years’ experience in the field, it brings together research, theory and practice to influence policy. Placing gangs and urban violence in a broader social and political economic context, it argues that government-led policy and associated funding for anti-gangs work is counter-productive. It highlights how the street gang label is unfairly linked by both the news-media and police to black (and urban) youth street-based lifestyles/cultures and friendship groups, leading to the further criminalisation of innocent black youth via police targeting. The book is primarily aimed at practitioners, policy makers and academics, as well as those community-minded individuals concerned about youth violence and social justice. Anthony Gunter is a Principal Lecturer in Criminology and Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Criminology and Law degree programme at the University of East London. Prior to his career in academia Anthony worked for over 14 years in both South and East London, within a variety of community settings, as a detached community and youth worker and Project/Area Manager.

CRIMINOLOGY / SOCIAL POLICY ISBN 978-1-4473-2287-0

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Race, gangs and youth violence Anthony Gunter

“A much needed and valuable addition to the literature on youth ‘gangs’, written in a sensitive manner informed by the author’s extensive and close up research… A must read for anyone interested in youth crime or in youth issues more generally.” Tracy Shildrick, University of Leeds

RACE, GANGS AND YOUTH VIOLENCE Policy, prevention and policing ANTHONY GUNTER 1/13/2017 9:35:54 AM

RACE, GANGS AND YOUTH VIOLENCE Policy, prevention and policing Anthony Gunter

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Policy Press North American office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol BS2 8BB 1427 East 60th Street UK Chicago, IL 60637, USA t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 t: +1 773 702 7700 e: [email protected] f: +1 773-702-9756 www.policypress.co.uk e:[email protected] www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN 978-1-4473-2287-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-4473-2289-4 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-2290-0 Kindle ISBN 978-1-4473-2288-7 ePdf The right of Anthony Gunter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of The University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover: image kindly supplied by istock Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents Acknowledgements iv Glossary v Introduction 1 one two three four five six seven

Global perspectives on urban youth violence The 2011 English riots Gangs in the UK? Policing the gang crisis Policy, prevention and policing into practice Road life realities and youth violence Youth, social policy and crime

13 47 77 113 139 171 203

Conclusion 229 Bibliography 239 Index 271

iii

Acknowledgements This book has been many years in the making and has been informed by hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hours’ worth of conversations, observations and experiences, initially as a community and youth work practitioner and more recently as an ethnographer/academic.To this end I must first say thank you to all the young people I have worked with and/or who have featured in my research. Thank you to Annetta Bennett and Charlie Parker for your wonderful insights over the years and for continuing to inspire me with your passionate commitment to the young people you work with. Thanks and appreciation must also go to the British Academy for the funding that allowed me to carry out the research which I utilise in Chapters two, five and six. A big thank you as well goes out to Sara Krishnan and Hanif Barker who were the RAs on this project. Many thanks to Clare Choak for the ‘girls and gangs’ discussions and for always making sure I am up to date with all the latest articles and publications. I also have to acknowledge the massive intellectual debt that I owe to Ian Joseph as without doubt my ideas and opinions on what I unapologetically refer to as ‘gang w**k’, have been greatly shaped by our many hours of arguments (over one too many beers) and of course our 2011 Runnymede Trust publication What’s a Gang and What’s Race Got to Do with It?. A thank you also goes to Victoria Pittman (for supporting this book project from the outset) and the editorial and production team at Policy Press. Lastly, I must express my love and gratitude to Heather (in addition to your proof reading duties), Mali and Aiyana for your encouragement, support and most of all endurance.

iv

Glossary

Badness: refers to a social world characterised by ‘spectacular’ hyper-aggressive/hyper- masculine modes of behaviour, usually centring around violent/petty crime and low-level drug dealing. Back up: where a young person can call on the physical support of friends, neighbourhood peers or family members where there is/has been a threat of violence. Beats: instrumental music tracks produced by young people themselves or taken from an already existing piece of recorded music. Beef: where a young person (or group of young people) has a dispute or argument with another young person or group. Bowling: a slow rhythmic and confident style of walking adopted by young males. ‘Bring it’ or ‘Move to’: where a group of young men violently assault a smaller group of young men (or an individual). ‘Bus Joke’ or ‘Catching joke’: where young people relay humorous stories and situations back to each other, talk about girls or boys and generally ‘diss’ (name calling/mickey taking) each other.

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‘Chiefed off’: where a young person feels ‘slighted’ and ‘disrespected’, or taken for an idiot as someone who is simple/ weak and can therefore be taken advantage of by others. Fam: short for family, a term for a close knit group of friends usually from the same neighbourhood or estate. Garms: refers to clothes/dress wear. ‘Kicking ball’: playing football. ‘Kotch’ or ‘Chillin’: is to sit down and relax/stay in one place as opposed to ‘passing through’. Linking Yats: sexual liaisons between young men and young women – more than just friends but less than girl/boyfriends. In this instance Yats refers to young women. On the Endz: where a young person is referring to being in their own neighbourhood. OTF: refers to the phrase ‘only the fam’ (family); fam/family here relates to a close group of neighbourhood peers/friends. Pass through: visiting a place but not intending to stay for very long. On Road: the social and cultural worlds that the young people both create and inhabit, indicating where (on the streets and in other public spaces) and how they spend the majority of their leisure time. Slippin: to be seen to have lost control of a situation or to come across as vulnerable/weak on Road. ‘Spitting’ or MCing: to rap song lyrics via use of rhythmic word flow and rhyming techniques. Shank: to stab someone with a knife or other sharp weapon. vi

Glossary

Swagger: confidence and style when ‘kotching’ or moving about the neighbourhood’. Youngers: description of someone (or a group of individuals) younger in age.

vii

Introduction Every week there are numerous headlines, opinion pieces or reports on the pandemic of gang-related youth violence and crime throughout the myriad of local and national print and broadcast media outlets. Consequently, all reported incidents of youth violence involving either a knife or gun that occur within any of England’s poor multi-ethnic urban locations are automatically deemed to be caused by the menace of street gangs. This situation is further corroborated by police ‘intelligence’ and statistics as well as by a small but growing number of criminological studies. Moreover, the existence and unique problem of street gangs has been officially recognised by national policy makers via the implementation of a range of new legislative tools and powers. In June 2015 the Conservative government both widened and extended the scope of gang injunctions – which were first introduced under the New Labour administration – and also introduced an updated statutory definition of gangs to be used across all of the police and public services including health, education, children and youth services. The official definition of UK street gangs was originally arrived upon by the Conservative-Liberal coalition in 2011 as part of its ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ (EGYV) strategy. However, the refreshed and more flexible 2015 definition allows the police and local authorities to take pre-emptive action in order for them to more effectively tackle gang and drug-related violent crime. The official government gang definition is extremely controversial, not least because of the long-standing and ongoing contested/heated academic and public debates about: (a) what a gang is and how to define it; (b) whether there is a growing gang problem; (c) whether there is a link between violent youth crime and gang membership; and (d) the demonisation and racialisation of gangs by the news media, which provides 1

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justification for the continued use of oppressive law enforcement tactics that disproportionately impact upon black and minority ethnic youth. The above questions abound both in the UK as well as in the US, the original home of the gang, and have yet to be resolved. If anything they have become sidelined by the more urgent and dominant neoliberal Conservative obsessions with cutting welfare and fighting urban crime. It is no coincidence that during the past 30 years or so US and UK governments, through the introduction of a range of policies and cuts to public expenditure, have sought to limit and/or diminish the role of the state in relation to welfare while investing in and expanding its punitive arm through ever tougher crime control strategies and rapidly increasing imprisonment rates. It is within this broad political economic and social context that the current UK gangs crisis needs to be examined. During its 13 years in power, New Labour successfully set about the task of joining up its crime control agenda to its social policy objective around tackling social exclusion. However, it was the coalition government, headed by the Conservative party leader and Prime Minister David Cameron, that went about completing the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown criminalisation project while embarking on its own grand plan of fiscal austerity and welfare reform. The savage coalition cuts to public expenditure during the period 2010 to 2015 resulted in more than £17 billion worth of savings. Since being re-elected as a majority government in May 2015, the Conservatives have promised that by 2020 they will have reduced the benefits and tax credit bill by an additional £12 billion. These austerity-driven welfare reforms have impacted disproportionately on the poorer and more vulnerable sections of society such as elderly people, disabled people, children and young people. Indeed, many locally delivered universal and targeted youth services have been completely decimated and the overall social policy climate for young people is even more dire due to the axing of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) for 16–19 year olds, abolition of the Connexions Service, tripling of university tuition fees and withdrawal of housing benefit for 18–21 year olds. Many young adults and particularly those from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds – compounded by the impact of deindustrialisation and government austerity 2

Introduction

measures – are having to contend with high levels of joblessness, homelessness, poverty and personal debt. Nonetheless, amid all of this the coalition and Conservative administrations have found time to target, criminalise and disproportionately punish, through their official statutory catchall definition of street gangs and anti-gang violence strategies, large numbers of black British urban youth. It was just after the 2011 English summer riots that the issue of urban youth gangs moved out from the pages of the newspapers to become one of the centrepieces of the coalition’s social policy agenda; it was at this juncture that the UK gang crisis became official. In the decade leading up to the disturbances there had been a growing number of local and national news media reports about the menace of gun and knife violence, with much of it being linked to black urban gang warfare. Interestingly, before 2011 violent crime in the inner cities tended to be largely characterised via the police and news media as street crime involving drug dealing, robbery and the use of lethal weapons such as guns. This national fixation with street crime, which began in the early 1970s, was intimately linked to postwar discourses about the problem of ‘coloured immigration’ and the long-standing social panics about working class youth subcultures. The young white male hoodlums and delinquents who had generated countless newspaper headlines in the 1950s and 1960s – such as the Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers – had by the early 1980s been supplanted, within the media’s gaze, by the black mugger and rioter. The current UK gangs crisis can be traced back to the late 1980s when stories about ruthlessly violent Jamaican Yardie criminals operating from within London’s black communities saturated the national news media. Located within notorious black urban crime hot spots (including Moss Side in Manchester, St Ann’s in Nottingham, Harlesden in north-west London and Hackney in east London), these Yardie gangs were allegedly heavily involved in the distribution and supply of crack cocaine. They were also renowned, according to the extensive police-media portrayals, for their ruthless and lethal gun violence and flamboyant lifestyles. By the late 1990s and 2000s it was alleged that the Yardies had been usurped by home-grown black criminals who adopted the 3

Race, gangs and youth violence

Jamaicans’ ‘gangsta’ lifestyle and lethal use of firearms. During this period the avalanche of police-media-fuelled reports had helped to cement within the nation’s consciousness the intrinsic interconnectedness between race, youth and violent street crime. At the same time, it was also argued by a variety of high-profile public figures, including Prime Minister David Cameron, that Jamaican and African American ‘gangsta culture’ was fuelling gang and knife crime. Consequently, within the space of a couple of decades the stereotyped black street robber had been transformed into the even more dangerous black ‘gangbanger’. Organisation of the book Primarily, this book aims to challenge current thinking about serious youth violence and the gang, and in particular the racialisation of this issue by the media and the police. The arguments and research evidence presented throughout will seek to challenge government-led policy, practice and policing orthodoxy around the menace of youth ‘street gangs’. Moreover, the book sets out to locate the issue of gangs and urban violence within a broader social and political economic context.Widening out the debate about gangs and urban violence beyond the narrow policing–crime nexus to adopt a youth development approach will further allow for these concerns to be better examined and understood as part of larger theoretical and research discourses concerning the youth life course; notably incorporating perspectives on youth transitions, identities, cultures, lifestyles, health and education. Chapter one first sets out to discuss the UK coalition and Conservative governments’ statutory definition of the ‘street gang’, arguing that it is part and parcel of a misguided and dangerous policy development that legitimises long-standing police-media-constructed violent crime narratives centred on black youth. Moreover, the official UK gang definition attempts (very simplistically) to cut through the many decades of (and ongoing) rancour/discord and contention among law makers, gang scholars and justice sector agencies in the US about how to locate/define/describe gangs and gang members and whether there is even sufficient empirical evidence to conclude that 4

Introduction

street gangs are responsible for violent crime. Interestingly, these thorny issues have been conveniently side-stepped by UK gang apologists currently operating in government, policing and academia. In contrast, rather than continuing with the current fixation with gangs, this chapter sets out to examine the social harms and risky behaviours associated with poor/marginalised youth growing up in the inner cities, slums, barrios, favelas and shanty towns of the world, and particularly in the Americas and the Caribbean. Fundamentally, this chapter maintains that the issue of global youth violence goes beyond policing and justice concerns and is better understood when viewed from a macro structural and/ or youth development perspective. In so doing, it will attempt to highlight one of the core aims of this book – the imperative need to examine the drivers of violent crime in isolation from racialised and criminalised gang discourses – by engaging with those research studies undertaken in Latin America, Jamaica and the US that examine the risky behaviours and social harms (largely) associated with marginalised young males residing in impoverished urban slum settlements and decaying inner city ghettos. Much of this behaviour manifests as lethal violence and needs to be understood first within a national historical context. As an example: many South American countries are particularly vulnerable to violent crime due to a history of political conflict and civil war. Second, urban youth violence needs to be located within the global political economic climate of rapid urbanisation, the retreat of both the labour market and welfare state in the metropolises of the West, and uneven capitalist development and state neglect within the megacities of the Global South. Within the global settings of advanced marginality, urban youth violence can be viewed as a by-product of an informal street-based economy where hyper-masculine modes of behaviour become entrenched and normalised. In conclusion, this chapter will argue that it would be better for UK academics to focus on the complex and underlying causes and manifestations of urban violence within poor communities rather than obsessing about street gangs. The 2011 riots can be said to be a watershed moment with regard to the national debate on gangs and violent youth crime, 5

Race, gangs and youth violence

a debate which hitherto had mainly taken place within the pages of the local and national print media. Both the Prime Minister (David Cameron) and the Home Secretary (Theresa May), alongside a number of other senior ministers, quickly rushed to blame the five days of looting, arson and violence on the ‘serious problem’ of ‘gangs and youth violence’ (May, 2011). Indeed, the summer disorders served as the main justification for the coalition’s five-year cross-government programme ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ launched just three months later in November 2011. Chapter two will revisit the key events of August 2011 while also examining the official data on the types of offences committed and the backgrounds of all those arrested and convicted. Drawing on the theoretical knowledge and limited research evidence generated thus far – and incorporating some of the findings from my own ethnographic study undertaken in an east London borough during the same period (see also Chapters five and six) – it is evidently clear that street gangs were not responsible for the outbreak of civil unrest. The remainder of this chapter will attempt to place the 2011 English riots within a post-war historical context, and more specifically, from the 1970s onwards when moral panics about problem (working class) youth collided with discussions about immigration, race and crime. As such it will explore the moral panics concerning first black British youth and the various crises around ‘mugging’, ‘rioting’ ‘violent street crime’ and now street gangs; and second the new Asian youth criminality with tabloid-driven headlines about ‘Asian gangs’, northern ‘race riots’ and more recently ‘radicalisation’. In conclusion, Chapter two will assert that the current popular fears and anxieties about the street gang and violent urban crime need to be understood as a continuation of the history of respectable fears (Pearson, 1983) concerning problem and poor youth. Ultimately the ‘gang’ menace addresses all of the big societal discussions and concerns of race, immigration, youth and crime during the post-war period in Britain. While there has been a discernible increase in UK gang scholarship, particularly since the early 2000s, it still represents a relatively small and marginalised area of academic interest. As outlined above, rather than looking for gangs, most British youth 6

Introduction

researchers in the post-war period have been more concerned with studying delinquency and working class subcultural formations. In particular, Chapter three will discuss how the seminal interdisciplinary work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s and early 1980s redefined academic understanding of subcultures, deviance and young people. The CCCS’s approach exemplified the accepted and dominant view within the social sciences, from the 1950s right up until the 1990s, and in direct contrast to the US situation, that youth gangs did not exist in Britain. The police-media concern about escalating black gun violence in a number of urban localities along with the intervention of an American scholar (Malcolm Klein) in the late 1990s, combined to challenge these long-standing academic denials about the existence of gangs in the UK and Europe. The remainder of the chapter interrogates the increasing – yet still relatively miniscule amount of – empirical research literature on the UK gang problem that has cropped up since Klein et al’s (2001) collection of European gang studies, which included a paper on Manchester street gangs. Rather than the UK being in the midst of a gangs crisis, as argued by John Pitts, I maintain that the research evidence in support of these claims are biased, partial and overly dependent upon police intelligence and statistics. Moreover, the long-standing ambiguities and definitional problems that are inherent to the term ‘gang’ have still yet to be adequately addressed/resolved. Although UK gang research is contested and represents a plurality of perspectives, since 2011 there has begun to be a coalescence of opinion by policy makers, operational police units, statutory and third sector service providers, and a small number of gang academics about the escalating problem of youth street gangs. Consequently, Chapter four will detail how this latest moral panic is propagated, promoted and sustained by this budding gang industry alongside its key sympathisers within the popular media. Notably, like the mugging crisis before it, the themes of race, crime and youth have been condensed into the popular image of the violent street gang. This can be attributed to the way that the police and media amplify and structure the debate about black young people’s disproportionate involvement in gun and knife violence. Furthermore, the recent ethnographic 7

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turn will be examined and the failure noted of these gang scholars to engage with issues of race and/or the broader youth studies discourses around ethnicity, agency, identities, transitions and cultures. UK gang researchers’ and thinkers’ under-theorisation of, and colour-blind approach to, issues of race (and agency) – namely alleged black over-representation with regard to violent offending and the racialisation of this issue by the media and the police – has resulted in misguided policy, practice and thinking that centres upon the existence of the problematic street gang. This overused racially toxic label only serves to further demonise and criminalise, via police targeting practices, large numbers of black young people. Chapter five draws extensively on data gleaned from my own ethnographic study examining youth crime and policing in one east London borough. It therefore provides a locally situated discussion about the impact of austerity and the national EGYV policy agendas – and specifically the local authority anti-gangs ‘Enough is Enough’ initiative – on youth provision and policing in the London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF).This chapter will assert that the gangs agenda has brought with it targeted funding for gangs youth work amid wholesale cuts to generic youth services and more generally severe cuts to frontline services that negatively impact upon those families and communities most affected by serious youth violence. In 2011 the coalition government identified the LBWF as a beacon of good practice with regard to its partnership arrangements for tackling its youth gangs problem. However, much of the information about the issue of escalating gang-related violent youth crime in the borough was derived solely from unverified police intelligence, which in itself was wholly problematic. This chapter will argue that the EGYV and ‘Enough is Enough’ programmes are both misguided and problematic in that they mistakenly posit that all youth violence and crime in urban communities is gang related. Furthermore, although premised on the notion of early intervention and prevention, these initiatives are primarily focussed upon tough law enforcement practices resulting in the disproportionate targeting and punishment of black youth. Unfortunately, the precarious financial position of youth services (including statutory and third sector agencies) precipitated by 8

Introduction

massive coalition cuts to public expenditure has meant they have had to collude with, rather than challenge, these anti-gang programmes in order to access public funds. Chapter six also utilises data from my empirical study undertaken in east London, in addition to findings from a number of UK research studies examining youth violence beyond the gang label. At this point the book will revisit and discuss the role and significance of ‘Road culture’ (Gunter, 2010) in the lives of young people growing up in poor neighbourhoods, and specifically the violent social worlds and hyper-masculine modes of behaviour associated with ‘life on Road’. By drawing on the voices and direct experiences of the research participants, this chapter will demonstrate that contemporary Road-based subculture plays a largely positive and creative role in young people’s lives.This is in stark contrast to the police-media-driven and gang-academic discourses that portray contemporary urban youth cultures as inherently violent and criminogenic.Whereas the current policy, prevention and policing agenda on serious youth violence in the UK is focused on gangs, the discussions by the young people themselves about ‘on Road’ culture (as have been the findings of a number of recent studies examining urban youth violence) demonstrate that while the threat of violence was everywhere, its cause was not necessarily gang related. Significantly, none of the young participants identified with or validated the official risk discourse around gangs. Most felt that the gang problem was a media invention that did not speak about the daily realities of east London Road life. They tended to use the term ‘gang’ when describing any other group of unknown young people, usually from another neighbourhood. Nonetheless, youth violence and robbery represented a real and almost daily threat for some young people, and its underlying causes were linked to territoriality and specifically the ‘code of the street’ (Anderson, 1999).Young males (and some young women) living in particular urban neighbourhoods can find themselves easily getting caught up in violent confrontations (or beefs) with their peers, and sometimes for very petty reasons. The social panic about gangs in the UK came to a head following the 2011 summer riots resulting in the coalition’s EGYV programme, and the Conservative government’s 2016 9

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initiative ‘Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation’ (EGVE). However, these recent governmental responses to the gangs crisis have been 40 years in the making and owe a great deal to wider neoliberal social policy developments in North America and Britain. Chapter seven will outline how the US war on drugs and urban crime policy agendas of both the Reagan and Clinton administrations in the 1980s and 1990s led to brutal law enforcement practices and a prison crisis that has seen several generations of African Americans being disproportionately imprisoned. Amid the implementation of hard law and order policies throughout the country alongside billions of dollars of additional funding, there were severe cuts to education and welfare programmes, which, just like the war on drugs and urban crime policy agendas, impacted mainly on blacks and more generally the urban poor. This chapter will examine the impact of hard law and order and the increasing criminalisation of social policy in the UK during the past two decades. In this regard the recent shifts in official policy discourses concerning ‘disadvantaged youth’ will be examined, particularly the way in which continued cuts to (and/or reallocations of) public expenditure have resulted in the move away from universalist to more targeted youth service provision. It will further document how this process – initiated under the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments during the 1980s and 1990s – has been continued and modified; first under the New Labour administration, with its focus on regeneration and youth crime prevention, and more recently by the EGYV and EGVE programmes. Lastly, Chapter seven will assert that serious youth violence is as much a health and education issue as it is a policing and crime one, moreover it should be contextualised alongside the many other adaptive responses (or risky behaviours) of marginalised young people to their entrenched socio-economic disadvantage. The current precarious position of young people growing up in poor neighbourhoods can only be tackled by the implementation of joined-up social policies that will lead to universalist and integrated service provision tasked with improving the life experiences, opportunities and choices of all young people. Crucially, it will be important that policy makers ensure that 10

Introduction

the voices and experiences of young people are integral to any future decision making and service delivery.

11

ONE

Global perspectives on urban youth violence Introduction Since the late 1980s, there has been ongoing and ever-growing police-media-generated concern about the problem of violent crime in the inner cities. The issue of urban crime has a much longer history in Britain and can be traced back to the early 1970s when discussions about ‘coloured’ immigration collided with the problematisation of second generation black youth – most notably the mugging crisis. These themes of race and crime and the decaying inner city were reinforced and magnified within the nation’s consciousness via decades of flashpoints and police–black youth conflicts, as exemplified by the 1976 Notting Hill disturbances and 1981 Brixton disorders. It is within this historical context that the current UK ‘gangs crisis’ needs to be located as it both replays, as well as extends, these now well-worn threads of race, violent crime and urban degeneration. However, where it signals a significant departure from these older narratives is in relation to the recent burgeoning academic interest and governmental concern with, and official recognition of, the ‘street gang’.The ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ programme launched by David Cameron’s coalition government in 2011 (HM Government, 2011, 2012b) adopted the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) accepted ‘standard definition’: ‘Street Gangs – these are relatively durable, predominantly street-based groups [of young people] who are recognised as a discernible entity and for whom violence is intrinsic. Crime as 13

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well as violent crime in the gang is instrumental (to achieving an outcome) as well as expressive’ (ACPO, 207:22). Interestingly, as well as very controversially, the coalition government in arriving at its official ‘standard definition’ had figuratively speaking ‘put to bed’ the one issue that ‘gang experts’ in the US have not been able to find any sort of agreement about: ‘what a gang is’ and ‘how to define gangs’. Whereas debates about ‘the gang’ are relatively new to the UK, for most of the post-war era in the US this issue has been viewed as a national law and order problem by a large and expanding industry of experts comprising policy makers, law enforcement professionals and gang scholars. ‘Just as gangs have proliferated across the nation’ – appearing in over 800 cities and towns – ‘so has gang literature’, and anti-gang policies and programmes (Klein, 1995:8). This is not to say that the debate has been resolved in North America as in reality there is still no consensus of opinion on gang definitions and typologies, either by those academic experts who study them or by those law enforcement professionals who police them. The only common ground among this industry of experts is the fact that they have consistently been able to ‘agree on only one point’ with regard to the age-old and rancorous gang question: ‘that there is no agreement’ (Greene and Pranis, 2007:9; see also for example Miller, 1975; Ball and Curry, 1995; Esbensen et al, 2001; Klein and Maxon, 2006). In Julie Barrows and Ronald Huff ’s review of federal and state gang policies, only two of the 50 US states used the same gang definitions. Unsurprisingly, in their research summary the authors also asserted that although the gang problem is garnering increasing amounts of attention across the US, ‘researchers, police officers, and lawmakers have yet to agree on definitions used to characterize and understand the problem’ (Barrows and Huff, 2009:675). Even though there has been no agreement on the gang question, this has not stopped the development of dominant discourses/definitional boundaries driven by law enforcement agendas that fixate on groups of youth who commit criminal offences, and who are involved in the illicit drugs trade. According to Randall Shelden et al (2013:23), too many US gang researchers have ‘confused the term group with the term 14

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

gang and have proceeded to expand the definition’ to the point where it becomes a catchall boundary that includes ‘every group of youths that commit offences together’. Consequently, what is the difference between youth gangs, street gangs and drugs gangs? Or why is it that many other types of white ethnic groups – whose identities are intrinsically linked to collective law-breaking activities like biker gangs, skinheads, ‘stoners’, organised crime cartels or even college fraternities (see Sanday, 1990; Spergel, 1995;Venkatesh, 2003) – are generally excluded from the research literature and popular discourses about gangs. Unsurprisingly, the dominant law and order perspective-informed research agendas of US gang scholars during the past 50 years has resulted in gangs largely becoming synonymous with minorities, and most typically the black and Latino urban poor. However, ‘the correlation between minorities and gangs may well be an artifact of definitional boundaries’ rather than a true ‘measure of actual gang membership’ (Coughlin and Venkatesh, 2003:51). Notwithstanding the above definitional contestations, omissions and inherent contradictions, the concerns and preoccupations of US gang criminologists have more recently been imported and/or applied to other jurisdictions around the globe, including Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.These developments have led to what John Hagedorn (2008:xxiv) refers to as ‘a world of gangs’, where institutionalised groups of ‘armed young men have become permanent fixtures in many ghettos, barrios, and favelas across the globe’ and represent a constant attraction for marginalised youth. Furthermore, the cause of this explosion of gangs around the cities of the world is as a result of rapid urbanisation, poverty, immigration and failing states. It should be noted that a decade before John Hagedorn’s World of Gangs (2008) or his edited collection Gangs in the Global City (2006), Malcolm Klein had briefly surveyed the research data on the gang problem around the globe – including among other countries Slovenia, Russia, China, France, Sweden, the Philippines, South Africa, Japan, New Zealand and Mexico – and contended that many had developed their own variants on the gang with regard to typology and structure. However, a number of others ‘have

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given birth to genuine street gangs’ like those which exist in the US (Klein, 1995:228). From the outset I must clarify that it is not my contention, either in this chapter or indeed throughout the remainder of this book, to contradict or even confer with writers such as Klein or Hagedorn, about whether or not gangs have proliferated around the globe. However, it has clearly become evident that this fixation on gangs by academics, policy makers, justice practitioners and the media is both dangerous and unhelpful, first, because it has led to the demonisation, and disproportionate targeting and punishment, of black and minority youth by the police and other criminal justice agencies; and second, because there is no available empirical evidence to support the commonly held view that gangs cause crime. In relation to the latter point, Jack Katz and Curtis Jackson-Jacobs (2004:93) argue that the principal problem with gang research, albeit rarely acknowledged, is the fact ‘that we never have a good basis for thinking that gangs cause crime’. Mercer L. Sullivan another critic of this ‘perennial fascination with gangs’ points out in his article ‘Are “Gang” Studies Dangerous?’ the inherent dangers of linking youth violence with gangs too closely: Much of what youth gangs do is expressive activity … The complex intertwining of cultural symbolism and on-the-ground patterns of behaviour poses a serious problem for research. If we mistake symbols for behaviour, we commit errors of reification. Mass society and mass media feed on and reinforce the tendency to reify gangs (Sullivan, 2006:16). Rather than continuing with the ongoing fixation with gangs, this chapter sets out to broadly explore the underlying causes of the social harms and risky behaviours associated with gangs, groups, subcultures and other youth social formations that exist within the inner cities, slums, barrios, favelas and shanty towns of the world. In so doing, it will attempt to highlight one of the core aims of this book – the imperative need to examine the drivers of violent crime in isolation from racialised and criminalised gang discourses. Taking issue with Hagedorn’s 16

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(2008) thesis, I will maintain that the global problem of violent urban crime is not linked to ‘a world of gangs’ but that it is born out of the negative impact of globalisation combined with specific national historical (political and cultural) processes. To this end, this chapter includes a comparative historical case study examining the causes and manifestations of urban youth violence in Brazil, Columbia, Central America, Jamaica and the US. Fundamentally, it will reassert the key argument that urban youth violence goes beyond policing and criminal justice and is best understood when viewed from a macro-structural and/ or youth development perspective. Cities, globalisation and slums While many young people around the world are doing well and growing up in supportive and cohesive societies, equally there are also large numbers of young people who are finding themselves increasingly impoverished and cut adrift – socially, economically and culturally – from the mainstream of society. Affecting both rich and poor countries alike, urban youth across the globe are facing a multitude of social ills and risks ranging from crime, violence, substance misuse, homelessness and fragile families as well as limited access to education and other welfare services. Within the globalised political economy this increasing poverty and socio-economic inequality – among already marginalised groups – is fuelled by rapid industrialisation combined with the effects of the retreat of both the labour market and welfare state in the metropolises of the West, and uneven capitalist development and state neglect within the mega cities of the global South. In 1950 the overwhelming majority (70%) of the world’s population resided in rural areas. However, by 2014 the reverse was the case with more than half (54%) of the earth’s inhabitants now living in cities. This demographic trend is set to continue into the next few decades, as it is expected that globally two thirds or 66% of people will be living in urban areas (UN, 2014). Rapid urbanisation alongside a continually growing world population is resulting in the creation of large urban centres and sprawls with between 500,000 to 1 million inhabitants, and the majority of them are concentrated in Africa and Asia. At present 17

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the majority of the world’s urban settlements are relatively small, housing up to 500,000 people, but there are a growing number of megacities with populations exceeding 10 million – again most of them are located in the global South. By 2030 there are expected to be 41 such megalopolises. This continuing global demographic shift towards urbanisation is due to impoverished and dispossessed rural populations being economically forced to migrate away from the countryside for the perceived wealth and opportunities available in the cities. Throughout history cities have always been the key drivers of economic, cultural and political development, but their rapid development over the past 150 years or so has been fuelled first by industrialisation and more recently post-industrialisation. Poverty as well as racial/ethnic and class-based inequality and exclusion have also been a central feature of city life. However, neoliberalisation and globalisation have contributed to the development of a ‘new geography of centrality and marginality’ (Sassen, 1999) where global cities have risen to become the main drivers of economic power and uneven capitalist development. The extremes of poverty and wealth, notable characteristics that previously differentiated developing from highly developed nations, are now an increasing feature of the major cities of the industrialised North. Even in the West, global cities have become pre-eminent as economic powerhouses dominated by financial and corporate services – rather than manufacturing – which require highly skilled workers at their centre, while at the same creating a growing army of low-paid workers and disadvantaged groups concentrated at their margins. As such, today’s global cities are urban spaces of extremes that are characterised not just by ‘immense wealth and poverty’, but also by ‘community and alienation, massive recreation and boredom, hygiene and disease, hope and despair’ (Bayat and Biekart, 2009:817). While globalisation is not a recent phenomenon, it operates in substantively different ways than was the case in previous generations. New developments in the areas of transportation as well as information and communication technologies have facilitated the rapid and relatively cheap mass movement of people, information, goods and services around the world. In addition, both the scale and the scope of today’s global 18

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connections are wide and far reaching, affecting individuals and groups in even the most remote of places. Globalisation is not just about economics and trade, rather it is multi-dimensional, encompassing legal, political, cultural, social, technological and other transborder flows resulting in a shrinking world and cultural homogenisation. In its report The State of the World’s Cities 2004/2005: Globalization and Urban Culture the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT, 2004) describes the significant impact of globalisation on cities, specifically the associated costs and benefits or notably the winners and losers. Private investors and corporate businesses have become the main beneficiaries of today’s improved global connections and neoliberalisation, as they are now able to maximise the financial returns on their investments by redeploying: development, production and marketing functions to the most profitable locations. Losers in this ‘race to the bottom’ have been, for example, female workers in many countries in East Asia, whose wage levels and working conditions have declined as a result of the dropping of barriers to footloose industries. In the more advanced economies, a consequence has been the rise in just-in-time and flex work, with the associated loss of benefits and decrease in job security (UN-HABITAT, 2004:2). In the global South particularly, there is a strong correlation between urbanisation, poverty and the prevalence of slums – informal, illegal, and unplanned settlements at the edges of city spaces characterised by poorly constructed and overcrowded dwellings with limited access to clean water, sanitation and other public utilities. It has been estimated that between 2000 and 2010 more than 200 million people in the developing world had been lifted out of slum conditions (UN-HABITAT, 2008), many through bold policy reforms undertaken at local and national governmental levels. Nevertheless, while these figures equated to an overall decline in the proportion of slum dwellers, from 39% in 2000 to 32% in 2010, in absolute terms their numbers 19

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had increased considerably on average by 58 million a year. It should be noted that these estimates are based on a limited operational definition of slums officially adopted by the UN in 2002, one that is only concerned with the legal and physical characteristics of human settlements. However, based even on this ‘very conservative gauge of what qualifies as a slum’ (Davis, 2006:23), UN-HABITAT estimates that by 2020 the world’s slum population is expected to reach 889 million. In its global survey The Challenge of the Slums UN-HABITAT (2003:xxvi) highlighted among other key findings the fact that although they are a ‘physical and spatial manifestation of urban poverty and intra-city inequality’, slum communities are not solely comprised of the urban poor but also include residents with reasonable incomes. Most slum dwellers’ livelihoods are linked closely to the informal economy where they have lowpaid jobs in clothes factories, waste recycling, or work as security guards or domestic servants, while others are self-employed and/ or home-based entrepreneurs.The UN’s global audit emphasises the fact that slum populations are exceptionally diverse in terms of employment and income-generating activities, ranging ‘from university lecturers, students and formal sector employees, to those engaged in marginal activities bordering on illegality’ such as petty crime. The issue of crime is something that has long been associated with slums – throughout the world they are perceived to be the main source of crime and a myriad of other social problems – and ‘characterized by their transient households and “counterculture” social patterns’. It is becoming apparent that slum dwellers are more victims of crime than perpetrators; as a result of exclusionary public policies in the areas of housing and policing in particular, they are more exposed to organised crime and its associated violence. Slums might be the dominant preserve of countries in the developing world, but the physical and social manifestations of urban poverty and inequality are becoming ever more apparent in the decaying inner cities/suburbs of North America and the declining high-rise outskirts of European cities.Accordingly, the American ghetto poor comprising largely African Americans and Latinos are marooned on the planet Mercury, while the European urban poor of ethnic immigrant and unemployed 20

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

populations are stranded on Pluto or Neptune (Davis, 2006). As with the slum dwellers of the developing world, poor urban neighbourhoods in the industrial North are similarly stigmatised as areas blighted by violent crime, illegal drugs and high rates of social dysfunction and a prevalence of lone-parent households, absentee fathers, teenage pregnancy, worklessness and welfare dependency. Furthermore, due to their increasing social and economic exclusion, the urban poor in the West are also more at risk from crime and violence.This is largely due to their dependency and/or engagement with the illegal informal economy for goods, services (such as illegal money-lending) and, in some cases, income. Global youth and urban marginalisation The effects of rapid urbanisation, neoliberalisation and uneven capitalist development across the globe have impacted disproportionately on young people, resulting in higher levels of inequality and deprivation. Within this context ‘urban youth bulges’ or continually rising youth populations have serious implications for their human development and quality of life. UN-HABITAT (2013) state that young people aged 12–24 constitute more than one fifth or 1.3 billion of the world’s population. The youth and child population combined, or all those aged 25 and below, totals nearly 3 billion and constitutes 50% of the planet’s citizenry; in addition most reside in urban areas. While globalisation has provided new opportunities for many young people, there remain a significant number of young people who continue to face a diverse and growing array of challenges. Too many of the world’s youth face inequality in access to a basic education and remain illiterate; they are having to contend with higher rates of labour market exclusion and constitute 47% of the world’s unemployed. Nearly 515 million young people are living in abject poverty and are forced to subsist on less than $2 per day, and girls and young women around the world continue to be subjected to discrimination and violence (UN-HABITAT, 2013). As we approach the third decade of the 21st century, the observations made by Marta Tienda and William Julius Wilson at the start of the new millennium remain 21

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depressingly accurate: ‘Despite bewildering differences in the social and cultural contexts’ in which urban youth are growing up in across the globe, it is evidently clear that the developmental challenges faced ‘by those reared in materially disadvantaged circumstances are strikingly similar’ (Tienda and Wilson, 2002:3). In order to improve the life chances and opportunities of many of the world’s poor youth it is incumbent on governments and stakeholders to devise policies and implement programmes which build inclusive and equal cities. In this respect the State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide report (UN-HABITAT, 2008) defines an inclusive city as one that has the following characteristics. First, it is socially inclusive, providing all citizens with adequate shelter, basic services and the necessary conditions for equal access to social amenities and public goods required for social well-being and cohesiveness. Second, it is a city that is politically inclusive and protects all its citizens’ rights and freedoms and encourages social and political participation among all with regard to democratic decision-making processes. Economic inclusion is another key characteristic of an inclusive and equal city, by way of encouraging and supporting economic development through equal opportunities for business development and access to employment, and promoting economic policies that directly target poor people. Lastly, it is a city that is culturally inclusive, promotes social integration, celebrates diversity, respects individuals’ cultural rights, acknowledges the human capital of all its citizens and seeks to improve them through creative expression. The State of the Urban Youth 2010/11: Inequality of Youth Opportunity report (UN-HABITIAT, 2010), provides a systematic review of empirical evidence regarding the variables which affect the four essential dimensions of inequality – social, political, cultural and economic – across selected cities in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. This report, a companion to its broader-encompassing global study of urban poverty and deprivation Bridging the Urban Divide (UN-HABITAT, 2008), is based on an analytical framework which uses variables grouped into four main factors: Predetermined Circumstances, Family Resources and Location, Inequality of Opportunities, and Intergenerational Inequalities. These factors were used by UN 22

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researchers to identify and analyse the variables that create the basic dynamics of youth inequalities in conjunction with the migrational trends and vulnerabilities that underpin today’s global urban ‘youth crisis’. Urban poverty and inequality are issues that are closely associated with social exclusion processes which deny certain groups equal access to economic, cultural and political resources and inhibit them from benefiting from the same opportunities as others.The negative consequences of predetermined circumstances and issues such as resources, gender, ethnicity, caste and disability mean that growing numbers of urban youth are being bypassed by important economic, social and political processes. On occasion these marginalised ‘young residents express their sense of frustration in ways that undermine urban cohesion and stability’ (UN-HABITAT, 2010:5). A young person’s family residence and availability of resources to access basic health or education services and amenities – such as clean water, sanitation and electricity – also impact on the four dimensions of inequality.As well as negatively impacting on their emotional, physical and mental well-being, it can also lead to the inability of the young person to successfully access key cultural, political and economic networks and associated opportunities. Consequently, UN-HABITAT (2010:6) researchers noted that those respondents in their global youth study who had grown up in more favourable locations with access to basic facilities ‘are expected to feel more integrated with the rest of society’. Likewise, intergenerational inequalities such as levels of parents’ income and education are expected to affect a young person’s overall transitional development and their feelings of social inclusion. Unless the impact of intergenerational inequalities is circumscribed by policy interventions, opportunity deprivation and inequity starting from birth will continue through childhood and all the way into adulthood ‘consolidating any disadvantages faced in early years’ (UN-HABITAT, 2010:7). The authors of this UN-HABITAT youth report maintain that inequality of opportunity – measured by the levels and quality of their respondents’ education – is the most significant factor that is expected to affect outcome equalities due to the bi-directional nature of that particular relationship:

23

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While young people are unlikely to be able to influence or determine the quality of primary education, they can improve their abilities as they grow up. If young people have access to better economic opportunities and activities, they can improve their levels of education, paving the way for their own economic, social and cultural advancement, as well as their integration in the social mainstream (UN-HABITAT, 2010:8) The majority of urban youth within the developing world are underprivileged and face a wide range of interrelated disadvantages and deprivation and many are also rural migrants who have moved to cities in search of work. Not surprisingly, the youth transitional life stage is also a period of high mobility for young people – their migration rates peaking between the ages of 15 and 24 (Cortina et al, 2014) – with many of them leaving behind rural communities and families in exchange for the opportunities and risks of urban slums and poor neighbourhoods. Globally the vast majority of mobile youth are internal migrants within their home countries, but of the current estimated 232 million international migrants worldwide, 35 million are under 20 years of age and 40 million aged between 20 and 29; in total nearly one third of all international migrants are under 30 years of age (UN, 2013). Young people who are embarking on new lives in large impersonal cities and countries on their own are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and getting caught up in worsening situations of poverty and inequality. Excluded ‘from opportunities for socialization under adult responsibility norms’ (UN-HABITAT, 2010:9) these urban youth find themselves at risk of engaging in or being a victim of crime and violence, substance misuse, sexual exploitation, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, educational disengagement and unemployment (Jani and Mellinger, 2015).

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Global perspectives on urban youth violence

Youth violence and comparative urban contexts Disadvantaged urban youth throughout the world, whether they are residing in the favelas of Brazil, ghettos of the US, banlieue in France or townships of South Africa, are faced with similar yet differing social stigmas and development issues centred on their precarious existence on the margins of mainstream society. The multitude of stigmatised and impoverished urban neighbourhoods around the world are all typically depicted as hotbeds of violence, deprivation, crime and social and cultural dysfunction. However, the fabric of urban marginality is not everywhere the same and while this is to be expected, Loic Wacquant in Urban Outcasts (2008:2) maintains that we can only fully understand advanced urban marginality once we embed the ‘generic mechanisms that produce it, like the specific forms it assumes’ into the differentiated cultural, social, political, economic and historical contexts ‘of each society at a given epoch’.While the global conditions that help ferment urban marginality are in many respects similar, rather than looking at a ‘world of gangs’ we need to work to develop more complex and differentiated perspectives on the causes and manifestations of urban youth violence in different national contexts. In this regard it is not even as simple as separating out the global South from the overdeveloped West, because while the effects of urban marginality – inequality, poverty and racial/ethnic and class-based exclusion – in, for example, Brazil, France, South Africa and the US are in many respects similar, the spatial contexts are not. The favela, as unique to Brazil as the banlieue is to France, the township to South Africa and the ghetto to the US, illustrates that not all dilapidated urban/suburban districts in the West are ghettos and neither are all slum communities in the global South poor. Nevertheless, escalating levels of urban crime and violence in all countries and regions ‘throughout the world represent a major concern for its citizens and their local government’ (World Bank, 2011:2). Reports of the gang violence crises affecting nations such as Honduras, Belize, South Africa or Kenya, or the news media portrayals of dramatic outbreaks of violence in Paris and throughout France’s other urban centres, illustrate clearly that the issue of urban youth violence/crime is not restricted to 25

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the countries of Africa, Latin America or even the US. Indeed, increasing outbreaks of violence and crime and the development of ‘lawless zones’ and ‘no-go areas’ is also occurring in the cities of rich Western nations with large disparities in wealth and opportunity.A significant feature of crime and violence in urban contexts has been the role played by young people, particularly young males, as both victims and perpetrators. Each year an estimated 200,000 young adults aged 10–29 years die as a result of interpersonal violence and 83% of these victims are male (WHO, 2015). In 2012, 36,000 children aged 15 and under ‘were the victims of homicide worldwide … Equating to 8% of all homicide victims’, and when combined with the number of victims aged between 15 and 29 (43%) this ‘means that more than half of all global homicide victims are under 30 years of age’ (UNODC, 2013:14). Lethal violence is the leading cause of mortality for 10–19-yearold adolescent males in the Americas and also ‘ranks among the top five causes of death’ for older male teens aged 15–19 ‘in every region, including high income countries’ (WHO, 2014:2). Between 2000 and 2012,‘one of every three deaths among boys aged 15–19’ in Latin America and the Caribbean was caused by interpersonal violence (Kato-Wallace et al, 2016:27). During this same period, homicide was the fourth leading cause of death for young adults aged 10–29 across the globe (WHO, 2015).Youth mortality rates engendered by lethal violence, across the world and even within countries, vary considerably. For instance in certain sub-Saharan African, South American and Caribbean nations the youth murder rate is estimated to be a hundred times higher than nations with the lowest rates of youth homicide, such as those in the Western Pacific and Western Europe (WHO, 2015). In 2012 the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that across the globe 94,000 children and young adults aged 0–19 were killed as a consequence of interpersonal violence, and this resulted in a homicide rate of 4 per 100,000. During this same 12-month period, in Latin America and the Caribbean 25,400 individuals aged 19 years and under were victims of lethal violence, representing a homicide rate of 12 per 100,000. Within West and Central Africa the child/youth homicide rate for under 19s was 10 per 100,000, which equated to 23,400 26

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

victims. By way of contrast, Central and Eastern Europe as well as East Asia and the Pacific were the two regions that had the lowest homicide rate for children and adolescents, which in 2012 was 1 per 100,000 (UNICEF, 2014). Of course violent deaths represent ‘the apex of the pyramid’ of the youth violence problem but falling underneath come the victims of non-fatal violence, who require emergency medical treatment. However, the third and largest segment at the base of the pyramid includes acts of violence and aggression that are never brought to the attention of law enforcement or health agencies. For every youth fatality caused by interpersonal violence, ‘it has been estimated that at least 20–40’ young adults receive emergency hospital treatment as a consequence of ‘serious violence-related injuries inflicted during assault and robbery’ (WHO, 2015:9). In order to gain a greater understanding of the broader impact of non-fatal interpersonal violence on children and young people, it is important to examine how injuries and disease affect both the duration and quality of their lives. The disability-adjusted life year or ‘DALY’ is a metric used to measure the ‘burden of disease’, injuries and other risk factors that shorten life or lead to ill-health/disease and disability (WHO, 2014b.). Among children and adolescents aged under 20, the global burden of disease is highest in under-5s, who are the most susceptible to mortality, illnesses and disability contracted via communicable diseases as well as maternal, neonatal and nutritional conditions. But as children make the transition into early adulthood the burden of disease increases due to homicide and non-fatal interpersonal violence, and is particularly pronounced among boys. For older adolescents aged between 15 and 19, the ‘DALY’ rate is systematically higher for males than it is for females throughout most of the world. However, the problem is particularly acute in Latin America and the Caribbean where ‘about 58 years of “healthy” life are lost per 1,000 boys aged 15 to 19 due to intentional injuries, compared to about 9 years lost per 1,000 girls in the same age group’ (UNICEF, 2014:45). Self-report surveys undertaken in different parts of the world concur that other ‘forms of youth violence – such as bullying, slapping, or hitting – can cause more emotional 27

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harm than physical harm’ (WHO, 2015:9). From this survey data, it is evident that across the globe ‘men and boys are more likely to experience violence in adolescence and early adulthood than at any other time’. Unfortunately, this ‘culture of violence also affects’ young people’s ‘attitudes that justify and normalize it’ (Kato-Wallace et al, 2016:27). The high incidences of homicide and non-fatal violence among young adults around the world ‘in some cases is as a result of gang violence in specific cities’ (UN-HABITAT, 2007:14), largely in Africa and Latin America where there is a prevalence of slums and large youth populations. Although UNICEF acknowledges that:‘Estimates of the numbers of gangs and gang membership is limited and it is difficult to know the extent of youth involvement’, it still goes on to report that ‘around 273,875 children (under 18) were believed to be involved in 29,900 gangs in the United States in 2011’ (UNICEF, 2014:46). UNHABITAT estimated that between 2002 and 2007 an estimated 100,000 gang members were responsible for 70% of all crime in Cape Town, South Africa, and in Guatemala approximately 100,000 gang members were reported to be responsible for ‘20,000 murders in gang warfare over the past five years’ (UNHABITAT, 2007:14). According to research undertaken by Clare Ribando Seelke estimates for overall gang membership in Central America in 2012 ranged from 85,000 [US Department State Department figures] to ‘a more modest 54,000’ according to UNODC data (Seelke 2014:3). In this era of global information flows it becomes necessary to examine closely the role of the media, within both local and international contexts, in relation to perceptions about the prevalence and causes of urban youth violence. In general media practices tend to coalesce around sensationalist news reporting – usually pertaining to various permutations of race-youth-gangs-cities-crime and violence – that engenders a ‘culture of fear’ in order to generate television viewing figures or sell news-based information product. ‘The ways in which adolescents and youths typically socialize are often perceived negatively and tend to be stigmatized’. Moreover, although it is true that these groups of adolescents and young adults ‘can be a source of vandalism, violence and crime, the fact of the matter 28

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

is that this phenomenon [juvenile gangs or bands of adolescents] is generally rooted in and prompted by other factors’ (IACHR, 2015:35).While gang membership – and the limited and widely varying estimates as to the number of gangs and gang members – is in some cases reportedly responsible for the high rates of youth violence and homicide in specific cities around the world, empirical research evidence indicates that for the most part there are a variety of complex contributory factors beyond gangs. It is evident that ‘many different forms of violence can operate concurrently, with different causes, mechanisms and outcomes’ and this has implications with regard to the ‘great differences between so-called “top-down” perceptions of the problem’, and the associated policy responses and ‘other more participatory “bottom-up” perspectives’ and proposed solutions (UN-HABITAT, 2007:14). Latin America and the Caribbean is a region of the world that has been particularly affected by escalating levels of violence and crime. It is ‘home to 8.5 percent of the world’s population, yet it concentrates 27 percent of the world’s homicides’ (UNDP, 2012:V). The Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s Global Burden of Armed Violence: Lethal Encounters (2015) report importantly highlighted the fact that official statistics concerning violent deaths are much more reliable in comparison to recorded data for other crimes and human rights violations. Consequently, drawing on official and research data from across the globe, the report found that 508,000 people died violently every year between 2007 and 2012, and while the media focusses on terrorism and war zone casualties, the overwhelming majority of victims are killed in non-conflict countries. ‘An examination of the distribution of lethal violence across sub-regions’, between the periods 2004 to 2009 and 2007 to 2012,‘shows that the Americas and Africa suffered from the highest rates of lethal violence’. In particular Central American states continue to: [e]xhibit the highest rate of violent deaths, which rose from 29.0 to 33.6 per 100,000 population; the next highest rate is that of Southern Africa, which rose from 27.4 to 31.2. Rates dropped slightly in the Caribbean (from 22.4 to 20.5) and in South America 29

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(from 18.0 to 17.0); while these averages are not as elevated as those of Central America or South Africa, they are still more than twice the global average of 7.4 per 100,000 (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2015:60). When these statistics are broken down into nation states we can see that a total of 22 countries in the Americas have homicide rates higher than the global average of 7.4 per 100,000, and seven countries have rates of lethal violence above 30 per 100,000. In the period 2007 to 2012, Honduras experienced the highest overall annual average violent death rate (73.4 per 100,000) followed by El Salvador (59.1 per 100,000), Venezuela (59 per 100,000) and Jamaica (52.1 per 100,000). It is important to note that lethal violence is not only distributed unevenly across states or regions, but also within states. While specific municipalities, cities or neighbourhoods may be highly affected by criminal violence and armed conflict, other areas may be comparatively peaceful (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2015).While there are specific (and historical) macro-structural and micro-level factors underpinning the endemic urban violence affecting many Latin American and Caribbean nations, the key issue or common concern of both sub-regions is organised transitional crime involving the illegal drugs trade. The US has historically been the dominant global market for illicit drugs, particularly raw cocaine: an estimated 660 tonnes of it was consumed in 1988 alone (UNODC, 2012) and Colombia was its main supplier. Although there has been a marked decline in demand for cocaine since 2006, its continuing illicit flow through much of Central America and the Caribbean still makes it the most lucrative organised crime activity in the subregion. The large-scale production of coca or opium poppy requires territorial control and therefore is clearly linked to insurgency and illegally armed militias, as can be seen in narco-states such as Afghanistan and Colombia. Beyond the producer states violence is not necessarily a requirement for the successful transnational flow of illicit drugs, as there is no real need for ‘drug distributors to quarrel among themselves or fight with the authorities’, indeed in many ‘transit areas the quickest way to profit is to avoid 30

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conflict’ (UNDOC, 2012:19). Further evidence that high rates of illicit drug flows do not necessarily correlate to higher rates of violence may be found when looking at the dramatically differing experiences between Central American countries. El Salvador has a relatively low cocaine flow of between four and five tons a year, but has ‘the highest sustained murder rate in the region’ as recorded in the period 2001–10. In direct contrast, Costa Rica has ‘26 times the cocaine flow’ as well as ‘just one-sixth of the murder rate’ (in the same ten-year period) of El Salvador (UNDOC, 2012:65). Much of Latin America is vulnerable to violent crime due to the fact that many of its nation states have been significantly affected by political conflict, civil war and repressive authoritarian regimes. This history of violence in the region – ranging from countries in the south such as Brazil and Argentina right up through to the central nations of Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua – has had long-lasting ramifications and profoundly impacts on its citizentry to this day. The systematic use of terror tactics in the region by state-sponsored actors such as the military, police and other militia has resulted – due to the exposure of large segments of the population to mass rape, death squads, torture and disappearances – in widespread psychosocial trauma (UNODC, 2007). In these affected communities violence becomes so commonplace that it soon becomes viewed as the dominant ‘normalised’ perspective on resolving conflict and settling disputes. In such environments victims are compelled to seek vengeance and gain respect by committing retaliatory acts of violence, thus contributing to long-standing ‘cycles of violence’. A history of civil warfare and political conflict has also resulted in large numbers of small firearms being introduced into the region, and the knowledge of how to use them. The illegal proliferation of small arms trains individuals in the skills of smuggling and covert organisation and in communities where children have limited or no access to education, ‘combat skills may be the only ones possessed by a generation of young people without alternative identities or employment opportunities’.This is particularly problematic given that these skills are tailor-made for ‘gangsterism, acquisitive crime, and cross-border trafficking’ (UNODC, 2007:14). 31

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Maras, street children and child soldiers

According to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), organised crime groups operating in Central America and the Caribbean tend either to be territorial or else are engaged in transnational trafficking, with most existing long before the present cocaine boom. Whereas territorial groups are mainly concerned with controlling their terrain and taxing activity within it, traffickers operate via networks of suppliers, transporters and receivers. Much of the violence within the region stems from the conflicts between territorial groups and the traffickers, as well as the conflict between the territorial groups. Territorial groups are diverse as some are concerned solely with robbing drug-traffickers while others are ‘more about identity than illicit commerce’, and in the case of the maras or pandillas (the two labels associated with gangs in Central America1) are renowned for being ‘particularly violent’ (UNODC, 2007:16; Sida, 2008; Cruz, 2010; Bruneau et al, 2011). In contemporary Central America youth-oriented territorial groups are seen as the main drivers of crime and violence and are therefore targeted by law enforcement agencies via oppressive and high-profile anti-crime strategies. While it is alleged these gangs existed before the cocaine boom, the recent civil wars have allegedly transformed them into what they have become today. During the relatively recent civil wars in Guatemala (1960–96), Nicaragua (1972–91) and El Salvador (1980–92), 335,000 civilians were killed (UNODC, 2007:35), moreover this resulted in the huge displacement of people with large numbers of them seeking refuge in the US. Many of them ended up in Hispanic-speaking gang-affected communities in Southern California and found themselves targeted by locals. In response to their situation, it is alleged many young men ended up joining existing gangs or formed their own. Due to a change in US immigration policy in 1

In Latin America there exists a large array of labels ‘referring to institutions that could conceivably be classified as gangs’ – even if there is no agreed theoretical consensus as to what constitutes a gang – with examples including: quadrilhas and galeras in Brazil, barras in Argentina, manchas in Peru, chapulines in Costa Rica, pandillas in Mexico and Nicaragua, and the maras in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador (Rogers and Jones, 2009:4). 32

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1996,‘many gang members were deported after being convicted of a crime, spreading the gang culture of Southern California to Central America’ (UNODC, 2007:101). While acknowledging the fundamental challenges that are inherent in any attempt to assess the extent of ‘gangsterism’ (see discussions above), in 2007 the UNODC estimated that there were 70,000 gang members in the seven countries of Central America (UNDOC, 2007). According to the report, the most affected countries in the region were alleged to be Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – but even in these countries there was a great deal of conflicting data (much of it estimated) on the link between gang membership and the rising levels of violence in each country.Whereas the maras were blamed for committing the majority of crime in Honduras, research at the time indicated that only 5% of all crime in the country was committed by those aged 18 and under. Interestingly, the bulk of mara membership was comprised of young people aged under 18. In El Salvador during this same period it was alleged that the maras were responsible for 60% of all homicides; however, again there was no research evidence to substantiate these claims. Research undertaken by the Salvadoran Institute of Forensic Medicine found that only 8% of the firearms homicides in 2000 could be attributed to the maras. Lastly, in Guatemala a police study found that only 14% (58 out of a total 427) of homicides that had occurred in January 2006 could be linked to gang activity (cited in UNODC, 2007). Gang members in Central America are blamed for a variety of crimes, including drug and human trafficking as well as human smuggling, ‘but the evidence for these claims has not been well quantified’ (UNODC, 2007:17). This still has not stopped the implementation of security strategies in Central America and the Caribbean – under pressure from the US – premised on suppressing gang activity and drug trafficking. In 1985 a US War College publication asserted that Central American states were being targeted by gangs who were aiming to depose or control governments via ‘coups d’ streets’. In the same year the head of the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs branch of the US State Department asserted that gangs posed the greatest threat to national security in the region (cited in Rodgers and Jones, 2009). It is these concerns and 33

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security agendas which have led to a raft of initiatives, from the secondment of law enforcement and military personnel, to the sharing of information as well as the coordination of legislation between the US, Mexico and Central America (Lara Klahr, 2006 cited in Rodgers and Jones, 2009).The transborder flow of illicit drugs is largely controlled by sophisticated organised crime networks (and not territorial youth gangs) who are ‘protected by law enforcement corruption’. Consequently, oppressive security strategies fail to address the underlying causes of crime in the region and only serve to further aggravate the long-standing cultures of widespread violence. During the past two decades there have been a succession of international reports (UNICEF and UNFPA, 2001;WHO, 2002; UN-HABITAT, 2007; UNODC, 2007; Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2011;World Bank, 2011; UNDP, 2013; Seelke, 2014; IACHR, 2015) that have concurred that violence is endemic in the region and that youth gang members are the group most at risk of violence; as such youth violence is real and needs addressing urgently. However, this premise obscures the real problem, which is Latin American youth’s disproportionate exposure to life on the streets (as a result of poverty, exclusion and displacement caused by violent conflict), a place where they are most susceptible to violence and other social harms. Brazil historically has had an acute problem with the issue of street children and because many of them move about to different places (for hiding and sleeping) and then on to different shelters and institutions there is no reliable data (IBGE, 2003 cited in Milnitsky, 2006). Nevertheless, utilising census data and surveys it was estimated that there were 250,000 children, aged 10–17 working and living in the streets in 2002. This corresponds to nearly 1 in 20 of the working class child population in Brazil (Milnitsky, 2006). More recently the Brazilian government provided a more conservative estimate – based on research undertaken by the National Department for Human Rights in 2011– that ‘there are 23,973 children working or sleeping on the streets of 75 Brazilian cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants’ (cited in CSC, 2012:2). Although the estimated numbers vary widely and are difficult to accurately ascertain, many of the children who live and work on the streets come 34

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

from unstable and abusive family environments. Street children characteristically will have three or more siblings (via their mother), all with different fathers. The mothers ‘are frequently alcoholic and without regular employment’, and with birth fathers being absent (the women tend to form ‘short-lived mother–“spouse” relationships’), transitory stepfathers become an ‘authoritative and abusive’ presence in the children’s lives (Milnitsky, 2006:196). Poverty and chaotic family circumstances are the key contributory factors that force children to leave the family home and live on the streets. However, this exposure to street life ‘presents youth with social conditions and conflicts which inevitably lead them into patterns of crime and drug addiction’. Paradoxically, although all aspects of the lives of street children are ‘in the plain view’ of other city residents, this constant public exposure leads to a kind of anonymity where the ‘street child becomes an invisible virtual “nobody”’ (Milnitsky, 2006:198–9). Children and young people who live and work on the streets are aware of their exclusion from most areas of citizenship, and cope with social invisibility through the use of illicit drugs: As soon as these adolescents become drug-addicted, they become and feel more socially excluded – from school, family, and any possible work. They move closer to violence and organized crime, drug dealing, and prostitution. They expose themselves more and more to intervention by the penal system, or to some kind of violent death as a consequence of involvement in street crime and violence (Milnitsky, 2006:201). In examining the lives of street children and other vulnerable youth affected by poverty and social exclusion, we should not just view them as passive victims but also acknowledge the active role they play in their own coping and survival. Consequently, while poverty and an abusive family background might lead some children into street life, others may volunteer to join an armed militia. It is estimated that more than 60% of Colombians live in absolute poverty. In Colombia the major issues of ‘inequity, 35

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marginalization, exclusion, and discrimination’ – combined with a history of political conflict – only serve to ‘feed and exacerbate conflict and violence’ (Hart and Mojica, 2006:245). More than half of Colombia’s 3.9–5.3 million internally displaced people are young people, aged 18 and under.Although there are no official statistics to verify these claims, there are estimated to be between 5,000 and 14,000 child soldiers operating in the country’s many armed forces; many other young people are also used by the state as informers and spies and for ‘counterinsurgency propaganda activities’ (Watchlist, 2012). Even after leaving the militias, former child soldiers struggle to adapt to everyday life away from the war environment.They find it almost impossible to return to their families and communities, because of the neglect and abuse that resulted in their volunteering to join the armed militias in the first place, or because of displacement caused by ongoing conflict. Ex-combatant youth’s traumatic experiences due to their exposure to violence and the disruption of family life results in the creation of cycles of urban violence in poor communities. These children reside in impoverished neighbourhoods where endemic violence is a way of life, and where generally there is a lack of trust among young people. Many of them are ‘connected to patterns of local violence’ which is further compounded by ‘informer networks’; this is where armed groups pay children and young people to ‘spy and spread rumours that set the community against itself ’ (Hart and Mojica, 2006:247)

Crime, culture and the black ghetto

Of all the nations that comprise the English-speaking Caribbean, Jamaica has consistently had the highest reported homicide rates not just in the region, but in the entire world. In the 40-year period following Jamaica’s independence from Britain in 1962, its murder rate rose from 8.1 per 100,000 of the population in 1970 to just under 20 per 100,000 in 1977. By 2001 the rate had shot up to more than 40 per 100,000 in 2001, and by 2005 it had soared to 64 per 100,000 (Harriot, 2003; Gray, 2007). As well as homicides, more generally violent crime is a 36

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

major issue on the island and much of it is concentrated in the poor ghetto communities located in and around the capital city of Kingston. Jamaica is beset by many of the same socioeconomic circumstances, and proximity to the US, as other Central American and Caribbean nations. Jamaica’s turbulent and long history of conflict is characterised by slave rebellions, social protest (driven by poverty and injustice), political violence, and by the brutality and repression meted out by slave owners and the British colonial authorities. Post-independence the island has been caught in the crossfire of the US war on drugs, and has suffered from the fall-out of more than five decades of tensions and hostilities between Cuba and the US. During the late 1970s and 1980s, it is alleged that the CIA devised a destabilisation programme targeting Michael Manley’s ‘leftist’ People’s National Party government (Blum, 2003). The key elements of this operation included covert ‘shipments of guns’, other weaponry and ‘sophisticated communications equipment’ to the opposing supporters of the ‘rightist’ Jamaican Labour Party. Although ‘strong arm tactics’ had long been a key feature of Jamaican political life,‘this now intensified in both frequency and deadliness, and in the use of arson, bombing and assassination’ (Blum, 2003:264–5; see also Webb, 1998). In addition to the recent intensification of political unrest, Jamaica has also been a key transit point for the shipment of illicit drugs to the US by international organised crime networks. Jamaica’s drug economy is estimated to be worth as much as 50% of its total gross domestic product (GDP), and has continued to expand, while its formal economic sector – characterised by long-term weak employment and productivity growth – has stagnated over the last 30 years (World Bank, 2016). Drug flows through the island have only served to aggravate violent crime by creating local drug-use problems, which has further fuelled other crimes such as robbery, burglary and prostitution. Significantly, the trafficking and use of illicit drugs has helped create a lucrative street-based illegal economy where the excessive use of firearms has become normalised, and valorised in the song lyrics of popular ‘dancehall’ reggae artists. Drawing on Hollywood‘s ‘gangster’ and ‘Western’ movie genres, Jamaican (and African American) popular culture has always celebrated the 37

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black outlaw, as the epitome of ‘cool’. Hence, it is not surprising to see the perennial appeal of the ‘bad ass’,‘bad nigger’ and ‘rude boy’ to youth growing up poor in the ghettos of Jamaica and black America (see Gray, 2003;Van Deburg, 2004). Furthermore, as a response to centuries of bondage, disenfranchisement and racial/class oppression, Jamaica’s black poor developed a unique ‘form of cultural insubordination – badness-honour’.According to Obika Gray (2003:18) this Jamaican oral kinetic practice employs a repertoire of violent and intimidating language, physical gestures and actions that ‘enables claimants, usually from disadvantaged groups, to secure’ a certain amount of power and respect. Badness-honour, and specifically ‘outlawry-as-identity’ among the poor and alienated urban youth had become the dominant identity claim, and its hegemony ‘identified rebels in the slums as a volatile, non-compliant constituency’ who were susceptible ‘to easy moral governance’ (Gray, 2003:17). The Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) is the most populated and crime-affected area in the country and witness to violent offences such as murder, shootings, assaults and robberies. In addition to the illicit drug trade and its long history of social and political conflict, there are several other key factors that drive crime and violence in Jamaica and Kingston: poor educational outcomes, lack of employment opportunities, inadequate housing which results in individuals squatting on lands illegally,‘improper infrastructure, inadequate social services and inaccessibility to basic utilities’ (Gray, 2007:6). Therefore, while crime and violence are endemic in Jamaica they have a disproportionate impact on its poorest communities, and in particular among its young (14–24 year-old) male population, who are statistically most at risk – both as victims and perpetrators – of homicide and violent crime.With poor educational outcomes and limited opportunities in the formal economic sector: Youth from inner cities are … more likely to be recruited as drug sellers because of their relatively lower opportunity costs, given that they are more likely to be school-dropouts/unemployed. Because drug sellers/dealers carry guns for self-protection and dispute resolution, the increased penetration of guns 38

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

has led to greater incidences of violence among the youth (World Bank, 2004:122). Unfortunately, children and young people’s exposure to violence in Jamaica leads to a cycle of increased victimisation and perpetration, which also negatively impacts on their educational achievement and later life outcomes. Baker-Henningham et al’s (2009:304–5) study examining children’s exposure to violence and academic achievement in Jamaica found that primary school pupils – particularly boys – in the urban neighbourhoods of the KMA are exposed to particularly high levels of violence in school and the wider community. Moreover, this overexposure ‘to violence is associated, in a dose–response manner, with poor achievement in spelling, reading, and mathematics’. In the US there is a large body of academic literature highlighting the individual, communal and socio-economic factors that increase children and young people’s vulnerability to crime and violent conflict.As well as a plethora of criminological and youth gang studies, there is an even more extensive canon of US-based research examining youth conflict, aggression and victimisation and encompassing the disciplines and perspectives of urban sociology, developmental and cognitive psychology, education, critical race theory, economics, urban anthropology, public health and social policy. Children and young people in the US experience much higher levels of exposure to crime and violence in comparison to adults. According to the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (Finkelhor et al, 2009:1; see also Cuevas et al, 2013), ‘more than 60% of children and youth aged 0 to 17 years had experienced at least 1 direct or witnessed victimization in the previous year’. In addition, nearly half had experienced a physical assault and over ‘one third (38.7%) had been exposed to 2 or more direct victimizations’. African American youth residing in deprived urban neighbourhoods experience alarming levels of victimisation, and are – in comparison to their peers from every other ethnic population in the US – the demographic most at risk of violent crime and homicides (Stein et al, 2003; Baum, 2005; US Department of Justice, 2006; Aisenberg and Herrenkohl, 2008; Fowler et al, 2009). Moreover, according to the Centre for Disease Control, 39

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homicide is also the leading cause of death among African American youth in the 10–24 age category (CDC, 2012). Black Americans have experienced a long history of racial violence and oppression delivered through the institutions of slavery and then Jim Crow. In the decades following the Civil War, African Americans’ official second class citizenship in the south was legitimised through the creation and application of an over-abundance of legislation. The Jim Crow system of white supremacy was enforced through various segregationist laws that barred blacks from schools, universities, hotels and restaurants, and from using any public facilities designated for whites. Black disempowerment in the south was further institutionalised through the application of repressive laws – such as those concerned with vagrancy and voter registration – which, although not overtly racial in character, were disproportionately directed against blacks in comparison to whites. The vagrancy laws significantly restricted the free movement of blacks and in effect stopped them from finding better employment opportunities. There were also a number of laws and other devices, such as the use of literacy tests, deployed throughout the south, which had the ultimate effect of denying black people the right to vote. In addition to all these forms of legal repression and discrimination, African Americans were also the victims of ‘widespread legal and extra-legal violence’ (Wright and Rogers, 2015:320). Racist organisations like the Klu Klux Klan were ‘tacitly supported by the state’ and given free rein to murder and terrorise blacks: … violence against blacks was not simply tolerated by state authorities in the South; it was also official state policy. From 1930–1960 between five and 25 black men were executed annually for rape in the United States … whereas for whites the numbers were never more than 4 and in most years zero or 1 (Wright and Rogers, 2015:320). While black second class citizenship was institutionalised through legal statute in the south, racism was also a major issue in the industrial cities of the north, particularly after the First 40

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

World War. The Great Migration saw an estimated 5 million African Americans leave the south between 1915 and 1960 and take up new employment opportunities in the promised land of the north. However, by the 1950s and 1960s the earlier optimism had been punctuated by the realities of urban life in the north, characterised by everyday racism and discrimination, police brutality and sub-standard schools, and where deliberate spatial/residential segregation resulted in the creation of dense black ghettos (Massey and Denton, 1993). Since the 1970s the African American population has been characterised by an affluent and growing middle class and is a legacy of, as well as an enduring testament to, the hard-fought achievements, of the civil rights movement. Conversely, the existence of a large and expanding urban underclass blighted by poverty and violent crime highlights the disproportionate impact that globalisation has wrought on African American communities during the past 50 years. Indeed, young blacks born between 1965 and 1984 were the first generation, whom Bakari Kitwana (2002) defines as the hip-hop generation, to grow up in this period of rapid global change. However, the impact that globalisation has had on the hip-hop generation of black Americans is one of a tale of two divergent outcomes. On the one hand contemporary black American youth culture derived from street-based hip-hop culture – incorporating rapping and beat making, break dancing, graffiti art, dj-ing, speech styles, dresswear and attitude – has been commercialised and transmitted around the world through film, television, fashion, video games and music videos to become a global youth culture. The multinational corporatisation of African American youth cultural innovation and visibility has redefined and standardised what it means to be black, regardless of social class or geographical location. However, as Kitwana (2002:12) makes clear, ‘the real story’ concerns the devastating impact that globalisation has had ‘on the hip-hop generation ... revealed in the widening divisions between’ the black ‘haves and the have-nots’ during the past 50 years. Deindustrialisation and hyper-ghettoisation are the two key features of globalisation that have transformed the black American ghetto – which mainly comprised the working poor and a small middle class – into a dilapidated urban enclave of 41

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extreme poverty, worklessness and economic exclusion. Between 1970 and 1980, nearly 40% ‘of all poor blacks in the 10 largest American cities’ were living in extreme poverty, in comparison with just over 20% ‘a decade before and with only 6 per cent of poor non-Hispanic whites’ (Wacquant and Wilson, 1993:27). Drawing on 30 years of US census data files, John Kasarda (1993) argues that between 1970 and 1980 blue collar and clerical jobs began to disappear in the northern cities while employment in the higher occupational ranges increased considerably. These changes in the labour market impacted particularly negatively on African Americans, since many of them had not completed their high school education. Between 1950 and 1970 there were large increases in the numbers of blacks employed in the urban industrial sector who did not possess a high school diploma. However, after 1970 a college degree became the standard requirement for accessing managerial, professional and high-skilled employment opportunities.The impact of extreme poverty, spatial-residential segregation and entrenched joblessness in the black ghettos of the US had, by the 1980s, created an underclass who were reliant on welfare and hustling to survive (see Valentine, 1978). These hustling or ‘off the books’ incomegenerating opportunities within the underground economy involved activities such as babysitting, selling newspapers, gambling, touting, dishwashing, drug dealing, prostitution, shop lifting and petty crime. In Williams and Kornblum’s ethnographic study of teenagers trapped in urban poverty, the underground economy was the only world they knew. All of their ‘work experience has been in the hustling world’ whereas at ‘this point in their lives, respect, status and prestige’ are goals that are only attainable ‘in the illegal opportunity structure’ (Williams and Kornblum, 1985:7). Since the 1970s the most lucrative hustle in the black ghetto, particularly for young males trapped in a cycle of poverty, has been the illicit drugs trade. In 1985 one half of all African American males aged between 16 and 65 were chronically unemployed, while throughout the entire decade of the 1980s the rate of black youth unemployment averaged ‘45 per cent or higher ... and in reality … much higher’ (National Research Council, 1989 cited in Lusane, 1991:47). During this period heavy industry had all 42

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but disappeared in the US’s urban black metropolises, creating huge armies of jobless and impoverished young men, who were keen to take advantage of the lucrative financial opportunities available in the rapidly expanding underground drugs economy. The Colombian coca leaf production boom had by the mid 1980s helped to make cocaine powder considerably cheaper and more plentiful, transforming it from a niche drug used by the rich and famous into a mass product used by a larger cross-section of society. However, it was the development of crack cocaine that really revolutionised the illicit drugs trade while at the same time wreaking havoc in poor black neighbourhoods: ‘They provided a ready-made distribution network of existing or easily created street gangs of unemployed youth who could retail crack and other drugs.These communities also had consumers who would purchase this cheap but potent, product’ (Lusane, 1991:49). The crack drug trade provided economic opportunities in the poor urban ghettos of black America while simultaneously tearing those same communities and families apart due to alarming increases in the rates of addiction and imprisonment. The escalating drug trade, with its association with guns and lethal violence, has combined with the many other problems besetting these poor communities to create urban environments where violent crime is widespread and homicides commonplace. As a consequence of being exposed daily to muggings, carjackings, drive-by shootings and retaliatory acts of violence, poor African American urban youth are particularly at risk of falling victim to aggressive behaviour and what Elijah Anderson (1999) refers to as the ‘code of the street’. Conclusion There have been numerous international reports, primarily commissioned by the United Nations and the World Bank, that highlight the problem of homicide and violent crime across the globe and specifically its disproportionate impact on young males growing up in impoverished urban communities. Outside of wartorn conflict zones such as those in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, it is clear that South America, the Caribbean and Southern Africa are the regions most blighted by homicide and non-fatal 43

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violence caused by firearms.Although the issue of violent crime within the Americas is linked – largely via media-fuelled populist perceptions – to the problem of youth gangs, there is, relatively, a very limited amount of empirical research evidence available to substantiate these claims.Additionally, the data which exists about the estimated number of gangs and gang members populating Latin America and the Caribbean varies considerably. By way of contrast, there is a much more compelling body of research data highlighting the continuing plight of large numbers of young people across the globe who are daily having to contend with the ill-effects of entrenched and increasing levels of poverty and socio-economic exclusion. Within the metropolises of the over-developed West as well as in the over-populated informal urban settlements of the global South, poor and marginalised urban youth face a number of challenges; specifically they are most at risk from homicides, violent crime, mental illness, substance misuse, sexual exploitation, homelessness, underemployment and fragile families. Violent crime disproportionately affects young males residing in the Americas, however their vulnerability to homicide and non-fatal injuries comprises only one element of the multitude of social ills and risk that they and their female peers are confronted with. Alongside the negative effects of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, uneven capitalist development and state neglect – which has fuelled their increasing impoverishment and marginalisation – large numbers of young people, like their adult counterparts, in Central America and the Caribbean have a long history of exposure to state-sponsored/political violence and more recently organised crime. African American youth similarly are the group within the US that is most exposed to homicides and community violence in addition to high rates of poverty, imprisonment, school dropouts, lone-parent households, underemployment, homelessness and mental illness. Although they reside in the richest and most powerful nation on earth, young black Americans find themselves at the bottom of society, not by accident, but as a consequence of 400 years of racial and class-based exclusion, which has been further exacerbated (during the past five decades) by globalisation and neoliberal social and economic 44

Global perspectives on urban youth violence

policies. The current dominant law and order agenda that lies at the heart of neoliberalism seeks to blame (and incarcerate) the young victims of rampant unfettered global capitalism by myopically focussing on urban crime, drugs and street gangs.This situation is particularly problematic given the fact that there is no agreement or consensus, nor empirical evidential base, as to what a gang is (other than groups of black and brown young men). Moreover, are gangs actually responsible for urban violence? Within this context, rather than reinforcing the police-mediadriven racialised street gang narratives this book argues for the adoption of a youth development approach – underpinned by social and economic justice – to tackle the global problem of advanced urban marginality.

45

TWO

The 2011 English riots

Introduction The August 2011 public disorders provided the pivotal moment when the changing nature of British urban youth cultures – specifically ‘the proliferation of violent youth gangs and the culture they ferment’ (Pitts, 2008:4) – was shown to the world. Looped television news montages, made instantly available to a global audience on a plethora of online platforms, depicted mob violence directed towards the police, burning buildings and the pillaging of high street retail stores. For many years prior to the 2011 riots there had been a steady increase in local and national news-media headlines discussing gun and knife violence, postcode wars and other violent crimes that were deemed to be gang related. More specifically, during the past two decades the nation has been ‘shocked’ by a number of high-profile youth homicides caused by gun and knife violence.The menace of serious urban youth violence was initially thrust into the consciousness of the nation by the killing in November 2000 of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, who bled to death in a stairwell on a housing estate in south-east London, after being stabbed in the leg. In January 2003 best friends 17-year-old Latisha Shakespeare and 18-year-old Charlene Ellis were the innocent victims of a fatal ‘drive-by’ shooting in north Birmingham. However, it was the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, who in August 2007 was shot dead by a 16-year-old youth in Liverpool, that ‘perhaps more than any other single case … set the agenda’ (Goldson, 2011:4).

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But even if the Rhys Jones case did usher in a new policing and policy agenda concerning violent youth crime, it was ceremoniously and ambitiously usurped by the events that unfurled during five days in August 2011, when England experienced significant and widespread civil unrest. From the outbreak of the disturbances on 6 August and for many months after they ended on 10 August, politicians and senior police officers queued up to take every available media opportunity – of which there were plenty – to blame the violence, looting, arson and criminal damage on urban youth gangs. In his address to Parliament on 11 August, the Prime Minister pronounced that the riots were not caused by poverty but ‘gangsta rap’ culture, a ‘culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority’. David Cameron then went on to assert that at the heart of the previous five days of looting, burning and violence: … sits the issue of the street gangs. Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes.They earn money through crime, particularly drugs and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates with gang on gang murders and unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders. In the last few days there is some evidence that they have been behind the coordination of the attacks on the Police and the looting that has followed. I want us to use the record of success against gangs some cities like Boston in the USA and indeed the Strathclyde police in Scotland – who have done this by engaging the Police, the voluntary sector and local government. I want this to be a national priority (Cameron, 2011). This new national priority of tackling urban street gangs was placed front and centre of the coalition government’s two ambitious multi-million-pound programmes – ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ (HM Government, 2011) and ‘Troubled Families’ (HM Government, 2012) – both of which were launched within three and eight months, respectively, of the 48

The 2011 English riots

disturbances. In hindsight, the August 2011 riots can be viewed as a watershed moment when the issue of violent youth gangs moved from the pages of the local and national print media and onto the front bench of the Cameron-Clegg administration.The government’s official endorsement of the UK ‘gang crisis’ thesis was evidenced by its wholesale adoption of the ACPO ‘standard definition’ of the street gang, in addition to its much heralded and ambitious social policy programme, which incorporated law enforcement, education, youth services and interventions (including benefit reforms), targeting and ‘dealing with’ troubled families. This chapter will examine the academic discussions and research literature on the causes and consequences of the events of August 2011, and utilise research data from my own ethnographic study1 undertaken in east London during the same period. In so doing, it will look to disentangle the political rhetoric and police-media narratives about this latest youth crisis, which allegedly is fuelled by a ‘gangsta rap’ culture that eulogises violent crime and the illicit acquisition of wealth. For those politicians and social commentators who subscribe to this perspective, the 2011 English riots provided a convenient peg on which to hang their arguments lamenting the latest ‘lost generation’ of violent and feral youth. From the empirical evidence and theoretical knowledge generated (thus far) by the five days of social unrest, it is clear that neither street gangs nor ‘gangsta rap’ culture played any part in this spontaneous summer carnival of lawlessness. Moreover, while the August disturbances ‘announced a new chapter in violent youth disorder Britain was already in the thick of a moral panic concerning its young people’ (Pearson, 2012:45).The metaphors of increasing lawlessness and other imagined threats – caused by retrograde foreign cultural influences and articulated via the perennial youth question – have been a notable and permanent feature of post-war discussions on the decline and fall of the British way of life. 1

This three-year research project ‘Youth Crime Prevention Practice and Neighbourhood Policing’ (BA SG100161) is part of a longer five-year ethnographic youth study undertaken in the London Borough of Waltham Forest between 2009 and 2014. For a more detailed discussion of the methods and some of the findings, see also Chapters 5 and 6. 49

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This ‘history of respectable fears’ stretches right back to the late 19th century and encompasses child pickpockets and ‘hooliganism’ in Victorian and Edwardian England, as well as the juvenile crime epidemic of the inter-war period. While during the 1950s and 1960s Britain was periodically plunged into a series of national crises brought about by the delinquent activities of Teddy Boys (Pearson, 1983) and Mods and Rockers (Cohen, 2011), by the 1970s these long-standing moral panics concerning problem youth became combined with anxieties and fears linked to immigration and race, specifically the ‘mugging crisis’ (Hall et al, 1978) involving black youth. If we fast-forward to August 2011 – taking into account football hooligans, rioters, acid house ravers,Asian gangs,ASBO kids, radicalisation and gun and knife crime – it is evidently clear that the ‘street gang’ menace encapsulates all of the major post-war national discourses and obsessions about problem youth, immigration, race and crime. A brief biography During the past two decades, I have carried out (and was in the middle of carrying out in August 2011) ethnographic research studies exploring young people’s Road cultures and transitions in east London (see Gunter and Watt, 2009; Gunter, 2010). Since the late 1990s, the Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions and Social Exclusion have undertaken a series of qualitative research projects that have examined the long-term transitions of youth growing up in the poor neighbourhoods of north-east England (see, inter alia, MacDonald, 1997; Johnston et al, 2000; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005). Notwithstanding the many insights gleaned from the Teesside Studies, due to focussing largely on white youth in a predominantly ‘white place’, the question arises as to how relevant the findings are to ‘super-diverse’ cities and urban spaces in the UK (Gunter and Watt, 2009). It is within this context that both my current (and previous) research projects were undertaken; first, as a means to compare east London with the north-east of England and, second, to revisit the same place and themes – the long-term cultures and transitions of youth growing up in two multi-deprived neighbourhoods in east London.

50

The 2011 English riots

Additionally, the latter years of the 2000s witnessed a growing concern about the issue of weapon-enabled youth violence, particularly knife crime, in many deprived urban neighbourhoods. As a response to the police-media-driven gang narratives, the New Labour government had rolled out a number of youth crime prevention initiatives in tandem with the introduction of Safer Neighbourhood policing teams. It was these circumstances and events that in September 2010 led me to embark on an ethnographic study that integrated my long-standing interest in young people’s cultures and transitions with an examination of youth crime prevention practice and neighbourhood policing in Waltham Forest. The research involved semi-structured interviews with young adults as well as interviews and discussions with a range of community stakeholders, including for example, local residents, housing officers, parents, youth workers, Youth Offending Team (YOT) practitioners and police officers. As a qualified community and youth worker I had worked and lived in east London for 15 years, as at September 2010. Consequently, my familiarity with the research site meant that I was able to draw extensively on this knowledge and experience to access (in order to interact with, observe and interview2) the research participants. As it was the summer holiday period for both schools and colleges, July and August were the busiest months of the year with regard to carrying out interviews and engaging with young people on the streets, parks, in the youth clubs and on residential activities.Also, during this summer period, there were a number of interviews and observational sessions lined up with two Safer Neighbourhood policing teams. On 4 August 2011 I took a break from the research project in order to attend an academic conference in Japan where I intended to share some of the preliminary findings from the study. On arriving back in the UK on the morning of 10 August 2011, I was immediately brought up to speed with the happenings of the previous four days and nights due to the saturated non-stop media footage 2

Some of the interviews with the young people and community stakeholders were carried out by two research assistants who were employed to work on the project. 51

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and commentary – in addition to the seemingly never-ending conversations with friends, colleagues as well as strangers – on the riots. I also soon learned that Waltham Forest was one of the four London Boroughs most affected by the disorders as evidenced by the Metropolitan Police Service invoking section 60 powers of stop and search3 in anticipation of violence within these localities.This ‘most draconian stop and search law’ (Taylor, 2014) allows police officers to apprehend and search individuals or vehicles regardless of whether or not there are any grounds for ‘reasonable suspicion’. It was quickly becoming apparent that these were not the right circumstances in which to undertake an empirical study examining youth crime and neighbourhood policing in Waltham Forest, so I had no choice but to suspend the project for a couple of months. During this enforced hiatus, I did still manage to carry out a number of interviews with young people and stakeholders (although not with the police) and took the opportunity to also discuss the riots and their aftermath. Looters, ‘mindless people’ and judicial abandon Beginning in Tottenham in north London on 6 August – and just two days after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed local black male resident, Mark Duggan – violent confrontations with the police as well as rioting, looting and arson quickly spread to other parts of London before engulfing many other urban centres across England. In the first 48 hours these public disorders encompassed all four corners of London, affecting, for example, Enfield, Walthamstow, Hackney and Barking in the north and east right through to Bromley, Croydon, Lewisham and Peckham in the south-east and south-west. During this initial period both police and politicians were quick to paint these London-centred disturbances as gang-orchestrated ‘copy-cat criminal activity’ that was driven by consumerism. Consequently, rather than being instigated by fractious police–youth relations or poverty and unemployment, marauding youth gangs had taken over the streets in order to loot the latest designer trainers, mobile phones and flat-screen televisions. 3

Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 60. 52

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The black Tottenham MP David Lammy (2011), referred to the rioters as ‘mindless, mindless people many of whom had come from afar intent on’ looting and robbing. Meanwhile the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Steve Kavanagh, argued that ‘social media and other methods have been used to organise these levels of greed and criminality’ (BBC News, 2011a). Kit Malthouse, Deputy Mayor of London and Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, asserted that there were opportunist criminals ‘in this city … who are intent on violence’ looting and arson in order to ‘create a sense of mayhem, whether they’re anarchists or part of organised gangs or just feral youth frankly, who fancy a new pair of trainers’ (BBC News, 2011a). By the evening of Monday 8 August the burning, looting, and firebombs/missiles targeting the police had spread to 12 areas within London as well as to Bristol, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. By the end of the five days, 66 locations and 19 police forces had experienced rioting, five people had been killed and hundreds more had lost their homes and livelihoods. Overall there had been more than 4,500 disorder-related arrests, while the total cost of the riots is estimated to have been in excess of half a billion pounds (Riots Communities and Victims Panel, 2011). According to police force data (Home Office, 2011), acquisitive crime (including burglary, robbery, theft and the handling of stolen goods) accounted for 50% of all recorded disorder-related offences. Arson and criminal damage to both property and vehicles accounted for 36%, while violent offences contributed just 7% to the overall total. In the three largest force areas in England – Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), West Midlands (WMP), and Greater Manchester (GMP) – acquisitive offences aggregated together comprised 90% of all recorded crimes. In the remaining 16 police forces, criminal damage offences were more prevalent than acquisitive crimes; consequently, 70% of all disorder-related offences, averaged across all the police areas, were committed mostly against commercial premises (51%) or vehicles (19%). Additionally, 13% of recorded crimes included those committed against individuals, specifically robbery and assault. Official figures also indicate that 6% of disorder-related offences were against the police. 53

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From the avalanche of journalist reports, eye witness accounts/ testimonies of victims and bystanders and television news footage, notwithstanding creative editing techniques, it is estimated that up to 15,000 individuals were involved in the disturbances (NYA, 2012). In truth, there is no adequate or accurate means by which to ascertain (a) the actual numbers of those involved, or (b) the personal biographies and backgrounds (age, ethnicity, gender, employment status) of all those individuals who participated. ‘The closest there is are details of those who were arrested’, and subsequently prosecuted for their alleged offences in court.Yet, even this ‘will not necessarily be representative of all those who took part, and unless or until a person is convicted or cautioned, their participation is not proven’ (Home Office, 2011:4). As at September 2011, and just over one month from the end of the riots, the Home Office reported that nearly 4,000 people had been arrested for their part in the disorders. The vast majority of these arrests (62%) had been made by the MPS and this can be compared with arrest figures of the WMP (16%) and GMP (18%). Interestingly, all of the remaining forces that had been most affected by the riots ‘had each arrested fewer than 150 people’ (Home Office, 2011:4). More than 50% of the arrestees in four police areas – which included the ‘big three’ of the MPS, GMP and WMP – were for acquisitive crimes, whereas in every other affected police force most people were arrested for disorder offences. The overwhelming majority of individuals (89%) arrested, across all the areas, were male; almost half (46%) were aged 18–24 and nearly one quarter (23%) were juveniles (aged 10–17). The age breakdown across the forces varied considerably and in this regard whereas approximately one quarter of arrestees were juveniles, just under half of those arrested (44%) by WestYorkshire Police were aged 10–17. In terms of the ethnic backgrounds of all those arrested, 40% classified themselves as White, 39% as Black, 11% as Mixed, and 8% described themselves as Asian. As was the case with the age categories, the ethnic composition of those arrested varied across forces. In the MPS area 32% of arrestees assigned themselves to the White ethnic category, whereas 77% of those arrested in the GMP were from a White ethnic background. The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary,Theresa May – in 54

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addition to many other commentators spanning the worlds of politics, law enforcement, the news media and even academia (see Harding, 2012) – were quick to blame the riots on street gangs. However, according to the official police statistics only 417 (13%) of all arrestees were gang affiliated, and outside of the MPS area most forces recorded less than 10% of those arrested as being affiliated to a gang. Within the MPS area nearly one fifth (19%) of arrestees were ‘identified as gang members – the joint highest of any force – and the number of gang members arrested in London (337) is far greater than those arrested in all other forces combined’. Moreover, the Home Office overview report of recorded crimes and arrests arising from the 2011 riots further went on to note that: ‘In terms of the role gangs played in the disorder, most forces perceived that where gang members were involved, they generally did not play a pivotal role’ (Home Office, 2011:5). As of 10 August 2012, a total of 3,103 individuals appeared before the courts for offences relating to the August 2011 riots. According to the Ministry of Justice (2012) more than 70% of the total number of hearings were held in London (2,246) with the remainder taking place in the West Midlands (334), Greater Manchester (249), and all Other Areas (274). Of the total number people brought before the courts, 89% were male and 11% were female, 27% were aged 10–17 and 26% were aged 18–20; 41% self identified as White, 39% as Black, 12% as Mixed, and 7% as Asian. Offences for which individuals were most likely to be brought before the courts included burglary (50%), violent disorder (22%) and theft (15%). As of 10 August 2011, in total 2,103 persons – representing 69% of the total number of court hearings – had been found guilty and sentenced for public disorder-related offences. Of those persons sentenced 1,405 (66%) received an immediate custodial sentence and an average custodial sentence length (ACSL) of 17.1 months.‘This compares to an ACSL of 3.7 months for those convicted at magistrates’ courts, but sentenced at any court for similar offences in England and Wales in 2010’ (Ministry of Justice, 2012:4). Lightowlers and Quirk (2015) noted that while much political, media and academic attention had been placed on explaining the causes of the riots, in contrast there has been much less focus/ 55

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debate about the responses of the police, prosecution service and the courts.As highlighted by Ministry of Justice data, it was clear that the judiciary meted out much harsher sentences to those individuals involved in the riots in comparison to the far shorter prison terms normally given to those who had committed similar offences prior to August 2011. During the immediate weeks and months following the riots, the politically charged atmosphere resulted in a quasi-state of emergency where due process and the normal independent working practices of the judiciary were temporarily abandoned. Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) had been advising magistrates ‘to disregard normal sentencing guidelines when dealing with those convicted of offences committed in the context of last week’s riots’. Reporting in the Guardian newspaper, Bowcott and Bates (2011) foretold that the ‘advice’ as provided by justices’ clerks in open court ‘will result in cases that would usually be disposed of in magistrates courts being referred to the crown court for more severe punishment’. Julian Roberts argues that the exercising of judicial discretion with regard to decisions that depart from the Sentencing Council’s guidelines in the interests of justice previously drew little or no attention.This situation has changed irrevocably due to ‘the succession of sentencing decisions arising from offences committed during’ the summer disturbances of 2011.‘A number of courts have exercised their discretion ... to depart from the Sentencing Council’s guidelines on the grounds that it would be contrary to the interests of justice to follow them’ (Roberts, 2012:439; see also Ashworth, 2012). It is evident that the judiciary too readily abandoned the same ‘guidelines that should have acted as a restraint on its punitive impulses’. Yet still, the harsh sentences that were handed out ‘need also to be considered in the context of police decision-making and, in particular, the increasingly proactive and adversarial involvement of the Crown Prosecution Service’ (Lightowlers, 2015:65). According to Paul Mandelle QC, a former chair of the Criminal Bar Association, ‘when people get caught up and act out of character, in a similar way, there is a danger that the courts themselves may get caught up in a different kind of collective hysteria’ and while they might not act in a violent or criminal manner, the judiciary 56

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‘in purporting to reflect the public mood actually go over the top and hand out sentences which are too long and too harsh’ (BBC News 2011b). The majority of news-media reporting on the riots tended to demonise and ‘other’ those (apart from the victims) who were caught up in its maelstrom; from hooded looters, robbers, arsonists, ‘social network’ inciters, handlers of stolen goods right through to petty theft, the mainstream newspapers had a field day reporting/rejoicing in the fact that those who had brought shame to the nation were getting their comeuppance and being brought to justice. Going against this tidal wave there were, in comparison, a small number of media accounts which highlighted the fact that many of the sentences handed out by the courts for riot-related offences were ‘over the top’ and disproportionately punitive. Some of these media reports included stories of, for example, the 23-year-old male who was jailed for six months having stolen a £3.50 case of water from a supermarket, or the mother of two young children who was given a five-month custodial prison sentence for receiving a pair of shorts (as a gift) that had been looted from a high street retail outlet.There was also the case of two males, again in their early 20s, who were each jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite a riot that did not actually take place (Baggini, 2011; BBC News 2011b). Some of the findings from my own research lend further evidence to support accusations about the ‘over the top’ responses of the police and the courts to those caught up in the events of August 2011. The two case studies below draw on taperecorded interview data with the individuals concerned, as well as the fieldwork diary entries of my general observations and conversations with their family members and close friends. Julian was 17 years old and previously (at the age of 15) had been given a police caution and a YOT Order for the possession of an offensive weapon. However, as result of being identified (some three months later) as one of a number of young people who had taken part in the riots, he was arrested (for public order-related offences) and placed on remand for six months in a local London prison. From the outset Julian had pleaded not guilty to all charges and the prosecution hinged largely on the testimony 57

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of one police officer, who allegedly “spotted” Julian from police video footage and this information was relayed to Julian and his family by his solicitor. During the six-month period that he was on remand Julian appeared before the court on a number of occasions, and at each point the case was abruptly adjourned for some reason or another. Whether it was by his solicitor or the barrister assigned to defend him in court, Julian was continually “advised” to plead guilty as “the police evidence was compelling” and that he would be able to walk free even if found guilty because of the time he had already spent on remand. Julian’s mother Cynthia believed that her son was innocent and although she felt it was unfair for him to be on remand she wanted to go all the way to court and force the police to show the evidence they had. At the last court appearance, and nearly six months after his arrest, the case was dismissed as the police officer who had “spotted” Julian failed to appear to give evidence as he “was on duty” and the prosecution finally conceded that they had insufficient evidence. Sandra who was 18 years old during the August 2011 disturbances had received a caution and a couple of YOT Orders from when she was aged 14 (she had got involved in what her mother describes as a “bad crowd”) for threatening behaviour and robbery. The caution was for a robbery offence that she played no part in; she was standing around with her friends in a park at the same time that a couple of young people had their mobile phones stolen. Rather than go to court she “wrongly” decided to accept a caution from the police. She would later go on to regret making this decision as she later discovered that it meant she had a criminal record and was not able to undertake her preferred college course (health and social care) because of it. Nevertheless, Sandra did manage to turn her life around and was about to go to university the following month (September 2011) to study business and finance. Unfortunately one moment of “madness” put paid to this, at least for that academic year. Although she did not directly participate in the August disorders, Sandra “foolishly tried to make a little change [some money]” by holding on to some looted property including a few mobile phones and laptops. The idea was that Sandra was to keep the “stuff safe” and then when things had quietened down they would be sold and she would get her cut. The moment of “madness” apart from agreeing to “hold on” to the stuff was the fact that the actual looters, alongside Sandra, “foolishly” took pictures of themselves and their stolen goods and posted them on social media. 58

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Within a couple of weeks Sandra’s home was raided by the police and she was arrested and charged with a range of public order offences including theft. She eventually pleaded guilty in court to handling stolen goods and was given a 12-month custodial sentence of which she eventually served a total of 4 months.

Both Julian and Sandra accepted quite phlegmatically their experiences at the hands of the police, CPS and courts. For Julian most people who hear his story, including myself, are quite shocked to hear that he was put in prison for six months for offences at the time he had yet to be found guilty of, and of which he was subsequently acquitted. Julian felt that because he was “known” to the police that was just the way “things can go down”; he felt that perhaps if he had had less of a history with the “system” then maybe he would have been angrier at his experiences. According to Julian if you are on the police’s radar, they will always be looking to get you for something. “If they can’t get you for this then they’ll get you for that. For all the things I done, they got me the first time for a toy … they said it was an offensive weapon that could be used as knife.” Similarly, Sandra accepted that both her past experiences with the police alongside her current friendship networks meant that she was always going to be treated harshly by the justice system with regard to the fallout caused by her “moment of madness”.Yet as noted by a number of legal commentators, it was not only the rioters who succumbed to a moment of ‘collective hysteria’ but also quite evidently the police, CPS and judiciary through their ‘over the top’ and ‘disproportionate’ responses to those accused and/or found guilty of committing public order offences during August 2011. Reading and researching the riots In addition to the media-driven political and policing narratives about the causes and consequences of the 2011 English riots, there have also been a significant (and continuing) number of academic articles which have attempted to understand the motivations of those that were involved. However, much of the scholastic output about the disorders has been largely 59

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speculative because ‘as yet’ there has been very ‘little sustained research’ that utilises ‘all the imaginative and methodological resources that can be marshalled: qualitative and quantitative, orthodox and creative, historical and contemporary’ (Phillips et al, 2013:8–9). Academic theorising and analyses about the motivations of the rioters have tended to coalesce around three broad themes: first, that the disorders should be viewed as acts of political protest motivated by social and economic disadvantage (Grover, 2011; Bridges, 2012; Barentsen, 2013; Akram, 2014; Lightowlers, 2015), or secondly that hostility towards the police was a major contributory factor (Morrell et al, 2011; Guardian/ LSE, 2011; Reicher and Stott, 2011; Klein, 2012; Newburn et al, 2016). Meanwhile other writers maintain that the rioters are the product of an apolitical era where the need to acquire the latest designer labels and tech gadgets is far more important than class solidarity, or any other kind of political affiliation, and as such their actions were motivated by a heady combination of opportunism and materialistic consumerism (Moxon, 2011; Sumner, 2011; Žižek, 2011;Treadwell et al, 2013). Daniel Briggs’ chapter ‘Contextualising the English Riots’ in his rapid-response edited collection on the unfurling events of August 2011 noted all of the above themes but ostensibly it was all about the ‘loot’: while the riots ‘started off as a protest’ they very quickly seemed to ‘turn into something else … from declarations of frustrated urban relations to underlying narratives of consumer temptations – from protest to provocation to plunder’ (Briggs, 2012:37). As noted above, much of the academic discussion on the riots has tended to be speculative and the limited information available about the motivations and experiences of those involved – in all of the affected geographical locations – has been confounded by the fact that no public inquiry has been called to address its causes. To date two of the most ambitious examinations of the 2011 disorders so far include the Guardian newspaper and London School of Economics’ ‘Reading the Riots’ (2011), and the National Centre for Social Research’s (NatCen – prepared for the Cabinet Office) ‘The August Riots in England’ (Morrell et al, 2011). The Guardian/LSE study comprised qualitative data from interviews with 270 individuals who took part in the disturbances within the six urban areas that were most affected. 60

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In addition, a team of researchers at Manchester University analysed a database containing more than 2.5 million riot-related tweets. The overriding and strongest theme that emerged from the Guardian/LSE research was the ‘long-burning frustration and anger with the police … that resulted in the civil unrest. Of the 270 people we interviewed, 85% said policing was an “important” or “very important” factor in why the riots happened’ (Guardian/ LSE, 2011:18). Across all of the six cities the antipathy towards the police many of the interviewees shared was informed by their daily street-level confrontations with ‘the biggest gang out there’. Unsurprisingly, black interviewees expressed the most acute sense of mistrust towards the police, which was based on personal experience and a long-standing history of communitybased antagonisms linked primarily to stop and search and deaths in custody. The other consistent theme that arose from the Guardian/ LSE study and articulated by the rioters, albeit in very different ways, was that ‘they harboured a range of grievances’ which incorporated a broad range of social and economic inequalities and injustice ‘and it was their anger and frustration that was being expressed out on the streets in early August’ (Guardian/ LSE, 2011:24). Many of those interviewed did also concede that their involvement in the looting was opportunistic and a chance to get ‘free stuff ’, including designer-label clothes and footwear, expensive electrical goods (many of which they would not ordinarily be able to afford) and everyday grocery items/food stuffs. Gareth Morrell et al’s NatCen study was mainly concerned with examining the reasons why young people became involved in the August riots, and sought to capture the experiences and perspectives of all who were directly affected via qualitative interviews/discussion groups with 206 young people and 51 adults (community stakeholders/residents) across five affected geographical areas. Fifty-four people (youth and adults) also took part in six focus group interviews in a further two areas that had not been affected by the disorders. Mirroring the Guardian/LSE findings, the overriding theme – and motivating factor for many young people’s participation in the riots – that emerged from the NatCen’s research was it was an opportunity for them to get back at the police. In the London 61

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research site areas the shooting of Mark Duggan and ‘the way it was handled’ was constantly cited ‘as the origin of the riots’ and moreover epitomised the unfair treatment that black youth regularly experience at the hands of the police. Even in those areas (outside of London) where the Mark Duggan case was not viewed as a causal factor, ‘the attitude and behaviour of the police locally was consistently cited as a trigger outside as well as within London’ (Morrell et al, 2011:5). Other motivational factors included the opportunities provided by the riots to ‘get free stuff ’ and also it was ‘something exciting to do’. Many of these triggers were underpinned by a range of ‘societal factors related to broader social issues’ linked to the scrapping of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), youth service cuts/ lack of youth provision,‘no expectations/aspirations and lack of support’, as well as poverty and materialism: [L]ife for some people was described as a constant struggle. Young people talked about the difficulty of managing on the money they received when out of work or in training. At the same time, a materialistic culture was cited as having contributed to looting by both young people and community stakeholders (Morrell et al, 2011:7). It was evident from my own very limited riot-related research data4 that those young people who did participate described that their actions were motivated by a sense of anger towards the police. This antipathy/hostility on their part was long-standing and did not occur solely as a result of the shooting of Mark Duggan, nevertheless, the events in Tottenham provided the spark and further fuel for the simmering resentments concerning police racism to become enflamed. Later on in this book (see Chapter five), I will draw more extensively on the findings of the ethnographic study to detail how the street gang and inner-city crime agenda has intensified ‘hard policing’ practices, 4

The primary focus of my research was on youth crime prevention practice and neighbourhood policing – consequently the research data generated on the August 2011 riots was limited. 62

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resulting in the disproportionate targeting and punishment of black youth. Utilising the voices of the young participants and adult community stakeholders, it will chronicle some of the day-to-day antagonisms and conflicts generated by the activities and attitudes of the ‘feds’ (the police). Interestingly, while the Guardian/LSE and NatCen findings both identified policing as a significant contributory factor for the start of the 2011 riots, the adult community stakeholders in my research study who addressed the disorders were unanimous in their condemnations of the rioters and resolute in their opinions that: ‘[t]hese riots weren’t like those from back in the day [early 1980s]. That generation, I mean I was young back in them days still, but them guys they was standing up for the whole community. They had it bad back then, not just from the police, it [racism] was everywhere.You couldn’t even go raving up the West End them times.This lot [younger generation] they don’t stand for nothing but the latest pair of trainers and phones. To me, I just think the riots was just a chance for them to rob and steal. I call them the lost generation’ (Adult Resident – taperecorded interview excerpt from author’s own study, September 2011). Whether or not the rioters were selfish materialistic opportunists or were indeed venting their anger at police injustice and a raft of social and economic inequalities, and contrary to the statements made by David Cameron and Theresa May, it is clear from the research evidence gathered so far that street gangs were not responsible for the events of August 2011. The Guardian/LSE study noted that the ‘role of gangs in the riots has been significantly overstated’ as during the four days of disturbances they ‘behaved in an entirely atypical manner … temporarily suspending hostilities with their postcode rivals. The effective four-day truce applied to towns and cities across England’ (Guardian/LSE, 2011:4). Gareth Morrell et al’s NatCen investigation into the riots on behalf of the Cabinet Office, which interviewed more than 200 young people and 100 adults in 63

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seven geographical locations across England, makes no reference to gangs in its final report, which more than suggests that they were not deemed to be a contributory factor by the research participants. The 2011 riots in context: race, crime and urban disorder in post-war Britain Although it has received much less attention in comparison to the urban disorders of the 1980s, the issue of race as a trigger for the 2011 riots has still featured – whether explicitly or implicitly – in many of the discussions about their causes and consequences (Solomos, 2011). Since the 1970s and 1980s, race has become synonymous in the UK with ‘crime’ and ‘riots’ and predominantly, but not exclusively, with black youth.The initial rush by politicians and sections of the media to blame street gangs and ‘gangsta culture’ for the events of August 2011 was the latest incarnation of this now long-standing history of criminalisation. Indeed, the roots of black young people’s ongoing criminalisation can be traced back to the public anxieties and fears about the fact that since the 1950s, due to large numbers of ‘coloured’ settlers, Britain was no longer the ‘white man’s country’ (Miles and Phizacklea, 1984). Ten years after the landing of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948 in Tilbury Docks with a cargo including 492 Jamaicans, New Commonwealth immigration had proceeded at such a pace that by the end of 1958 there were approximately 125,000 West Indians and 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis settled in Britain (Fryer, 1984). These new workers were gladly absorbed into the UK economy, and specifically by employers such as London Transport, the National Health Service and those in the textile industry where labour shortages were particularly acute. However, the white British work colleagues and neighbours of these new ‘coloured’ immigrants were much less welcoming, and in many instances were outright hostile. Many white Britons had never encountered a black person before and most of the knowledge they had about them was informed by a racist-imperialist past, which was communicated through literature, popular culture and entertainment. Not unsurprisingly, a significant number of white people held 64

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prejudicial attitudes against blacks, seeing them as cannibals and uncivilised heathens who killed their own children. Within a very short period of time disappointment and ‘disillusionment of many kinds’ had become the everyday experience of the 1950s settlers (Fryer, 1984:374). As well as having to contend with incidences of verbal abuse and physical violence on the streets and in their homes, these black and brown settlers also faced racial discrimination on a daily basis in the workplace and when seeking to secure accommodation. Amid increasing incidences of racism and anti-immigration feelings – as manifested through race riots and acts of mob violence in areas of black settlement – between 1958 and 1968 racism in Britain ‘had not only become respectable. Enshrined in a series of “overtly racist” immigration laws, it had become official’ (Fryer, 1984:381). The national discourse generated by the ‘problem’ of coloured immigration to Britain during the post-war period had by the mid 1970s mutated into a moral panic concerning the inherent criminality of second-generation black British youth. Enoch Powell in his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (BBC News, 1968) had forewarned that large numbers of black (and Asian) settlers to the UK would inevitably lead to violence and social conflict. While there had been a great deal of alarm about the growing numbers of settlers arriving in the UK from the New Commonwealth during the 1950s and 1960s, the racist rhetoric and violent attacks against these new arrivals centred on conflict and competition around jobs, housing and perceived irreconcilable cultural differences rather than crime.Throughout this period, first-generation blacks were believed to be more law abiding than members of the white host community (Bowling and Philips, 2002). This official view had shifted miraculously by the early 1970s as the issue of black criminality, and more specifically mugging, exploded into the consciousness of the British public as the latest moral panic concerning deviant youth; but with the added toxic ingredients of immigration as well as race. During this period the MPS went out of its way to present statistical evidence demonstrating the disproportionate involvement of black youth in violent criminal activity. Accordingly, official police statistics released in 1973, which were 65

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widely reported on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, alleged that between 1968 and 1972 London muggings had shot up by more than 129%.The precise origins of the mugging data ‘remains a deep mystery’, particularly since as ‘there is no legal offence called mugging, the data cannot be derived direct from the Annual Reports’ (Hall et al, 1978:95). This did not, however, stop the MPS giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 1976 concluding that ‘Our experience has taught us the fallibility of the assertion that crime rates amongst those of West Indian origin are no longer higher than those of the population at large’ (Gilroy, 1987:94). By the late 1970s throughout England’s decaying multi-cultural urban centres – from Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester to London’s ‘front lines’ in Brixton, Hackney and Notting Hill – West Indian British-born youth congregating and socialising on the streets found themselves the targets of mass stop and searches and arrests by the police in their ongoing heavy-handed crack-downs on drug dealing, mugging and other criminal activities. As far as the news media and the forces of law and order were concerned, the nation’s inner-city black communities were hotbeds of dysfunctionality and rampant criminality (Hall et al, 1978; Campbell, 1985; Solomos, 1988). Within this context African Caribbean youth also found their activities and behaviours away from the streets similarly scrutinised and violently targeted. All of the premises utilised by inner-city youth for any form of social gathering or communion – such as pool halls, cafes, community centres, house parties and shebeens – were subject to constant police surveillance and harassment, often culminating in raids where the use of guns and dogs was also standard procedure. While the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 represented a symbolic watershed with regard to post-war coloured immigration, specifically introducing the issue of race relations to the British mainland, it was the events that took place in ‘Bristol in April 1980 that marked the beginning of a new era of race relations in Britain’ (Keith, 1993:52). Although the exact details and causes of this major outbreak of violent disorder in the St Pauls area of the city are contested, the subsequent and widespread sensationalist reporting of the ‘shocking’ events in 66

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the news media helped to thrust issues of race and racism firmly into the consciousness of the nation. In the immediate aftermath of the Bristol disturbances there were no public enquiries or further academic scrutiny as to their larger symbolic significance for the state of race relations within British society at large.This complacency was violently brought to an end exactly one year later by what has been variously described, depending on the particular political slant of the commentator, as the 1981 Brixton ‘riots’/‘disorders’ or ‘uprisings’/‘rebellions’.The events that took place in that decaying corner of south-west London in April 1981 were to have long-lasting social, political and policing ramifications that reverberated throughout the UK for decades to come. The shocking images of three days of violent street battles between black youth and the police were beamed around the world, and for a short period of time it looked as though the only way the state would be able to reclaim and enforce the rule of law on the streets of Brixton would be through the deployment of the army. The Brixton rebellions resulted in close to 300 hundred police officers and 65 civilian casualties in addition to the destruction of 30 buildings, and led to the creation of a public enquiry headed up by Lord Scarman (1981) barely two days after the disorders had ended. More significantly, the violent incidents that occurred in Brixton at the beginning of April were quickly followed in July, August and September 1981 by further ‘explosions of anger and violence … when it seemed that every British city was expecting a “riot”, that was to show that Bristol was not an isolated event’ (Keith, 1993:52). The summer of 1981 and the ensuing news-media-fuelled moral panic about the looting and burning that had spread like wildfire throughout the inner cities of England had also helped to confirm and ramp up the link between black youth and crime within the nation’s consciousness. By the early 1980s the earlier depictions of the black mugger and drug dealer had been supplanted, albeit temporarily, by hysterical and distorted newspaper headlines, reports and vivid pictorial portrayals of the ‘riots’ as well as the anarchic and irrational mobs of black ‘rioters’. Published in November 1981 and widely reported in the media, Lord Scarman’s report on the Brixton disturbances that had occurred earlier that same 67

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year found that they were a spontaneous outburst of longstanding anger and resentment by black youth concerning heavy-handed and oppressive police practices. As well as the broken and problematic relationship between the police and the black community, Scarman also highlighted the wider social and economic concerns with regard to racial discrimination/ disadvantage and inner-city decay across the country. During the summer of 1981 Britain was gripped by a national recession in which unemployment was estimated to be above the 3 million mark, with ethnic minorities and young people in particular being disproportionately affected. At the time of the civil disturbances in 1981, the unemployment rate in Brixton stood at just under 14% and for black youths the estimated figure was nearer 60% (BBC News, 2004). Some of the recommendations of Scarman’s report, particularly in relation to policing, were subsequently implemented, for example the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in 1984 and the establishing of the independent Police Complaints Authority (PCA) in 1985. However, Scarman’s proposed social and economic reforms aimed at addressing racial discrimination and disadvantage, and the interrelated socio-economic and political conditions that created the conditions for violent protest, fell largely on deaf ears of the Conservative government of the day. Not unsurprisingly, at least to those within Britain’s black communities, within four years of the publication of Scarman’s report serious urban disorders flared up again, this time in Birmingham’s Handsworth district as well as on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London. Large-scale civil unrest broke out in September 1985 within the Lozells Road area of Handsworth, resulting in two fatalities and more than 400 arrests during 36 hours of burning, looting and violent clashes between black youth and the police. The Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham exploded into violence in October of that same year after the death of Cynthia Jarrett following a police raid on her home. On the evening of 6 October, large numbers of black and white youth on the estate targeted up to 500 police officers with petrol bombs, bottles and bricks and also set alight cars and buildings. As a consequence of the violent disorder, one policeman was killed and 58 other 68

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officers and 28 civilians were seriously injured. The death of PC Keith Blakelock and the senastionalised reporting of the violent events that had taken place on Broadwater Farm and in Handsworth, just one month earlier, cemented further the official/‘common sense’ view of the innate criminality of black youth. The violence, robbery, anarchy and general lawlessness which characterised crime in the nation’s multi-cultural urban zones had – beginning in the early 1970s through to the mid 1980s – become indelibly ‘identified as an expression of black culture’, which in turn was premised on a matrifocal and pathological family structure that ‘wrought destructive changes’ on the decaying ‘inner-city by literally breeding deviancy out of deprivation and discrimination’ (Gilroy, 1987:109–10). The new Asian criminality and more riots The Salman Rushdie Affair in 1989, which denotes the events that followed the publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, added a completely new dimension and tabloid-driven narrative to the national obsessions of race, immigration and crime. While the black youth folk-devil was by now well established within the nation’s consciousness, in stark contrast their Asian counterparts were largely invisible with regard to discussions about delinquency and criminality. The dominant media and academic narratives painted a picture of ‘black youth in crisis’ whereas Asian youth – due to their connectedness to a rich history with strong familial-cultural foundations and traditions – were viewed as being ‘peacable, law abiding, successful and largely unproblematic’ (Alexander, 2000:5). However, news-media footage of large numbers of Muslim youth across the country marching, burning books as well as an effigy of the author, and vociferously chanting in support of the fatwa – ordering all Muslims to kill Rushdie – issued by the Ayotollah Khomeni of Iran, marked a decisive shift in perceptions of and discourses about Asian criminality. Moreover, the changing perceptions emphasised religious difference as well as youth in the formation of problematic British Muslim subcultural male identities. The belated recognition of the diversity of British Asian cultures (Modood, 1992) with regard to religious and cultural difference 69

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also created further demarcations between the successful Indian middle classes and the disadvantaged/impoverished Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities. Following on from the Salman Rushdie Affair, the local and national news media began to focus on the violence, criminality, pathology, and poverty as well as the cultural alienation and dysfunction that was engulfing many of Britain’s Muslim communities. In July 1995 the Independent Newspaper (Bennetto, 1995:5) ran a feature story warning about the ‘Asian crime “timebomb”’. Drawing on Home Office research, the article noted that the ‘demographic timebomb of Pakistani and Bangladeshi youths’ was leading to a ‘serious upsurge in crime’, as evidenced by the large numbers of them who were being imprisoned, and ‘is likely to cause a moral panic in Britain’.The Independent feature story came on the back of three days of rioting by Asian youth in Bradford during June 1995, which was blamed on intergenerational cultural conflict and the breakdown of traditional hierarchical structures and discipline, in addition to police racism. Well before the Bradford disorders there had been numerous violent clashes between Asian males – who as local heroes (Webster, 1996) had mobilised in order to defend their local communities from racist attacks – and white working class youth. In their reports on many of these skirmishes throughout the nation from east London to Bradford, the newspapers tended to portray the growing phenomenon of Muslim youth self-defence, as played out in the public setting of the streets, as the growing ‘Asian Gang’ menace.A national newspaper article in 1992 noted that the ‘East End is fast becoming a neighbourhood of ghettos, a breeding ground for intolerance and violent frustrations’ and while acknowledging the increasing and long-standing problem of racial violence proclaimed: ‘but the Asian gangs are a new phenomenon, and the increasing frequency of their confrontations is a sign, many fear, of things to come (cited in Alexander, 2000:7). In reality, as had been pointed out by Colin Webster (1996) and many other grass roots anti-racism activists and groups, Asians had been fighting back against white racist victimisation for many years and contrary to press reports, it was not a new development or phenomenon.

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In 2001 the Asian youth crime pandemic which had characterised much of the 1990s was to result in the summer of discontent, when between May and July the northern England towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford experienced some ‘of the worst rioting the UK has seen in 20 years’ (BBC News, 2001b).The worst of the civil disturbances occurred in Bradford, where it was alleged 1,000 young males engaged in violent clashes with the police and set alight cars and buildings in the Manningham area of the city.The reported findings of the various individual investigations and the official national enquiry (HM Government, 2001) into the summer disturbances headed up by Professor Ted Cantle – the former Leader of Nottingham City Council and academic expert in community cohesion – blamed a combustible mixture of poor/toxic race relations, poverty, heavy-handed policing and additionally, with regard to Burnley, organised criminal activity. Lord Herman Ouseley’s ‘Community pride not prejudice’ report (2001) on race relations in the Bradford district, which was commissioned before the outbreak of civil unrest in the city, described a once economically vibrant area which was now in the ‘grip of fear’ as a consequence of: growing divisions among its population along race, ethnic, religious and social class lines and now finds itself in the grip of fear … Fear of people talking openly and honestly about problems, either within their communities or across different cultural communities because of possible repercussions, recriminations and victimisation … Fear of challenging wrong-doing because of being labelled ‘racist’ – and that applies across all ethnic groups. Fear of crime even though the police say that violent crimes are on the decline. Fear of confronting the gang culture, the illegal drugs trade and the growing racial intolerance, harassment and abuse that exists (Ouseley, 2001:1). The media commentaries that followed the publication of the Ouseley Report tended to focus on the ‘grip of fear’ quote, which seemingly gave journalists and commentators free rein to 71

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discuss the ‘taboo’ issue of what Marie Macey (2002) describes as ‘specifically Muslim crime’ within Bradford’s Pakistani communities. The police were alleged to have been turning a blind eye to Asian wrongdoing in the city for fear of being labelled racist as such drug dealing and other types of gangrelated violent criminal activity involving Muslim young males was reaching epidemic proportions. Drawing on official crime statistics for the six-year period 1994–99, Macey noted that while there was an overall increase in the numbers of British south Indian males incarcerated, the biggest change occurred within the Pakistani population which rose from 0.9% to 1.3%. Furthermore, contrary to the popular perceptions and stereotypes about ethnic groups, the Home Office figures indicated that Asian criminality was characterised by high rates of involvement in violence against the person as well as drugs offences (cited in Macey, 2002:25–6). While confirming that ‘violence against the person’, and ‘drugs’ offences had increased significantly in the West Yorkshire area, the author asserts that ‘the only comment that can be made on these statistics with any level of confidence is that the majority of the illegal drug trade in Bradford is controlled by Pakistani Muslims’ (Macey, 2202:26). However, Macey also noted that there were a number of ‘specifically Muslim’ crimes that were not immediately apparent from the official crime statistics for England and Wales: … ‘specifically Muslim crime’ in Bradford stems from, centres around, or is influenced by: 1) perceived religious requirements; 2) international Islam and the notion of Ummah (the pan-Islamic nation or brotherhood of Muslims); 3) the politics of the Indian subcontinent; and 4) Mirpuri cultural traditions, sometimes masquerading as religious requirements (Macey, 2002:27). ‘Specifically Muslim crime’ takes the form of young males in Bradford going to considerable lengths to monitor and control the behaviour of women, and involves a spectrum of behaviour that ranges from minor/constant harassment by gangs of male 72

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youth right the way through to murder. Other examples of criminal behaviour and neo-criminal behaviour given by the author under the ‘Muslim’ heading included: first, a discussion of the influence of religious requirements which were used in 1989 to demand the provision of Halal meat in Bradford’s public schools, with the ensuing demonstrations erupting into violent disorder; second, the influence and use of the notion of international Islam with specific regard to the 1989 Salman Rushdie Affair when Muslim demonstrations in support of the fatwa included ‘ritual book burning which ended in violent public disorder’; and last, the significant local impact of traditions imported from Mirpur with regard to ‘gender relations and sexuality in the Pakistani Muslim community.These have been extended to non-Muslims with serious effects on racialised conflict in Bradford’ (Macey, 2002:27). Although Macey’s thesis is solely concerned with Bradford and does not discuss Islamist extremism or ‘Asian sex gangs’, the subsequent US-led international ‘war on terror’ – in response to the September 11 2001 attacks on New York – and national social panics about ‘honour killings’, ‘forced child-marriage’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘child sex grooming’ it has given further credence to the notion of ‘specifically Muslim crime’. The demonisation and ongoing criminalisation of Muslim male youth, and specifically those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, very much mirrors the experiences of black youth in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the long-standing ‘moral panics’ and ‘respectable fears’ about working class youth have again been updated with the added toxic ingredients of immigration, race, delinquency and now religion. From 1989 through to the present day violent crime and disorder, drug dealing, domestic violence, sexual deviancy and terrorism have become indelibly identified as an expression of Muslim culture. The commonsense and popular national discourse portrays Pakistani and Bangladeshi youth as disadvantaged and pathologically affected by intergenerational conflict and cultural alienation: in short, they ‘have developed a brand of ethnic activism’ and religious radicalism that is ‘aggressive and macho both in rhetoric and action’ (Ali, 1992:117).

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Asian youth involvement in the 2011 riots was relatively small (representing 7% of all those brought before the courts, as of September 2012) and there was no disorder in any of the areas with large Pakistani or Bangladeshi populations.Yet in truth, the disorder only provided Muslim communities and their young people with a couple of weeks of respite from the intense media scrutiny and column inches focussing on radicalisation, British jihadists and the threat to national security posed by home-grown terrorists. Instead, for a few weeks at least, the nation’s vitriol was concentrated on the other ‘usual suspects’, which included criminally inclined blacks (with their ‘gangsta culture’) and the ‘white chavs who have become black’ (see Hastings, 2011). Conclusion The 2011 riots have generated, and continue to do so, an avalanche of opinions and explanations as to their causes and consequences across the various print and electronic media platforms. While the initial commentaries by politicians, senior police officers and rapid response op-ed pieces in the press largely coalesced around the race/gangs/crime nexus, the subsequent and ongoing academic responses have generally tended to focus on a broad range of societal inequalities, police injustice and consumerist-driven criminality. Evidently, in the absence of a national public enquiry combined with the limited empirical research evidence on the English incidents of disorder, many of the available diagnoses and proposed solutions are more a reflection and reaffirmation of the particular political biases and/or research agendas of those doing the commenting. Indeed, the Lib-Con administration conveniently launched its ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ (HM Government, 2011) and ‘Troubled Families’ (HM Government, 2012) programmes on the back of the events of the summer of 2011. Rather than criminal opportunism, the riots might better be characterised by the shameless political opportunism of senior government ministers such as David Cameron, Theresa May and the former Work and Pensions Secretary Ian Duncan Smith. According to their orchestrated and shared post-riots hymn sheet, the looting, burning and violence were caused by the problem 74

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of street gangs, which in turn was fuelled by (a) ‘gangsta rap’ culture, which glorifies violent crime and shows disrespect to authority, and (b) weak and dysfunctional families with longstanding intergenerational problems centred around worklessness, domestic violence, lone parenting and criminal activity. However, it very quickly became apparent that neither street gangs nor ‘gangsta rap’ culture played any part in starting the riots, and the final report examining their causes prepared by NatCen on behalf of the Cabinet Office (Morrell et al, 2011) failed to make any mention of gangs in its 63 pages. This did not though stop the coalition from continuing with its Ending Gangs and Youth Violence (EGYV) national project and the adoption of ACPO’s problematic catchall, and now standard, official definition of the street gang. Although it was four decades in the making – as witnessed by the various police-media-constructed moral panics fixating on race and inner-city crime – as of November 2011, with the convenient launching of EGYV on the back of five days of social unrest three months earlier, the UK government declared the country to be in the midst of a new youth (gangs) crisis. In addition to politicians such as David Cameron and Theresa May there are a number of opinion formers in the media and the academy (see Pitts, 2008; Harding, 2012) who insist that gang-related violence and crime in Britain is a recent and very worrying social phenomenon. On the other hand there are many other commentators who maintain that this new ‘gangs crisis’ is just the latest instalment in the long history of respectable fears and moral panics concerning poor and working class UK youth (Pearson, 1983; Cohen, 2011). Since the 19th century certain sections of the youth population have been problematised and scrutinised by a plethora of self-appointed guardians of public morality and decency.The histories of the youth problem spans both the 19th and 20th centuries and encompasses widespread public anxieties about the threats posed to the nation’s moral health and social order; by child pickpockets, marauding youth gangs (or hooliganism) in Victorian and Edwardian England as well as the juvenile crime epidemic during the inter-war period. From the 1950s onwards Britain has intermittently been rocked by moral panics centring on delinquent youth and the deviant 75

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subcultures of Teddy Boys, Mods, Rockers, football hooligans and acid house ravers. National tabloid newspaper headlines have constantly reported on a multitude of moral panics about the criminal behaviour of black muggers and rioters, teenage joy riders, schoolgirl mothers and ASBO kids. The youth life stage has thus become synonymous with lawlessness and declining moral standards and is seemingly the recurring lament of each generation.These discourses about youth in society are in reality linked to broader public anxieties concerning the impact of rapid cultural, social and economic change on society and its key institutions. In short the perennial youth question ‘is a metonym for all that has gone [or is going] wrong in society’ (Roche and Tucker, 1997:3). It is within this context that the race and urban crime question of the past 50 years – with specific regard to black youth and more recently Asian Muslim young people – is also clearly located.

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Introduction During the past 10 years in particular there has been a marked increase in academic interest about youth gangs (cf. Hallsworth and Young, 2008; Pitts, 2008; Batchelor, 2009; Deuchar, 2009; Goldson, 2011; Densley, 2013; Hallsworth, 2013; Harding, 2014) and urban violence in the UK.While there has been a discernible increase in youth gang scholarship recently, it still represents a relatively small area of academic interest as post-war UK youth researchers, rather than looking for gangs, have mostly been concerned with studying subcultures. The early incarnations of British youth subcultural studies were concerned with deviance and ‘abnormality rather than normality’ (Blackman, 2014:498). Spanning the inter- and post-war periods, British subcultural theory was initially influenced by biology and the eugenics movement. Utilising medical concepts, deviant youth group members were described as being mentally subnormal and exhibiting pathological personality traits (see, for example, Burt, 1925). UK studies examining youth deviance and delinquency after 1945, while retaining elements of the earlier positivist traditions, were dominated by the therapeutic approaches of psychology and psychoanalysis. Bowlby’s (1944, 1953) theories concerning the ‘affectionless personality’ and ‘inadequate socialization’ caused by maternal–child separation, which he argued was ultimately responsible for juvenile delinquency, served as a model for further research into the causes of deviancy.This ‘psychoanalytical 77

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approach became the norm’ throughout the 1950s and early 1960s (cf. Mays, 1954; Morris, 1957; Trasler, 1962), with major empirical studies defining delinquent youth as ‘suffering from psychological problems within a deprived culture’ (Blackman, 2014:499). Moreover, the existence of working class youth subcultures was clear evidence as to the young deviant’s ‘inability to integrate in society’ (Blackman, 2014:499). However, by the late 1960s this psychoanalytical understanding of subculture fell out of favour with British scholars, who at this point had become heavily influenced by the new deviancy theory emanating from US sociology, particularly the labelling perspective. This new interactionist approach stressed the concept of relativism with regard to wrongdoing by asserting that an action is only deviant because a dominant social group of rule makers has labelled it as such. Howard Becker, one of the most influential exponents of this new deviancy theory, asserted that researchers should sympathise with the outsider rather than with the rule makers and law enforcers. The way in which societies and social groups arrive at decisions that determine rules and therefore rule breaking is largely decided through political conflict. This being the case, it is therefore true that ‘the questions of what rules are to be enforced, what behaviour regarded as deviant, and which people labelled as outsiders must also be regarded as political’. As such, the ‘functional view of deviance by ignoring the political aspect of this phenomenon limits our understanding’ (Becker, 1963:7). By the 1970s and in tandem with New Left and counter-cultural influences, the labelling perspectives of the new deviancy theory had transformed the way in which UK scholars viewed subcultures. The styles and class-based identities adopted by young people were no longer interpreted as deviant or delinquent and instead were analysed in relation to the dominant and parent culture and social change. Youth subcultural studies As discussed above, the emergent scholarly interest in youth gangs is particularly noteworthy because it was only 30 years ago or so that the consensus among British social scientists was 78

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that the US had youth street gangs while the UK had ‘youth subcultures’ (Campbell et al, 1982).While British social scientists, notably sociologists and the burgeoning area of criminology, were heavily influenced by their US peers, as illustrated by the plethora of research focus on youth delinquency and subcultures, there was one particular area of adolescent deviance favoured by US scholars – the study of delinquent youth street gangs – that was difficult to locate in the UK. Although the definition and location of the youth street gang both in the US and UK has been/is contested and exceptionally problematic (see Chapter one), this has not stopped the term being ‘used very loosely more or less simply to describe an “unruly” group of ’ young people who hang about together. However, the abuse of the term gang in this manner is unacceptable and ‘in order to achieve conceptual integrity’ any criminological or sociological definition ‘must do better than this’ (Tierney, 2006:115). Of great significance in this regard is Frederic Thrasher’s 1927 study The Gang, which provided a sociological, and the original, definition of the gang, which interestingly does not make any direct reference to delinquency: The gang is an interstitial group originally formed spontaneously, and then integrated through conflict. It is characterized by the following types of behavior: meeting face to face, milling, movement through space as a unit, conflict, and planning. The result of this collective behavior is the development of tradition, unreflective internal structure, esprit de corps, solidarity, morale, group awareness, and attachment to a local territory (Thrasher, 1963:46). For most of the post-war period academics in the UK found it difficult to locate gangs – featuring characteristics such as a stable membership, rigid internal structure, cohesiveness and a unity of purpose – and so focused their research energies on youth subcultures. Although the immediate decades after the Second World War were dominated by discussions about working class young people’s affluence and consumerism, Britain was still a long 79

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way from being a classless society. The UK has long been a country defined by its rigid social class structure, which has, for many generations of young people, been transmitted through and distinguished by education, language, occupation, leisure activities, culture and family life. By the end of the 1960s, and taking place in parallel to developments already under way in the UK academy concerning the growing influence of labelling theory, a small number of studies had by then been undertaken that focused on working class youth and structural inequality reproduced through schooling (Jackson and Marsden, 1962; Douglas, 1964; Hargeaves, 1967). During this period there were also a small number of community-based youth studies such as Wilmott’s (1966) Adolescent Boys of East London, and in particular Downes’ (1966) The Delinquent Solution, which maintained that delinquency provided working class male youth with subcultural solutions to social inequality and restricted life chances. However, it was Phil Cohen’s influential Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community which best illustrated the future direction of youth subcultural studies in Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s. Cohen’s (1972:30) paper took issue with criminologists who associated delinquency with subculture, arguing that ‘a distinction must be made between delinquency and subculture’. Additionally, Cohen asserted that he did not think the middle class produced subcultures because only dominated cultures can form subcultures, consequently he was particularly interested in exploring the impact subcultures had on the changing patterns of delinquency in working class communities.The slum clearances of the East End and associated development of large estates and new satellite towns on the edges of east London in the 1950s brought about great changes to working class communities and in particular destroyed ‘matrilocal’ extended family and kinship networks. According to Cohen, this period of great change was accompanied by a phenomenal rise in youth delinquency, particularly property offences such as vandalism, car thefts and all types of hooliganism. Cohen (1972:31) interprets this rise in delinquency as the unconscious protest by working class youth ‘against the general dehumanization of the environment’, a direct consequence of the ‘loss of the informal social controls 80

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generated by the old neighbourhoods’. Lacking the requisite communication tools to effectively make sense of the changing structural dynamics and contradictions – of extended family, nuclear family, peer group, hegemonic school culture, incohesive working class parent culture, and exploitative labour relations – of the many ‘social configurations that he is locked into … what can a poor boy do? Delinquency is one way he can communicate … through non-verbal channels’ (Cohen, 1972:31). During the 1970s, Cohen’s theories on working class subculture went on to be further and systematically developed through the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. Although it was established in 1964 the CCCS’s work came to prominence in the following decade under the stewardship of Stuart Hall, who served as the Centre’s second Director. Most significantly, the ambitious and interdisciplinary scope of the Centre’s analyses redefined academic understanding of subcultural studies, deviance and young people (Blackman, 2014). For researchers at the CCCS – as illustrated in the landmark edited collection Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 2006) first published in 1975, and Dick Hebdige’s (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style – the objective of Cultural Studies was to analyse and understand: … the relationships between those ‘relatively autonomous’ but never mutually exclusive sets of relations designated as ‘culture’ and ‘society’… Unlike more conventional sociological inquiries, however, RTR gave as much weight to the symbolic as it did to the social – ‘subcultures and style’ … and with theorising the complex linkages or mediations between them. Throughout, the subcultures project was shadowed by these larger conceptual questions … among them, Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’, Althusser’s ‘relative autonomy’ and ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’, Barthes’ and Levi-Strauss’ ‘bricolage’ (Hall and Jefferson, 2006:ix).

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A further difference in the CCCS approach to subcultures – which differed significantly from the dominant sociological interpretation of ‘society’ and the dominant literary and humanities understanding of culture – was its analysts’ concern and preoccupation with examining the relationship between culture and power. In particular, researchers at the Centre placed great emphasis on subcultural style and ‘the ability to transform cultural objects or to borrow from other places and other times’ in a cut and mix format.The work of the CCCS also preferenced the utilisation of ‘ritualistic and symbolic modes of resistance’ and the ‘ambivalent structural relations’ between a subculture and its working class parent culture and the ‘less class bound realm of mass culture’ (Gelder, 1997:145). One of the key criticisms of the Birmingham approach concerned its overly narrow interpretation of subculture, which its researchers examined solely in relation to youth and social class. Additionally, the CCCS has been criticised for its preoccupation with the ‘spectacular’ styles and subcultures of white working class heterosexual males (McRobbie, 1978; Bose, 2003; Carrington and Wilson, 2004; Griffin, 2011) at the expense of studies examining the everyday and mundane activities/styles of youth; including girls and young people from BAME (British. Black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds. The CCCS approach to the study of youth subcultures had by the 1990s – as a result of neoliberalism and the collapse of the UK youth labour market combined with the growing influence of postmodernist theory – fallen out of favour with British scholars. As such, contemporary youth studies research is dominated by either the ‘cultural’ perspective, with discussions of individualisation, neotribes, fashion, lifestyles and ‘cultural representations in youth’; or by the ‘transitional’ perspective, focussing on patterns of ‘economic socialization, linkages between education and work’ (Furlong, 2013:145–6). Youth gangs in post-war Britain As noted above, throughout most of the post-war period the UK youth question had largely been dominated by theoretical and empirical analyses of delinquency and working class subcultural 82

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formations.According to this wealth of youth research literature, there was virtually no evidence that pointed to the existence of structured gangs and for Downes (1966) this was a fair indication of their absence from British soil.The only systematic academic enquiry into delinquent gangs in the UK during this period was undertaken by the psychologist Peter Scott in his 1956 study ‘Gangs and Delinquent Groups in London’. He interviewed 151 boys aged 8–17 on remand for offences carried out in the company of other juveniles, and for comparative research purposes, interviewed a similar cohort of boys who were on remand for offences carried out solitarily. In his empirical study, Scott argued that there were three distinct types of offending group formation – adolescent street groups, loosely structured groups or collectives, and structured gangs.The adolescent street groups did not actually engage in criminal activity, although the majority of casual observers perceived that they did. However, in reality while members of this type of group looked fearsome and sometimes behaved abominably, they very rarely came to the attention of the police or juvenile courts. Loose antisocial groups, on the other hand, comprised individuals who were deeply disturbed and unhappy with regard to the key institutions of the family, schooling and society at large. Members of this grouping often appeared to be ‘bent on a headlong delinquent phase which is not interrupted by court appearance’ and consequently they would continue to commit offences ‘even while on remand’ (Scott, 1956:11:2). The third delinquent group or ‘Gangs Proper’ with featured characteristics such as an identified leader, durable and definite membership, criminal objectives and attachment to a local territory, were much harder to find.The few gangs that were thought to exist did not conform to the image of the gang as portrayed by writers such as Thrasher, which generally paints a picture of ‘healthy devilment, adventurousness, pride of leadership’ and ‘loyal lieutenancy’. Furthermore, a key reason why it has been almost impossible to locate proper delinquent gangs in Britain is because ‘with the ever-decreasing waste sites and vacant lots, the gangs are quickly broken up’, nevertheless ‘many of those subsequently described under the heading “unstructured antisocial” groups,

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might develop into gangs proper if allowed to continue’ (Scott 1956:11). In England the dominant news-media discourse about working class delinquency right up until the late 1990s, as was the case in the academy, centred on the moral and social panics associated with problematic youth subcultural formations. Newspaper discussions about delinquency and violence in Scotland, or more precisely Glasgow, during this period differed considerably from those taking place in the rest of Britain. James Patrick (2013:7) in his 1973 study A Glasgow Gang Observed reflects on the fact that while gangs are deep-rooted in the city’s history – from the 1880s right through to the 1920s and 1930s, and linked to the city’s interminably notorious slums – it was from the mid 1950s that the people of Glasgow, through reports in the press, gradually started to become aware of the growing gang problem in the city. By the mid 1960s the initial trickle of news stories about gangs in Glasgow had exploded into a full-scale social and moral panic, with headlines such as ‘The Gangs are Back! As the vandalism, the slashings, the “group disorders” mounted, articles on causation, diagnosis and therapy kept apace’ with this growing phenomenon (Patrick, 2013:7). During this period residents on the Easterhouse housing estate attempted to set up vigilante groups against the gangs. However, the city’s most senior magistrate warned that anyone engaging in any form of violent activity would be prosecuted, thus putting to an end all discussions about tenants forming vigilante organisations. The social panic that was gripping the city was further illustrated when in February 1966 more than 40 shopkeepers and business leaders appealed to their local Member of Parliament for the necessary protection, of themselves and their properties, from the marauding gangs.These demands for greater protection resulted in the creation of an anti-youth gang committee that was headed up by the Lord Provost and the Chief Constable of the City of Glasgow Police. By the early spring of 1966 the national television and radio networks had also began to report on the problem using phrases such as ‘a stabbing is no longer news in Glasgow’. The crime statistics for Glasgow, released the same year, revealed that more than 850 individuals ‘had been arrested for carrying an offensive weapon’, also that in excess 84

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of ‘1,500 people had been arrested for breach of the peace and just slightly less for disorderly behaviour’ (Patrick, 2013:8). As the year progressed the discussion about gangs and violence in Glasgow by the media, politicians and the police intensified and became even more exaggerated; it is within this atmosphere of social hysteria that Patrick ‘undertook this piece of work’. As a newly qualified teacher working in an approved school he was invited to join the world of Glasgow’s juvenile gangs by one of his pupils, and thus provided the research context for his 1973 tome, which ‘is a descriptive account of a participant observation study of one such gang which I met on 12 occasions between October 1966 and January 1967’ (Patrick, 2013:xi).Patrick’s study includes a map of Glasgow which is divided into all the gang territories as they existed in 1966. The north-west part of the city was particularly affected as there were more than 20 gangs – the author notes that there were no doubt even more gangs in existence that he was not aware of – ranging in size and importance. Each youth gang possessed an identifiable name, usually linked to a clearly marked-out territorial attachment; interestingly in the gang that Patrick joined (The Young Team) the boys always referred to themselves as ‘team’ rather than ‘gang’. The gangs of Glasgow also had identifiable leaders who were granted ‘the title of king’ and it is ‘only in this context that the most disturbed personality can come to the fore; through his prowess in explosive acts of violence he is able to capture the leadership of the gang’ (Patrick, 2013:151). Weapon-enabled serious violence – whether it be through slashing or stabbing with a knife or assault with a razor blade, broken bottle or pint glass – alongside other types of general delinquency was an everyday and key feature of gang life in Glasgow. For Patrick, the long-standing cumulative and interconnecting problems of slum housing and high rates of unemployment, youth crime, alcoholism, ill-health and mortality are clearly the root causes of Glasgow’s violent gang subcultures. For working class young males born into an intergenerational culture of industrial militancy, hyper-masculine identities, economic hardship and limited life opportunities, the only solution, it seems,‘and one hallowed in the traditions of Glasgow slum life, is to respond with violence’ (Patrick, 2013:150). 85

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Anne Campbell et al (1982:77) dismissed Patrick’s claims about the problem and existence of gangs in Glasgow, arguing that on closer inspection of his study ‘while there were groupings of male youths known by territorial names, there was little if any internal structure and stability of membership’. Malcolm Klein in the preface to his co-edited collection of research studies on street gangs and problematic youth groups in Europe, The Eurogang Paradox, noted that there was a paucity of research on gangs in Europe (Klein et al, 2001). During two sabbatical study leaves in Europe in 1985 and 1991, Klein visited scholars and officials in numerous cities – initially in Stockholm, Zurich, London, Manchester, Berlin, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, as well as Kazan and a number of other cities in the Volga region – where youth gangs were reported to be a real social problem and found that they most definitely existed. ‘Yet, almost no research depictions of street gangs in these or other cities were available (a notable exception being James Patrick’s A Gang Observed) (Klein et al, 2001:xi). Whichever perspective one takes with regard to Patrick’s thesis, it is clear that the post-war research literature on UK gangs is exceptionally sparse. Peter Stelfox’s 1998 study examining ‘Lower Levels of Organised Crime’ in England and Wales’ reconfirmed ‘that the amount of information available about gangs in the UK is comparatively limited’ (Stelfox, 1998:398), and this situation only began to change at the beginning of the previous decade. I will discuss later on (see Chapter four) exactly what the growing number of UK gang academics had to say (or not) about issues pertaining to the linkages between race, urban youth cultures and violent crime. First though, the remainder of this chapter will look to review the growing academic interest regarding the contentious issue of youth gangs since the early 2000s. Gangs and the UK Academy Eurogang paradox and Manchester’s gangs

As alluded to briefly above, the growing academic interest in UK gangs can be traced back to the work of the Eurogang Network in the late 1990s, and specifically Klein et al’s (2001:xii) 86

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collection of original research reports from Europe as well as the US. Formally established in 1997, the Network comprised an international steering committee of scholars who were interested in generating a body of ‘gang knowledge and method as applied both to cross-national comparisons and to implications for public policy in Europe’. Much of their work sought to challenge European policy makers’ denials about the existence of street gangs because they did not fit the cohesive, hyper-violent, highly structured typology of the ‘real gangs’ that are found in the US. The paradox, from which the Network’s first book derived its name, ‘is that “real gangs” in America do not usually fit the stereotype that led to the denial of gangs in Europe’ (Klein et al, 2001:xii). According to the US co-editors Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson, European academic thinking about gangs was, at the time of writing, largely outdated as a consequence of being fixated with the pre-1970s classic texts of, among others, Thrasher,Yablonsky, Cohen, and Cloward and Ohlin. However, since these pioneering studies there have been a clutch of modern texts produced during the 1980s and 1990s which have better documented the massive changes in, and proliferation of, US street gangs. The Eurogang Network accepted that gang definitions are not fit for purpose ‘and continue to fail; for each one proposed, exceptions are found’ (Klein et al, 2001:218). Very narrow conceptions miss out important elements, while more wideranging conceptions can include rather too much. Street gangs are acknowledged to be informal youth formations that are largely self-formed and co-defined in terms of membership as well as by the key stakeholders of the wider community. Nevertheless, according to the Network, gang researchers are in general and broad agreement with regard to the following key characteristics. Street gangs are:

– mostly male, but usually with female members – mostly minority by race, nationality, or ethnicity, or ethnicity (and almost always comprised of alienated or marginalised youth in any case) – mostly youthful (… typically in the adolescent and early years) 87

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– often territorial and street oriented – mostly self recognised as a group, even as a special group – mostly oriented toward criminal activity, but with considerable variation in the level of such activity – somewhat stable over time, generally from one to many years (Klein et al, 2001:218).

These core attributes of the street gang, as identified by the Eurogang Network, are important in that they allow for the conscious exclusion of other organised groups such as prison gangs, rockers, terrorist cells and the wide variety of musicalbased subcultural groupings. Significantly, the above criteria allow for the exclusion of the great majority of youth cultural formations, peer groups, clubs and formal teams and such like, which – although sometimes linked to delinquent and anti social activities – do not share the same combination of characteristics found in street gangs. Dennis Mares’ (2001) study of ‘Working Class Street Gangs in Manchester’ was the only British contribution to Klein et al’s edited tome, and was based on ethnographic data gathered between September 1997 and January 1998.The author utilised participant observation techniques with several gangs and undertook interviews with gang members and other community stakeholders in Manchester, which were supplemented by newspaper articles, literature and secondary statistical data. However, according to Mares (2001:154) ‘unfortunately no statistical data on street gangs were available, as gangs do not yet comprise a distinct category within police statistics’. The study begins with a brief (paragraph) and misinformed historical account about the study of gangs in Britain, where the author talks about the new type of ethnic street gang – up until this point the gangs in question were largely white and working class with distinctly local names – that emerged in England’s four largest cities during the 1980s.These street gangs, allegedly based on US gangs such as the Bloods and Crips, were heavily involved in the illicit drugs trade, which often resulted in extreme violence and turf warfare.

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Mares locates two of these newly emergent ethnic street gangs, the Gooch and Doddington, in the ‘impoverished’ multi-ethnic Manchester district of Moss Side. According to him, members of both of these gangs became heavily involved in the illegal drug trade in the 1980s, resulting in spiralling violent crime and homicide rates. Surprisingly, the gangs ‘are not drug gangs ... drug dealing was carried out on an individual basis … the gang as a whole was not an organisation aimed at drug dealing but primarily existed as a social group’ (Mares, 2001:155). Each gang allegedly had approximately 90 members, half of whom were serving prison sentences, and 80% of whom were of African Caribbean heritage. However, with regard to this latter point street gangs in Moss Side were largely organised around territory and not ethnicity. Some of the oldest members were in their early thirties while others were aged as young as ten. Neither the Gooch nor Doddington gang were hierarchically organised and there were no formal or identified leaders. However, the older members or OGs (original gangsters) with a longer history of criminal engagement had more influence on the newer/younger members, who tended to be most utilised for the undertaking of the riskiest operations. Gooch and Doddington’s stylistic features were heavily influenced by the Black Atlantic street styles popularised by US gangs and the Jamaican posses, and indeed ‘the clothing style and musical preferences reinforce their gangsta image’ (Mares, 2001:156). Consequently, Mares concludes that both of Moss Side’s street gangs can be classified as having a neo-traditional structure, because as recently emergent they have not had sufficient time to develop an elaborate structure and subdivision. The street gangs in Salford – a district located near Manchester’s city centre – were similar to those found in Moss Side in that they exhibited the same neo-traditional structure and correspondingly high levels of violent criminal activity.The one major difference noted by Mares was that, unlike those found in Moss Side, Salford’s street gangs were comprised of white working class youth aged between ten and 25.This was most likely attributable to the fact that when some gang members reach their early twenties, they tend to join one of the larger organised criminal organisations 89

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that dominate the area. With membership numbering between 25 and 60, Salford gangs’ criminal activities were centred around car crimes, robberies and the selling of illicit party drugs. As was found to be the case with all of Manchester’s gangs, ‘the lads in Salford are very territorial … gangs form on specific streets or in certain neighbourhoods. They also adopt the name of the main street in which they operate’ (Mares, 2001:158). Lastly, the Salford gang members dress styles and musical preferences were almost identical to their black peers in Moss Side in that they wore expensive designer clothing, and were also attracted to the glamorised representations of ‘gangsta’ culture depicted in US rap music lyrics, videos and Hollywood films. There were many other gangs in existence throughout the rest of the Manchester Metropolitan area that – unlike the neo-traditional structures found in Moss Side and Salford – had structures that the author describes as ‘compressed. Often located in impoverished council estates, cliques of youth have formed street gangs that are often short lived and whose members seldom exceed thirty’ (Mares, 2001:159).These gangs are predominantly white and lack any form of organisational structure, and most of their criminal endeavours revolve around fighting, petty crime and antisocial behaviour linked to alcohol and drugs misuse. In summary, Mares concluded that the gang problem in Manchester was fairly limited even though there had been a noticeable increase in gang-related violence and delinquency since the 1980s. Overall, he found that the street gangs in Manchester were predominantly white, which suggested that the UK experience was ‘slightly different from’ the rest of Europe ‘and is intimately linked to historical class antagonisms’ (Mares, 2001:161). The escalating problem of gun violence and fatal shootings in South Manchester during the late 1990s and early 2000s, led to the implementation of a three-year government-funded policing-led strategy aimed at tackling gun and gang-related serious violence. Bullock and Tilley’s (2002) Shootings, Gangs and Violent Incidents in Manchester report describes analysis and strategy development for the Targeted Policing Initiative undertaken in South Manchester. This evaluation action study, which utilised a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data, also set out to identify the immediate causes of gang-related shootings and 90

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other serious crime in the city. The research data that informed the Home Office-funded report was gleaned from four sources: Recorded crime statistics for Greater Manchester Police (GMP) for the period April 1998 to September 2000; Shootings, creation of a database containing information on police confirmed shootings in the GMP area between January 1997 and November 2000; Individuals, creation of a second database containing information relating to individuals identified by GMP as having had involvement in gangs or in shootings – the database only included young people living in South Manchester aged 25 and under; Interviews, semi-structured interviews undertaken with 23 young males identified as being gang members by GMP and other justice sector practitioners. As a caveat with regard to the data on which the report’s findings are based, Bullock and Tilley (2002:8) noted that ‘none of the data sources were without difficulties’. First, the Shootings database only contained information relating to those incidents ‘that came to the attention of the police’. Second, all of the data relating to individuals ‘was largely a function of police intelligence’. Third, interviewees were selected based on ‘who was readily available … largely because of their involvement in the criminal justice system’. Finally, the authors conceded that both the ‘extraction and use’ of the data sources ‘for aggregate analysis was technically difficult and we were dependent on the accuracy and completeness with which available information was recorded’ (Bullock and Tilley, 2002:8).With regard to those long-standing and problematic definitional considerations, throughout this report the term ‘Gangs’ was ‘used to refer to relatively enduring identifiable groups of young people who see themselves as members of those groups, and who commit crime as part of that membership’ (Bullock and Tilley, 2002:23). According to the report, and further building on Mare’s earlier findings, there were four major gangs in South Manchester known to GMP. In addition to Gooch and Doddington, there was also the Pit Bull Crew and Longsight Crew, however the gang situation was described as being fluid – members joined and left, while new groups were formed as older ones disbanded. The Pit Bull and Longsight Crews both emerged as a result of internal shootings/conflicts within the older Gooch and 91

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Doddington gangs, and at the time the report was written the police estimated that approximately 200 young people aged under 25 were connected with the four gangs. Overall GMP estimated that in 2001, taking into account older associates as well as those younger ones operating at the margins, there were up to 470 individuals engaged in gang activity in the south Manchester area.The other key characteristics of the south Manchester gangs, as identified by police intelligence, were:

– The gangs were predominantly black or mixedrace, with nearly 80 per cent of members being of African Caribbean heritage (and British-born). – Only 11 per cent members were female and played peripheral/supporting roles. – Known gang members were prolific serial offenders, average of 12 arrests and 2.1 convictions per member. – Offences included rape, murder, drugs offences, fraud, robbery, burglary, and firearms offences etc… – Weapons carrying was commonplace among members. – There were longstanding and endemic conflicts between the four gangs. – Gangs are ter r itor ial with identified and demarcated spatial boundaries. – All gangs comprised of ‘a core of main players, together with “ordinary members”, “runners” acting on behalf of members, and “associates”, who may have’ links with other gangs ‘or provide networks of support’ (Bullock and Tilley, 2002:26).

The increasing escalation of gun crime and serious violence in south Manchester during the late 1990s and early 2000s was widely reported in the national news media – drawing on police statistics and intelligence – as being a gang-related issue that was unique to the city’s Moss Side ghetto, which housed the majority of its ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘depraved’ black youth population.The above conclusions were also clearly confirmed in the findings of 92

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Mare’s (2001) Eurogang ethnographic study as well as Bullock and Tilley’s (2002) Home Office report. However, during this same period there was also an explosion in local and national newspaper headlines and articles concerning the growing menace of gangs throughout the UK’s other major urban centres. Surveying the UK gangs problem Much of the news media’s gaze continued to focus on the endemic criminality – further compounded by the recent introduction and growth of hyper-violent US- and Jamaican-style street gangs and posses – within the nation’s black communities. However, there were an increasing number of news stories about the social havoc being wreaked across the nation by the unprecedented proliferation of many other violent ethnic (‘Asian’, ‘Turkish’, ‘Sri Lankan’, and ‘Romanian’) gangs. During this period there were also press reports which described two other worrying new developments: the growing number of under-16s who were gang involved and the phenomenon of “girl gangs”. It is within this national context that Bennett and Holloway (2004) set out to examine the full extent of gang membership in England and Wales, by utilising statistical data gleaned from the New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring programme (NEW-ADAM). In addition, their study also assessed whether or not there was a direct causal relationship between being a gang member and engaging in problem behaviours such as illicit drug dealing and substance misuse and/or involvement in violent criminal activities. The research data on gang membership was obtained through NEW-ADAM and comprised a three-year rolling programme of surveys undertaken in 16 custody suites in England and Wales.All arrestees who were deemed eligible were expected to complete the survey; those who were considered ineligible included vulnerable adults, minors aged under 17, and anyone viewed as potentially violent. The research sample included both male and female subjects, with surveys taking the form of a structured questionnaire with the aid of a personal interviewer.The surveys included questions about drugs usage and supply, lifestyle choices, criminal activities, and use of weapons/gun possession, and in 93

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14 of the 16 research sites, 2,725 interviewed arrestees were also asked – following a brief explanatory preamble – whether or not they were a member of a gang. In acknowledging some of the limitations of their research study, the authors note that: • the population of arrestees is not naturally reflective of currently active offenders, they are not always guilty of the offences for which they have been arrested and may be in custody for a wide array of reasons, including being drunk and disorderly, immigration checks, and for bail infringements; • the NEW-ADAM survey does not include young people aged 17 and under, consequently the study is not able to capture any information with regard to gang membership at the younger end of the spectrum. In mitigation of the above limitations the authors argue that as very little ‘is known about gang members in the United Kingdom’, any new information that can be gleaned ‘on gang members aged 17 years and over … is a useful first step’ (Bennett and Holloway, 2004:311). Based on their research sample, Bennett and Holloway estimated that in the period March 2000 to April 2001 there were some 20,000 active gang members among the arrestee population in England and Wales.The authors went on to stress that the above estimates were based only on gang members who were arrested and those aged 18 and over, consequently the total number of gang-involved individuals (including juveniles) in England and Wales was more likely to be much higher. Gang members were overwhelmingly white and male, aged 25 and under. More significantly the authors concluded that: Overall, the findings are consistent with the image of street gangs from research in the United States. Gang members tend to be involved in criminal behaviour, generalists in terms of offending patterns, responsible for a notable proportion of all offences, sometimes violent, involved in drug supply offences and have a tendency to carry weapons and guns – and sometimes use them (Bennett and Holloway, 2004:317). 94

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Clare Sharp et al’s (2006) Home Office report Delinquent Youth Groups and Offending Behaviour, which examined the findings of the 2004 Offending Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS), specifically looked at the extent to which young people aged 10–19 residing in England and Wales were involved in ‘delinquent youth groups’ and/or engaged in criminal activities. The 2004 OCJS survey was based on a number of questions developed by the Eurogang Network and was designed to assess levels of offending within the general household population.Throughout the report, the term ‘gang’ was deliberately avoided due to its problematic and ambiguous nature and in its place the authors referred to ‘delinquent youth groups’ (DYG), which they define as follows:

– Young people who spend time in groups of three or more (including themselves). – The group spend a lot of time in public places. – The group has existed for three months or more. – The group has engaged in delinquent or criminal behaviour together in the last 12 months. – The group has at least one structural feature (either a name, an area, a leader, or rules) (Sharpe et al, 2006:3).

Based on the above definitions, the authors estimated that 6% of all 10–19-year-olds in England and Wales were involved in a DYG.The level of involvement was the same for boys (at 6%) as it was for girls (also at 6%), however, it was not possible to present any statistical data for BAME involvement due to the small number of respondents. The findings in relation to individual offending by members of DYGs indicates that they committed more core offences – robbery, assault, burglary, criminal damage, car crime and drug selling – than non-members. Indeed, the OCJS estimates that 6% of 10–19-year-olds who are members of a DYG were responsible for roughly one fifth (21%) of all core crimes committed by this age group. As was acknowledged by the authors, the above findings were unsurprising due to the very nature of the definition of DYG as utilised within the report;

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nonetheless, they assert that it is still very useful and insightful to examine the differences between the two groups. An important feature of the DYG definition utilised in Sharpe et al’s report relates to the fact that individual members should have committed some criminal offences or delinquent activities together as a group.The group offending/delinquency categories that were most common among DYG members were: 51% used drugs, 40% threatened or frightened others, 36% engaged in graffiti, 31% broke/damaged or destroyed things, 29% used force or violence on others, 24% stole things. In conclusion the report – which ‘provided the first set of nationally representative results’ examining the extent of DYG membership in England and Wales among 10–19-year-olds – indicated that only a minority of young adults were involved in such groups, and ‘they engage mostly with low level offending behaviour’ (Sharpe et al, 2006:24). Paul Bradshaw’s (2005) study on ‘Youth Gangs and Delinquency in Edinburgh’ presented data gleaned from the longitudinal Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, and was based on a research sample of 4,300 young people. Adopting the Eurogang Network’s self-definition technique, schoolchildren aged 13 at the time were asked to self-nominate; ‘if a respondent claimed to be a gang member, this was considered adequate grounds for his or her classification as such’ (Bradshaw, 2005:199). Respondents were asked about the number of friends they hung about with, and whether or not they would describe the group of friends they went about with as a gang. Interestingly, they were not asked whether the gang was engaged in any types of criminal or delinquent activity; as such the study was not concerned with defining gangs solely in terms of delinquency. The Edinburgh study research team created three increasingly restrictive definitional gang types, which they applied to their cohort: • (Gang type 1) this first group included members of any gang without an identified name, special sign or saying. • (Gang type 2) this second group included members of any gang that had either an identified name or a special sign or saying. • (Gang type 3) this third group included members of any gang that had both an identified name and a special sign or saying. 96

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Each consecutive gang type, according to Bradshaw, represented ‘a higher degree of gang identification and organisation’, and as such group 3 ‘signifies a well-established group whose members readily identify themselves with a specific gang name and sign and symbol’ (Bradshaw, 2005:201).The study’s findings indicated that one fifth (19.9%) of all respondents assigned themselves to being in a gang, which referred to any of the three gang categories. More than two thirds (66.6%) of these self-nominated gang members fell into category gang type 1, just over one sixth (17.8%) were in gang type 2, and one sixth (16.5%) fell into gang type 3. With regard to gender, 52.6% of girls were members of any of the three gang types, while boys represented 47.4%. When the gang definition was funnelled down and became more restrictive it was found that boys made up 61.9% of membership of gang type 3, which were those that were most organised and recognised. Lastly, the study’s findings suggested that gang membership affected the respondents’ delinquency, but more significantly ‘the more organised and easily identified the gang is, the greater its effect on its members’ delinquency’ (Bradshaw, 2005:210). Juanjo Medina et al’s (2013) longitudinal study, Children and Young People in Gangs, utilised data from the OCJS in order to investigate the conditions and reasons why young adults in England and Wales join, remain in and exit gangs. The study adopted the Eurogang definition of street gangs as ‘any durable street-oriented youth group whose identity includes involvement in illegal activity’, in addition to a variant of it that focussed on ‘durable, street oriented youth groups that engage in offending behaviour’ (Medina et al, 2013:3–4). OCJS data on young people aged 10–16 initially captured during 2003 was then analysed by the research team in 2006 to see how their respondents’ behaviour had changed over the previous three years. Before going on to discuss their study’s findings and policy implications, the authors noted that household surveys such as the OCJS are only designed to ascertain offending behaviour within the general population. Consequently, this study excludes data from those young people housed within Young Offender Institutions and the juvenile secure estate, and who are deemed to be most at risk from becoming gang involved. 97

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Medina et al’s longitudinal study found that those young people who are gang involved are more likely to engage in criminal activities, antisocial behaviour and substance misuse. However, gang membership does not necessarily lead to offending or other types of delinquent/problem behaviour and in fact many of the gang-involved young respondents did not report any offending. Most significantly, at least with regard to the emergent and ongoing social panic concerning gangs, the authors concluded that there was no research evidence to substantiate official, newsmedia and policing claims that the numbers of children and young people joining gangs has increased in recent times. ‘We found no evidence that gang members are becoming younger or that the prevalence of joining gangs has changed over time in the seven age cohorts we examined’ (Medina et al, 2013:7). Reluctant gangsters and gang talk While Medina et al’s (2013) findings indicate that emergent moral panics about increasing gangs and gang-related violent crime are misplaced, John Pitts (2008:4) noted that in the time it had taken him to complete his book Reluctant Gangsters, ‘39 young people were either shot or stabbed to death on the streets of London in gang-related murders’. Drawing largely on Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and Home Office statistics during (one accounting period) 2007, Pitts noted that despite there being a steady decline in adult and youth crime in Britain during the preceding 15 years, in certain towns and cities there had been a proliferation of gang-related youth violence, including armed muggings, homicides, sexual assaults ‘and between April and November 1,237 young people were injured in gun and knife attacks’. For him it was clear that the nature of youth crime and youth cultures within certain urban spaces in the UK, and among particular groups and communities had changed dramatically. The reason for this was attributed categorically to the explosion of violent youth gangs and the cultures that are associated with them. Interestingly, Reluctant Gangsters (2008:6) shies away from attempting to define gangs and instead prefers to describe them; whereas definitions ‘by demarcating a field of study’ can be 98

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inflexible and limiting,‘description can always be augmented by new knowledge and fresh insights’. Interestingly, the description of the gang he goes on to provide – ‘children and young people who see themselves, and are seen by others, as affiliates of a discrete, named, group with a discernible structure and recognised territory’ – looks very similar to the official ‘street gang’ definition currently adopted by the government and the police (see Chapter four). Pitts goes on to further assert that while affiliates do not describe themselves as being in a gang, they use Black Atlantic British street terms (see Gunter, 2008) such as ‘crew, family, massive, posse, brerrs, man dem, cousins or boys’ (Pitts, 2008:6). Although there have been a small number of survey-based studies examining youth gang patterns and membership in the UK during the last two decades (see discussions above), the majority of academic research literature on UK gangs during this period has tended to be of a qualitative nature. Additionally, many of these studies have been carried out within urban and semi-urban neighbourhood settings – for example in Manchester (Aldridge and Medina, 2008), south Wales (Maher, 2009), Glasgow (Deuchar, 2009; Fraser, 2013) and London (Densley, 2013; Harding, 2014; Windle and Briggs, 2015) – and have featured a relatively small sample of research respondents. In fairness, apart from John Pitts’ Reluctant Gangsters (which I discuss in more detail in Chapters four and five), the majority of these locally situated case studies do not necessarily make claims beyond their local research site or that there is a national gangs crisis or that the nature of youth cultures in urban Britain has changed irrevocably, to become principally characterised by hyper-violent street crime. Nevertheless, many of these gang studies have tended to bypass the vast literature and array of perspectives that characterise the multi-disciplinary area of contemporary youth studies, and instead have been content to view the issue of urban youth violence solely through a criminological and community safety lens. In comparison to the recent London-based gang studies, Ross Deuchar’s Gangs, Marginalised Youth and Social Capital takes a more holistic approach with its examination into the lives of young adults growing up in Glasgow ‘who have 99

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become disenfranchised by educational failure, unemployment and poverty’. By taking into account ‘both the positive and negative roles that youth gatherings and gangs can play in young people’s lives’, the book ‘reflects upon the relationship between gang culture and building social capital’ and ‘aims to empower those who work with’ disadvantaged youth (Deuchar, 2009:xi).Although the author is concerned about the increasing demonisation of young people and their behaviour which is closely linked to neoliberal welfarism and the ‘punitive turn’, he quickly goes on to assert that the UK and the rest of the world are facing a growing gang problem. But just like his fellow academic gang apologists, the research evidence that Deuchar provides to justify his claims – that in cities across the globe gang culture is on the rise and that there is an ‘increasing tendency for younger members to join gangs and become involved in more serious crime’ (Deuchar, 2009:17) – is extremely threadbare and partial to say the least. For his own study, the author undertook semi-structured interviews with 50 young people (in addition to interviewing a number of adult community stakeholders) drawn from across four deprived geographical locations. Significantly, the book fails to provide any kind of gang definition or typoIogy, however a summary of the ‘important findings’ from the study, which is included at the end of chapter four, notes ‘The Glasgow Gangs described by the young people could be classified as street gangs (Klein, 2001)’, meanwhile their activity seemingly matched ‘Thrasher’s (1927) classic definition of conflict associated with attachment to local territories’. Although the majority of gang members tended to be involved with petty crimes ‘such as under-age drinking, drug use and recreational violence’, they did occasionally engage in more serious kinds of criminal activity, which included ‘violent attacks which were sometimes racially driven’. Lastly, according to Deuchar, gang members were predominantly male and they ‘drifted into gangs’ for many different reasons, ‘including the search for power, excitement and status; compensating for educational failure, unemployment or dysfunctional family life; to express narrowly defined masculinity; and to continue a family tradition of gang membership (Deuchar, 2009:53–4).

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Violent street gangs

Simon Harding’s book The Street Casino: Survival in Violent Street Gangs is also premised on the belief that violent street gangs are a pervasive and growing problem that particularly blights the most distressed and disadvantaged urban communities.According to the author, rather than deny the daily realities of this brutal and often fatal violence – which engenders fear and anxiety among those caught up in gang life – ‘we owe the young people involved a moral and social responsibility to understand this world, to explore this social field …’. In order to provide fresh insights and a new perspective on UK gangs which ‘illuminates the variety of interrelationships, networks and behavioural dynamics crucial to understanding the evident complexities of UK gangs’, this ethnographic study examines street gangs in south London and utilises Bourdieu’s social field analysis method (Harding, 2014:14/24). Significantly and conveniently, The Street Casino deliberately sidesteps the many thorny and contested discussions about definitions and typologies (see chapter 1) so as to refocus on other areas.The study uses Miller’s (1992) street gang definition: ‘… a self-formed association of peers, united by mutual interests, with identifiable leadership and internal organisation, who act collectively or as individuals to achieve specific purposes, including the conduct of illegal activity and control of a particular territory, facility, or enterprise’ (cited in Harding, 2014:17). In addition to the participant observation method, which included 60 site visits, the author also carried out qualitative interviews with seven local residents, ten police officers who worked with gangs, 15 justice sector practitioners who worked with gang-affiliated young people, and 24 gang-affiliated and/ or at-risk youth. (As an aside it would be interesting to know whether the research participants, worked to and/or agreed with this catchall definition.)Harding’s key theory and main findings are that daily life in the violent street gang (or the gang social field) is comparable to a casino game: the young people – whether they are associates, affiliates or members – are the ‘players’ in the ‘game’ who are on the never ending quest for street capital represented by power, money and the maintaining/ 101

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enhancement of their reputations. In this volatile and high-risk world, street capital equates to the chips on a roulette table that can be lost, won or traded. This is a casino that never closes and where every day there are a different group of winners and losers, but ultimately the House will always win! The fallout from all of this is that within the social field of SW9 (the area of south London where the research was undertaken) the utilisation of excessive violence is the primary means by which actors seek to gain a reputation and obtain street capital ‘and it is a feature of all three repertoires expressive, instrumental and sanction’. Recent developments in the ‘social field mean that firearms are now used to support these strategies across all three repertoires’ and this in turn helps to ‘explain the increase in violence in SW9’ which has spilled over into to the wider community. Within the neighbourhoods that constitute SW9 ‘gangs are no longer the aberrant “other”. For many young people gang affiliation is a natural and logical progression’ and their everyday lived experience, whether at school, on the streets or in the home, ‘means that violence is wholly normalised, expected and required in the social field’ (Harding, 20014:231). How Gangs Work: An Ethnography of Gang Violence by James Densley aims to challenge ‘popular misconceptions about gangs – as amorphous collectives of hoodies and hoodlums,“unhappy, unloved, and out of control”, perpetrating wanton acts of crime and violence’ – in order to demonstrate that by and large gang members are ‘rational agents who optimize under the constraints of their harsh life conditions’. Correspondingly, gangs ‘are rational organizations that evolve to punish fraud and fault but reward industry and ingenuity’ (Densley, 2013:3). Unlike the London gang studies of Pitts (2008) and Harding (2014), Densley does engage with the ongoing debates and disagreements about definitions, typologies and behaviours before himself departing from the ‘definition merry-go-round’ to declare his gang definition of choice: First, they are all self-formed associations of peers that have adopted a common name and other discernible ‘conventional’ or ‘symbolic’ signals of membership (see Gambetta, 2009b, p. xix). Second, they are 102

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comprised of individuals who recognize themselves (and are recognized by others) as being ‘members’ of a ‘gang’ who … engage in … have engaged in ... criminal activity. Third … their business remains confined within the group – gangs are, in Martín Sánchez-Jankowski’s (1991, p. 28) words, ‘quasiprivate’ and ‘quasi-secretive’ organizations. Fourth, disputes within the group cannot be settled by an external ‘third party’ as established by the rule of law (Densley, 2013:5–6). How Gangs Work is primarily based on data derived from qualitative interviews with self-nominated ‘members’ (n=52) and ‘associates’ of 12 gangs, aged 13 to 34, drawn from six of the most deprived and gang-affected boroughs in London. In addition, the author also carried out interviews with 27 young people aged 16 to 24 who lived in the same geographical locations but who were not gang affiliated; the parents/siblings of gang members (n=15); and 87 adult practitioners from the police service, CPS, courts, probation working within the areas of law enforcement, health, education, social services and the voluntary and community sector. Densley’s research differs from that of many other UK gang studies in that it centres around the experiences of informants who ‘claim the identity as a gang member for themselves rather than having it placed on them by others.They described themselves as committed to their gangs.’ By way of contrast, gang associates ‘neither recognized themselves nor were recognized by others as bona fide gang members, yet they offended with gang members and were associated with them by’ the police, justice sector professionals ‘or community information’ (Densley, 2013:9–10). According to Densley, to understand why young people join gangs we first need to acknowledge the contexts and circumstances in which they join. With regard to this particular study (where nearly 80% of the research subjects were black males) there were long-standing problems that the black community faced pertaining to the ‘difficult’ schools which many of the interviewees attended alongside the lack of supervision they received, as a result of being lone-parented or because both 103

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parents were busy working. According to the author, the above set of circumstances means that the pervasive allure of the gang within the neighbourhood setting becomes irresistible to many young people: gang members exhibit high aspirations to be economically successful and share with their non-gang peers the ‘material expectations encouraged within advanced capitalism. Overt differences in life chances have’ – as result of racism and structural inequality – ‘however, translated into perceptions of injustice that in turn affect the decisions they make about their life strategies’. Gang membership is a choice’ but this is clearly ‘a choice that would have much less resonance with’ youth living in gang-affected neighbourhoods ‘if they saw more evidence that commitment to non-subterranean values among their families and peers actually led to the achievement of valued goals’ (Densley, 2013:40). Of course there are serious risks and dangers associated with being a gang member, specifically the normalisation of serious violence and its utilisation as a sanction for the violation of gang norms, minor and mid-level rule breaking or failing to follow orders of an ‘elder’. If a member accrues too many midlevel infractions or is deemed a traitor then they run the risk of being kidnapped and brutally punished or ‘tortured’. Although economic violations such as the failure to pay debts will tend to lead to economic sanctions they also can be accompanied by physical violence including non-fatal stabbings, slashings and shootings. Generally violence was used by the elders to regulate the behaviours of young gang members; additionally the informants disclosed incidents where ‘sexual violence was used as a means to address the supposed transgressions of women’ (Densley, 2013:96). Violence against women and girls

Juanjo Medina et al’s (2012) ‘Hidden Behind the Gunfire:Young Women’s Experiences of Gang- Related Violence’, based on data from a three-year ethnographic study of youth gangs in an English city, is one of the few research articles that attempts to explore the impact of gang culture on the lives of young women and the different ways in which it shapes their experiences 104

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of violence and victimisation. According to the authors, the young women were perceived by the male members as playing a secondary role within the majority of gangs that were studied. The young women were often involved in the criminal activities of the gang: ‘stashing money, drugs, or guns’; providing alibis; ‘selling stolen goods; using their homes as “safe houses” … setting up “honey-traps” against rival gang members; and cover/drivers to shift drugs’ between cities.Yet, while they are clearly involved in central gang activities ‘women were rarely talked about as “proper” members by gang-involved young men and by the police and other state agencies’. Medina et al ‘encountered gang-related sexual and intimate partner violence, for example, sexual assault/rapes reported by young women, allegedly committed by young men involved in their gang’. However, the risk of violence was not restricted to those females with an active role as female relatives and the girlfriends of gang members ran the risk of physical violence from rival gangs either as ‘witnesses, or victims of threats and assaults’ (Medina et al, 2012:655). According to the authors, this focus on young women is long overdue because the ‘problem of gang violence in England is (still) primarily discussed by academics, practitioners, and policy makers as a problem of young men’s violence against other young men’ (Medina et al, 2012:654). An exception to the above statement is Race On The Agenda’s (ROTA) ‘Female Voices In Violence Project’ (FVV) (Firmin, 2010) which is one of the first UK studies to examine the impact of serious youth and gang violence on women and girls. Utilising a team of volunteer researchers ROTA interviewed 352 women and girls from across London and from a wide range of backgrounds and age groups. Although the FVV Project did include one-to-one interviews, the majority of fieldwork involved focus group interviews and discussions. Of those interviewed 57% self-identified as being associated with, or affected by, gangs and serious youth violence due to their relationship to a gang member: as a mother, sister, link/sexual partner, friend, aunt/other female relative, or associate. Fortythree% of those interviewed stated that they were not affected by gang-related youth violence and had no association to gangs.

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The five key findings identified in the FVV Project report were as follows. First, there is a ‘negligible amount of intelligence on the numbers of women and girls affected by gang violence’, either as mothers, sisters, links/sexual partners, or as female gang associates/members. Second, ‘sexual violence and exploitation are significant weapons used against females’ who are associated or involved in gangs. ‘Rape has become a weapon of choice. Third, women and girls who are gang affiliated ‘rarely disclose any victimisation they experience due to fears over reprisals’, in addition to the ‘belief that their criminal association means that they are not privy to the protection of the state’. Fourth, many of the girls who carry guns and drugs for their boyfriends reside outside of gang-affected areas and they also ‘may attend grammar or private all-girls schools’. However, these young women ‘rarely receive interventions and struggle to identify routes of support’. Lastly, the FVV Project found that gang-associated young women who offend ‘are being processed through systems such as youth justice, or alternative education which are designed to work with boys’, and any interventions that they are able to access will tend to take place ‘in environments dominated by boys.This has a severe impact on their ability to address their offending behaviour and reduce their victimisation’ (Firmin, 2010:7–8). Informed by ROTA’s FVV Project and subsequent reports (Firmin, 2010, 2011), the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) undertook an Inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups. In 2013 the OCC in partnership with the University of Bedford published ‘“It’s wrong … but you get used to it”’ which was a report on the findings of the Inquiry’s commissioned research study examining gang-related sexual violence towards, and exploitation of, young adults in England (Beckett et al, 2013). The two-year qualitative study involved one-to-one and group interviews with 188 young people (females and males aged 13 to 28, who were from a variety of backgrounds) and 76 professionals drawn from six geographical locations across England. Of the young adults interviewed, 87% (131) had direct connections with gangs and of these 40% reported that they had directly witnessed instances of gangassociated violence and exploitation, while 23% of females and

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4% of males self-identified themselves as victims of gang-related sexual violence and exploitation. As stated in the OCC’s report, there were three types of sexual violence or exploitation that specifically impacted on young women and were also identified as unique to the gang environment: (1) ‘Sexually assaulting, or having a sexual relationship with, a female’ who has direct connections with a rival gang or ‘gang-involved young man in order to “disrespect” or provoke that young man or gang’; (2) the ‘honey trap’ scenario where a young woman’s sexuality is used to ‘set up’ males in rival gangs; (3) ‘Sexual activity or sexual assault as a means of initiation into the gang’ (Beckett et al, 2013:27). Lastly, as part of their findings the authors maintain that gang-related sexual violence and exploitation ‘does not occur in a vacuum – it is influenced both by the wider gang environment and wider patterns of sexual violence and exploitation in society’ (Becket, 2013:6). Critiquing gang talk

During the last 20 years or so there have been a significant number of ethnographic studies of marginalised and/or offending young people growing up in some of Britain’s most deprived urban areas, that neither locate youth gangs (Alexander, 2000; Sanders, 2005) nor describe them as being an issue in their research findings (Back, 1996; Craine, 1997; Nayak, 2003; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005; Gunter, 2010; Brookman et al, 2011; Parkes and Conolly, 2013). It is important to note also that there are a number of critical criminologists who have taken issue with the police-media-driven gang crisis thesis as presented by academics such as John Pitts. In his article entitled ‘Perpetual Novelty’ Geoffrey Pearson reminds us that contemporary social panics centred on shootings, stabbings, gangs, street crime and general youth delinquency ‘are better understood as persistent, if somewhat intermittent, features of the social landscape, and in this respect we suffer from a profound historical amnesia’ (Pearson, 2011:20). There has also been criticism levelled at, on the one hand, the exaggerated newspaper reports about the perceived new social phenomena and problem of girl gangs and associated 107

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increase in female violence and criminality, while on the other hand, these critics have also noted the way in which qualitative UK gang studies have been male centred with young women largely ignored or else portrayed either as auxiliary members or victimised sexual appendages (see earlier discussions; also Batchelor, 2009, 2011;Young, 2009). Although this issue will be explored in more detail later (see Chapter four), other academics have also taken issue with the media-fuelled gangs crisis, and in particular highlighted the implications for already over-policed and stigmatised/marginalised BAME populations (Alexander, 2008; Aldridge et al, 2008; Smithson et al, 2013; Joseph and Gunter, 2011). In particular, Simon Hallsworth and Tara Young have been two of the most consistently outspoken critics of the media-fuelled moral panics concerning the feral and violent street gangs allegedly besieging Britain’s major urban centres. In their 2004 article ‘Getting Real About Gangs’, the authors noted that the UK had become afflicted by ‘gang fever’ following the fatal shootings of two young women in Birmingham in 2003. Moreover, as far as the nation’s gang talkers – such as the tabloid press and documentary film producers – are concerned, the urban street gang has successfully replaced the mugger as the ‘folk-devil par excellence’ (Hallsworth and Young, 2004). For Hallsworth andYoung, the exaggerated and sensationalised depictions of, as well the disproportionate reactions to, this perceived new national menace fail to place the real problems of urban violence in perspective. One of the key reasons why it has been difficult to do so is the myriad of definitional problems and ambiguities inherent in the term ‘gang’. As such, when is a group of young people hanging together on the streets not a gang? Does it mainly apply when they are black or when they are poor? Also, why limit the notion of gangs just to young people, surely the criminal activities of international corporations like Enron are gang-like? In their article ‘Gang Talk and Gang Talkers’, the authors similarly discuss the partial research evidence about, and unproven empirical case for, the existence of gangs in the UK context (Hallsworth and Young, 2008). Consequently, the ‘understandings people bring to bear when the gang menace is evoked has, by default, been saturated with references acquired from the American context’ (Hallsworth and Young, 2004:12). 108

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However, urban street life as it is played out in the black and Hispanic ghettos of the US is completely different from what goes on in the UK. More poignantly, Hallsworth and Young argue that groups of youth hanging together in urban spaces should not automatically be linked to criminal activity and antisocial behaviour. Indeed, the ‘attention the gang receives’ reflects more ‘the sensational and (often) inaccurate coverage produced by the mass media than it does the objective reality of the street’ (Hallsworth and Young, 2008:184). The numerous journalistic devices utilised by the print and broadcast media when doing their gang talk is central to the construction of the gang myth. Accordingly, the first tactic deployed entails applying the label of the gang ‘more or less permissively and uncritically to any group that appears to occasion social disquiet’. Unsurprisingly, this ‘goes hand in hand with a tendency to report that the gang is the problem even when the evidence linking it is very tenuous’. Then for added ‘good measure, having terrified the wider population, urgent strategies and policies are demanded of “experts” to suppress the gang which law and order politicians seem’ more than happy to oblige with (Hallsworth and Young, 2008:182–3). It is not only the news industry that is responsible for the creation of the gang myth – academic gang talkers, rather than challenging the misrepresentations of the media’s gaze, have preferred to ‘confirm it in their fixation and their elected method of research’ (Hallsworth and Young, 2008:185). For Clare Alexander also, the gang menace has been so distorted, over-reported and academically consolidated that it has ‘become, in fact, a contemporary urban legend’. Nonetheless, this does not ‘make it either right or helpful in understanding what is actually going on, or how the problems of youth violence might be addressed’ (Alexander, 2008:7). According to Hallsworth and Young, while it is clear that some young people are involved in group-based offending and violence, much of this delinquency and antisocial behaviour stems not from the formation of inherently pathological gangs but from the ecology of the worlds that many young males inhabit. With the boredom and mundanity of daily life for disadvantaged urban youth entrapped on miserable and decaying crime-ridden 109

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housing estates,‘motivated like most to identify with a particular group (peers, the estate, ethnic group, school) the conditions are established both for group loyalty and conflict’ (Hallsworth and Young, 2004:12). In response to limited socio-economic and spatial circumstances, and to avoid boredom, some young people reconstruct ‘their street worlds in dramatic ways: to be in a world that is rich in excitement and danger’ (Hallsworth and Young, 2004:12). For Hallsworth, a solution to the problem of urban youth violence lies in tackling the socio-economic and spatial problems that help create a street ecology of disorganisation and volatility.The way forward then, rather than deploying ever more draconian and discriminatory gang suppression policies and practice, can only be by ‘radicalizing and politicizing the often deeply alienated and marginalized young people who live amongst it’ (Hallsworth, 2011:195). Conclusion Although recently there has been a discernible shift in thinking on UK gangs by policy makers and a small (but increasing) number of academics, it is still the case that the overwhelming majority of historical and contemporary studies concerning young people – whether policy led, practice oriented or purely academic – in Britain has been about either their ‘cultures’ or ‘transitions’. Youth cultural perspectives have tended to focus on identities, lifestyles, fashions, neotribes and subcultures; youth transitions perspectives, on the other hand, are largely preoccupied with examining patterns of economic socialisation, specifically the relationship between education and the labour market. During much of the post-war period the problems associated with delinquent working class subcultures dominated the research agendas of scholars interested in the UK youth question. However, according to the wealth of literature that was generated by this academic interest there was virtually no evidence to suggest that structured youth gangs existed on British soil. This state of affairs continued right on into the 1980s with Anne Campbell et al – who also dismissed James Patrick’s ((1973) 2013) claims about gangs in Glasgow – asserting that whereas 110

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the US has gangs Great Britain has youth subcultures (Campbell et al, 1982). Notwithstanding the intervention of Malcolm Klein et al’s Eurogang Network since the late 1990s or more specifically the recent claims by gang scholars such as John Pitts, Ross Deuchar and Simon Harding, there is still very little (or convincing enough) research evidence to suggest that ‘violent youth gangs and the culture they ferment’ (Pitts, 2008:4) have proliferated throughout the many decaying and distressed urban centres of Great Britain.

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Policing the gang crisis

Introduction This book has so far examined and/or discussed much of the academic research evidence, as well as the key role played by the news media, with regard to the UK gangs crisis. However, there are two important areas concerning this latest moral panic that have yet to be addressed, first, the various national and local government policy responses and second, and perhaps more significantly, the role of the police as the chief architects of this national crisis. The way the police are able to shape and then control the gangs agenda is through the construction of crime statistics that are then leaked to the media. The London Evening Standard ran a front page (Bentham, 2014) headline proclaiming that according to Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) statistics ‘3,484 London gang members commit 6600 crimes including 24 murders in three years’. This new moral panic and fixation with the youth gang menace is then clearly not restricted to politicians and the media. With regard to the empirical evidence that has helped to sustain this latest social panic concerning problem youth, it would be inaccurate to claim that gang research has taken root within the UK academy, as in truth this has not been the case. Nevertheless, there has been increasing interest in this area by a relatively small number of academics working within the area of criminology. Among this relatively small number of UK gang academics, there is a much smaller number of them who, it can be said, are part of a burgeoning (as regards policy, policing and practice) ‘gang 113

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industry’, which is on hand to intellectually respond to this latest ‘youth crisis’ of violent urban crime and disorder – much of it distorted, London centric and police constructed (Shute et al, 2012). This chapter will look to further examine current academic discourses about the UK gang situation, and argue that much of it has unwittingly helped to fuel the racialisation and exaggeration of this issue by the media and the police; with ‘gangsta rap’ culture seen as the driving force behind black youth’s disproportionate involvement in violent criminality. Secondly, it will argue that this gang thinking has resulted in the formulation of misguided policy, practice and policing that centres around the existence of the problematic catchall street gang label that criminalises, via police targeting practices, black (and urban) youth and their street-based lifestyles and friendship networks. Ending gang violence As discussed briefly in Chapter two, Prime Minister David Cameron’s contention that the 2011 riots were caused by youth gangs and ‘gangsta rap’ culture was swiftly followed by the £10 million initiative ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ (HM Government, 2011). According to the Home Secretary Theresa May, the programme was ‘the first ever truly cross government approach to tackling gang and youth violence’ and she then went on to outline the coalition government’s ‘wide-ranging’ proposals covering the five areas of ‘prevention, pathways out, punishment, partnership working and providing support’. Borrowing heavily from New Labour’s 1990s crime mantra, the Home Secretary also promised to combine action to tackle the causes of gang and youth violence with tough enforcement measures targeting those who engage in violent criminal activities. ‘Stopping such violence is not a task for the police alone.Teachers, doctors and youth workers all have a vital role to play.’ Accordingly, Theresa May then went on to assert that the issue of gang-related crime ‘will only be successfully tackled when local areas and local agencies like these work together and share information’ (HM Government, 2011:4–5).

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As part of this wide-ranging strategy, the Home Office envisaged that by April 2012 more than £10 million of funding would have been distributed to 30 localities most affected by gang-related violent youth crime. With at least half of the allocated funds going to the third sector, the money was ringfenced ‘to improve the response of mainstream services’. As a consequence, by the end of the parliament in 2015, the Ending Gang and Youth Violence programme (EGYV) was to have ‘turned around the lives of 120,000 of the most troubled families, reducing their involvement in violent crime and disorder’. In so doing, ‘we will have seen a reduction in the number of ’ youth fatalities and serious injuries caused by gang or youth violence’. Lastly, all of the 30 identified gang areas would ‘be able to point to reductions across a range of indicators, for example, an improvement in well-being for individuals, families and communities’ (HM Government, 2011:23–4). Notwithstanding these lofty targets, and just a little more than three years after the launch of the flagship anti-gangs initiative, the Home Affairs Select Committee reported that the ‘Home Office has spent over £10 million on its Ending Gang and Youth Violence programme, but has failed to effectively evaluate the project’ (HM Government, 2015a:8). In January 2016 the Conservative government published a report outlining the six priorities, for 2015/2016 and onwards, of the updated strategy on ending gang violence and exploitation. Focusing on the 52 EGYV priority areas, and with a continuing multi-agency response, this refreshed approach sets out to address the following current and emerging problems at a local level:

1 Tackle county lines – the exploitation of vulnerable people by a hard core of gang members to sell drugs. As gang members are allegedly living and operating in, by moving into, new drugs markets outside of their local urban areas. Linked to this emerging development of the exploitation of vulnerable young people who are groomed and/ or coerced into relocating, selling drugs or having their homes used a base from which illicit drugs are sold. 115

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2 Protect vulnerable locations – places where vulnerable young people can be targeted, including pupil referral units and residential children’s care homes. 3 Reduce violence and knife crime – including improving the way national and local partners use tools and powers. 4 Safeguard gang-associated women and girls – including strengthening local practices. 5 Promote early intervention – using evidence from the Early Intervention Foundation to identify and support vulnerable children and young people (including identifying mental health problems). 6 Promote meaningful alternatives to gangs such as education, training and employment (HM Government, 2016).

It would be disingenuous to give the impression of any kind of consensus among gang academics with regard to the existence of and/or the typologies of youth gangs in the UK. Nonetheless, during the past ten years – as evidenced by the EGYV initiative – there has begun to be a coalescence of opinion by policy makers, operational police units, practitioners and a very small number of gang academics about the existence of the street gang. The contentious and catchall notion of the ‘street gang’ – as being any durable, street-based youth group whose identity is oriented towards violent and criminal activity – owes much to the work of the Eurogang Network (see, for example, Klein et al, 2001; Decker and Weerman, 2005) and in particular (and ironically) to Simon Hallsworth and Tara Young (2005) of London Metropolitan University. In their Report to the Home Secretary on ‘Gun Crime and Gangs’ (ACPO, 2007:22) the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) note that: The London Metropolitan University and the MPS have developed definitions of the types of criminal associations that young people form, which are now being taken up by the police service, Home Office,

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Youth Justice Board and HM Prison Service. There are three groups defined …:

– Peer Groups – these are relatively small, unorganised … with little or no engagement in serious assault. – Street Gangs – these are relatively durable, predominantly street-based groups … for whom violence [and violent crime] … is intrinsic – Organised Crime Groups.

Not surprisingly in the government report ‘Ending Gang Violence One Year On’ (HM Government, 2012b:11), it was noted that ACPO ‘had mapped gangs across the’ UK using the now ‘standard definition’ of the street gang, characterised as a durable, discernible group of street-based young people engaged in criminal activity and violence. It is particularly noteworthy that Simon Hallsworth is one of the key architects of the same ‘gang industry’ that he bemoans and rails against in his more recent work (see particularly Hallsworth, 2013). Interestingly, although the 2012 government report discusses the now ‘standard definition’ of gangs, the Home Affairs Committee in its report on ‘Gangs and Youth Crime’ (2015) still found that varying definitions of gangs were being used across police services and by some local partnerships. As a consequence, the Committee reported that it was not possible to aggregate gang ‘data to give a comprehensive reliable picture at a national level’ (HM Government, 2015a:9). The Policing and Crime Act 2009, implemented under the former Labour government and which came into effect in January 2011, was the first piece of legislation that specifically makes mention of, and clearly attempts to define, gang-related violence. Part 4 of the 2009 Act gave new powers to police offices and local authorities to take out injunctions against individuals, to prevent gang-related violence. Section 34(5) of the 2009 Act defines ‘gang-related violence’ as: Violence or a threat of violence which occurs in the course of, or is otherwise related to, the activities of a group that: 117

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a) consists of at least 3 people; b) uses a name, emblem or colour or has any other characteristic that enables its members to be identified by others as a group; and c) is associated with a particular area.

Amendments contained in the Crime and Security Act 2010 further provided for gang injunctions or what many commonly refer to as ‘Gangbos’, to be taken out against young people aged between 14 and 17. Additionally, the Crime and Courts Act 2013 makes provision for gang application hearings, in relation to 14–17-year-olds, to take place within youth courts, rather than in the County Court. The Home Office, as part of a review of the operation of gang injunctions in accordance with the requirement set out in the 2009 Act, sent out a data request to the 33 EGYV programme local authority areas. Only 25 of these EGYV priority areas returned data and reported that, during the reporting period January 2011 to January 2014, ‘88 gang injunctions had been put in place. Eleven of the 25 areas had used gang injunctions, but one (non-London) area accounted for over half (46) of the total number’ (HM Government, 2014:5). All of the reported injunctions were against males, only two were given to juveniles aged under 18, and most of the restrictions applied for were in relation to said individual visiting a particular geographical location, or associating with a particular individual and/or group. Notwithstanding the recent work of UK gang criminologists, for many academics working within the social sciences and/or youth studies the issue of street gangs is just another moral panic in the long ‘history of respectable fears’ about working class and poor young people. This latest moral panic is propagated, promoted and sustained by the burgeoning gang industry and gang talkers, including the news media, politicians, academics, policing units, and statutory and third sector service providers. As with the mugging crisis in the 1970s (Hall et al, 1978), it is accurate to assert that the themes of race, crime and youth have been condensed into the image of the ‘street gang’; and if not by the academy then certainly by the news media. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson’s (2008) study of the reporting, and associated 118

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semantic meanings, of violent crime in the English news-print media found that race was more often than not linked to violent criminality. Indeed the study argues that violent crime is viewed as being endemic within black communities, not because of skin colour but due to the criminal cultures and lifestyles of the perpetrators of gun and knife violence. Gangs and law enforcement As with the ‘mugging crisis’ of the 1970s the role of the police in the campaign to tackle and end gang violence is similar to that of the media ‘but they come in to play at an earlier stage of the cycle. They too structure and amplify’ (Hall et al, 1978:38) the black crime problem, initially through the compilation of official crime statistics as well as news and witness appeals. In 2010 the national news media ran headline stories and comment pieces on the official crime statistics released by the MPS that showed a link between ethnicity and violent crime.The Sunday Telegraph (Alderson, 2010) led with the headline ‘Violent inner-city crime, the figures, and a question of race’, with the article then going on to say that the figures indicate that the overwhelming majority of those held responsible for violent offences are black males. More significantly, the article further asserts that the figures provide justification for the targeting of black males by the police and that they probably go some way to explaining why they are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than white males. The other way in which the police structure and amplify black violent crime is via the mobilisation of resources, Trident was set up by the MPS in 1999 as a specialist unit that focussed on tackling gun crime and homicides within the black community. By 2012 Trident was relaunched and became Trident Gang Command to lead the MPS response to tackling gun-related crime and violence in London in order to reduce homicides, serious youth violence and the harm caused by street gangs and organised crime. It set out to achieve these aims by: • Enforcement – by identifying and pursuing the most harmful gangs and gang members through proactive investigations and operations. 119

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• Prevention and diversion – through identifying young people on the periphery of gangs and working with partners to divert them away. • Tasking and coordination – through monitoring armed and gang-related activity to ensure the right resources are quickly in the right places (MPS Trident Gang Command, 2013) While the rebranded Trident Gangs Command is no longer focussed explicitly on black violent crime, its remit with regard to gangs in London can leave no one in any doubt that much of its operational focus will be targeted on violent crime within the black community. This point was highlighted in the London Crime Reduction Partnership (LCRB, 2012:19) Anti-Gangs Strategy Report, which in recognising the over-representation of black youth in gangs and gang-related crime noted that it was clear that ‘enforcement activity to tackle gangs is likely to disproportionately affect London’s Black … communities’. The Report also argued that any enforcement response to gangs in London needs to be undertaken in a sensitive manner, as well as being mindful of the fact that the ‘majority of young Black people are not involved in gangs’. However, with regard to the figures for stop and search practices in London and the rest of England and Wales it is still the case that ‘overall, Black people are stopped and searched around seven times more than White people’ (Strickland, 2014:1). These statistics – notwithstanding the Home Secretary Theresa May’s rolling out of the voluntary ‘Best Use of Stop and Search Scheme’ in an attempt to reform police use of stop and search powers (May, 2014) – would suggest that the police are failing to heed the points raised by the LCRB report. When looking at the MPS enforcement response to gang crime, it is not very clear whether the police are looking for gangs or groups of black males ‘on road doing nothing’ (Gunter, 2008).The current accepted catchall definition of the street gang is particularly problematic in this regard, as it has the capacity to label and criminalise any street-based peer group.This situation becomes even more acute when the issue of racism and racial profiling is added into the mix; specifically the street gang label leaves too much power in the ‘discretionary’ hands of individual 120

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police officers, who, like the media, perceive the street-based lifestyles, fashions and demeanour of black youth as being inherently criminogenic (Campbell, 1985; Bowling and Phillips, 2007; Sharp and Atherton, 2007; Sveinsson, 2010). The national gangs crisis becomes even more toxic when it is combined with the long-standing issue of police racism, specifically in relation to the oppressive policing practices that have historically been utilised, in the unofficial ‘war on crime’, against Britain’s ‘lawless’ and inherently criminogenic black communities. Bowling et al (2015:7) assert that since the 1970s it has been clear that black people ‘were over policed but under protected’ with research evidence indicating that the police have generally failed ‘to provide equal protection under the law’. Moreover, the police – and more than is the case with any other public body – ‘have been repeatedly and persistently accused of racism and racial discrimination against’ members of Britain’s black population. Organisations such as the campaigning charity INQUEST have consistently raised awareness about deaths in custody – including prisons, young offender institutions (YOIs), immigration detention centres and police custody – generally, and specifically in relation to BAME individuals. In the ten-year period spanning 2002 to 2012 there were 380 deaths in police custody due to lack of due care or excessive use of force, or as a result of fatal police shootings. According to INQUEST a disproportionate number of deaths in custody ‘or following contact with the police following the use of force or serious neglect are from Black and minority ethnic (BAME) communities’ (INQUEST, 2015). Since 2010 there have been two high-profile incidents involving specialist firearms officers from the MPS fatally shooting unarmed black males on the streets of London – Mark Duggan in 2011 and Jermaine Baker in 2015 – and on both occasions it was widely reported, in the news media, that officers had been acting on ‘police intelligence’ implicating the suspects as senior ‘gang members’. It is important to note that racialised police violence is not restricted to deaths in custody or fatal shootings. In May 2015 the Independent newspaper uncovered that more than 3,000 police officers – all of whom are still patrolling the streets – are under 121

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investigation for alleged violent assault against members of the public (Gallagher, 2015). The Metropolitan and West Midlands Police forces accounted for the majority of these complaints, with black and minority individuals representing more than 55% of alleged victims of police brutality. According to the London Campaign Against Police and StateViolence (LCAPSV), it is well known within BAME communities that ‘over 99% of complaints alleging racism are dismissed by the Met Police’. However, the number of complaints that do get officially logged are in fact ‘not representative of the actual level of police brutality. Such instances are regular occurrences … but are unreported and thus not recorded’ (Kyerewaa, 2015:24). Of particular relevance to policing and the UK gangs crisis is the use and, as many critics argue, abuse of joint enterprise: an ancient common law legal doctrine which is a form of secondary liability whereby a suspect who knowingly assists in, or encourages the committing of, a ‘crime with another becomes liable for all criminal acts committed by the other person (the principal offender) in the course of their joint criminal venture’ (HM Government, 2012c:3). This controversial legal principle has been extensively applied in a large number of cases, involving groups of young people, where the suspects are alleged to have committed ‘gang-related’ violent crimes. In such circumstances, the application of joint enterprise means that an individual young person can be held criminally liable for the actions of others, even if the said individual was not directly or physically involved.The growing concern about the misuse of this doctrine resulted in the House of Commons Justice Committee issuing the following recommendations: Our primary recommendation is that the Ministry of Justice should take immediate steps to bring forward legislation in this area.We believe the problems to be sufficiently acute, however, that we also recommend the Director of Public Prosecutions issue urgent guidance on the use of the doctrine when charging. In particular, we would welcome guidance on the relationship between association and complicity,

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which is of vital importance in gang related violence and homicides. (HM Government, 2012c:3) Following on from the Justice Committee’s recommendations, a Bureau of Investigative Journalism study reported that in the eight-year period between 2005 and 2015, in excess of 1,800 individuals had been charged – alongside four or more people – with homicide under the legal principle of joint enterprise (Bowcott, 2014). The Guardian newspaper’s discussion of the study went on to further outline that this represented 17.7% of all homicide cases. During the same eight-year period prosecutions for homicide cases involving two or more individuals totalled nearly 4,600, and this represented some 44% of all homicide prosecutions that took place between 2005 and 2013. Whereas only 11% of Court of Appeal rulings involved joint enterprise cases in 2008, by 2013, the proportion had doubled to 22%. The study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists further noted in those homicide cases involving four or more individuals that it was more likely than not that such a ‘defendant would eventually be acquitted – suggesting people may be being scooped up into serious prosecutions without there being strong enough evidence against them’ (Bowcott, 2014). Similarly, the campaign group JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association) argue that the ‘law is inherently flawed and that it leads to overly harsh sentencing’ and they also maintain that it is disproportionately used against the ‘black community – about 80% of the prisoners represented by JENGbA are black’ (Robins, 2015). It is clear that the UK gangs agenda is helping the police and other justice system agencies to further target, criminalise and disproportionately punish – through a variety of oppressive policing tactics as well as the overuse/abuse of joint enterprise – ever increasing numbers of black people. As highlighted in the preceding chapter, UK gang criminology is contested and represents a plurality of perspectives, nonetheless one academic voice in particular – John Pitts – has had a significant impact with regard to the framing of the EGYV national agenda. In a direct and overtly critical examination of the coalition and Conservative governments’ policies on youth gangs and indirectly Pitts’ work which has helped inform it, Jon Shute 123

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et al (2012:40) maintain that the construction of the current UK gang crisis is ‘partial in the expertise and evidence it draws upon: of the 34 non-governmental attendees at a consultative “international forum of gang experts”’, they also noted that 24, or 70% of the entire forum, were former or currently serving senior police officers.To compound matters further,‘British gang research was represented by a single academic best associated with research in one London borough’.The authors further go on to assert that the main outcome of this ‘consultative forum’ was the emergence of a distorted, yet overly simplistic, London-centric police-constructed view of organised serious youth violence to create panic and thus legitimise oppressive police tactics aimed at tackling street gangs. Race and ethnicity Although he is one of the founding academics (wittingly or unwittingly) of the UK gang industry, and the associated police and media-driven national obsession with the gang menace, Simon Hallsworth is one of the main critics of these ‘gang talkers’ (see Chapter three). However, many of his previous criticisms have been brought together and distilled within his latest book The Gang and Beyond (2013:5) in which he continues his railing against the burgeoning industry of thinkers, journalists, film makers and politicians who have helped to turn the gang into the ‘new folk-devil incarnate’. His expanded thesis of the current situation is that violent street worlds are not a new phenomenon and furthermore that street gangs are not necessarily responsible for all urban violence. However, there is one glaring omission from his polemic on the UK gang thesis – namely his engagement (or lack of) with issues of race and the alleged disproportionate involvement of black youth, as both victims and perpetrators of violent crime. Scattered throughout Hallsworth’s (2013) tome are some very brief discussions, a sentence here and there, about racism with regard to US anti-gang policies and (mostly) UK gang talk narratives. Consequently, he asserts that in our insecure age gangs have been rediscovered and widely disseminated because they tap into ‘our primordial fears about the Other’, particularly as from 124

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the outset they have been linked with black youth.Within gang talk narratives ‘we find a world reduced to a fundamental binary between the healthy included [white] middle class society and confronting it, [black] feral gangs that threaten to overwhelm it [unless beaten back]’ (Hallsworth, 2013:82). For the author these racist and othering narratives are the ‘unforeseen consequences’ of gang talk within the popular media and the academy, and are the result of the ‘legacy of deeply inscribed racism’ (Hallsworth, 2013:79).This is as far as his engagement with issues of race and ethnicity goes; as the gangs menace is a sensationalist fantasy concocted by middle class white gang talkers, there is then no need to further engage with the racialisation of violent crime by the police and the media, black disproportionality or indeed UK urban (‘gangsta’) music cultures. The failure to ignore or under-theorise issues of race (and agency) with regard to gang thinking is not just limited to Simon Hallsworth; unfortunately it is a feature that is symptomatic of too much of the UK gang literature. John Pitts’ (2008:5) monograph was based on research undertaken in three deprived and high-crime London boroughs in which the ‘majority of gang involved young people were of Black, African-Caribbean or mixed heritage’. While acknowledging the importance of ethnicity with regard to the shaping of local street culture, Pitts argues that ‘the violent youth gang phenomenon is not reducible to a question of race’. His reasoning here is that in Scotland and Liverpool youth gangs are mainly white, and therefore ‘social class provides a more salient explanatory schema than race’ for the recent surge in gang-related youth violence. As an academic Pitts acknowledges the disproportionality of black youth in gang violence yet fails to sufficiently engage with issues of race and youth cultural formations and instead lays all the blame on poverty and its specific impact on black and other marginalised communities.The problem with the kind of ‘colour blind’ (for example, where race discourses are ignored in favour of social class) research carried out by Pitts is that he still details in all their violent and gory detail the destructive and nihilist behaviours and cultures of largely young black males, which in turn academically reaffirms the racialised police-media-driven construction of the urban gangs crisis. 125

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James Densley’s (2013:28) gang study, in which more than 90% of his young research participants are black, features at the outset a very brief discussion about race and racism, which crucially was the ‘principal modality through which the interviewees sought to comprehend their disadvantage and discrimination they [and families and neighbours] experience …’. In doing so, the author attempts to provide a contextual backcloth for the over-representation of gang-affiliated black youth in his study by discussing the impact of racism; particularly with regard to disproportionate educational exclusion, unemployment and under-employment and as such ‘white society had impeded all legitimate potential to realise their goals’. Simon Harding’s (2014:203) recent study about violent street gangs in a deprived and high-crime-affected local neighbourhood situated in one south London borough again features mainly black African and Caribbean youth as research participants. According to the author, however, the ‘ethnicity of gang affiliation is a direct reflection of the ethnicity of the local neighbourhood or estate’. Considering that the book is mainly concerned with the violent street worlds of largely black young males within a renowned historical black British neighbourhood (Brixton), it is surprising that issues of race and ethnicity are only briefly mentioned some 200 pages in and then not discussed again. Also, given the fact that the black African and Caribbean populations still only comprised 23% of local population, no real explanation is provided by the author as to why it was the case ‘that most gang members in SW9 [postcode for research site] are young men of Black African and Caribbean origin’.As a context to black male over-representation concerning gang affiliation, Harding asserts that 59% of the borough’s child population is Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) and further highlights the fact that BME communities also experience more acute levels of poverty and deprivation. The ethnographic and qualitative gang studies of Pitts, Densley and Harding are all London based, and while there have also been a number of similar studies undertaken in other urban localities in England (Aldridge and Medina, 2008), South Wales (Maher, 2009) and Scotland (Deuchar, 2009; Fraser, 2013), presently they represent the prevailing academic perspective on youth gangs. 126

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Rather than challenge the official government policy and the police-media agenda about the UK gang crisis, these Londoncentric case studies concur that there is a serious problem with violent gangs and gang culture. In addition, they also tend to essentialise (and pathologise) black youth by denying them individual agency and instead interpret their disproportionate involvement in street-based gang culture as a consequence of the macro-structural constraints imposed on their lives via racism and class-based social exclusion. It is here where much of this research literature in particular would benefit from engaging with those ethnographic studies (Alexander, 1996; Back, 1996; Nayak, 2003; Gidley, 2007; Gunter, 2010) that have critically explored the importance of agency, identities, hybridity and racism in the lives of BAME youth. Criminological taboo While this chapter is seemingly critical of the failure of gang scholars to adequately engage with issues of race, in fairness many white (and BAME) liberal academics are wary of confronting the ‘thorny criminological taboo’ that sets out to examine race/ethnicity and offending behaviour.1 This is in large part ‘due to the wider political and ideological implications’ (Gunter, 2008:350) that can result in the further stigmatisation of marginalised BAME communities who historically have been labelled as the criminal other (Keith, 1993; Garland et al, 2006).The ‘criminological taboo’ is particularly poignant in the study of gangs – where police statistics and media portrayals of gang-related violence continually highlight urban black youth’s disproportionate involvement – and as Claire Alexander points out this then has serious implications for issues of ‘policy 1

There is a vast array of academic literature that focusses on youth class and crime in post-war Britain, however the interrogation of race and ethnicity (specifically whiteness and class) with regard to the majority population and offending behaviour has until very recently been largely ignored.According to Webster (2008:294) this is very surprising, especially considering ‘self-report studies suggest that “whites” disproportionately offend compared to other ethnic groups and obviously commit the vast bulk of crimes’. 127

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and social control’ and in particular police targeting practices involving stop and search (Alexander, 2008:14). Indeed, Aldridge et al (2008:31 and 36) carried out their gang research in an ‘English City’ in order to ‘remedy the predominant focus within research, police and journalistic accounts’ on BAME young people’s involvement in gangs. Consequently, they deliberately focussed the gaze of their research beyond the gangs dominated by BAME youth and their already stigmatised communities in order to ‘capture the represent ethnic diversity’ in addition to examining its ‘role in gang dynamics’. Drawing on their research findings on youth gangs in three predominantly Asian areas in the north of England, Smithson et al (2013:117–19) noted that whereas the control agencies’ (and some community stakeholders’) discourses constantly articulated the problematic existence and prevalence of violent gangs (‘despite the lack of a working definition in the area’) within the communities where the research was being undertaken, in contrast to these official risk discourses the ‘young people consulted for this study were at pains to articulate that gangs were not evident within their communities’. The majority of Smithson et al’s young respondents articulated the key difference between hanging about with friends in public settings and being in a gang and maintained that it was a label attributed by those in authority who were out of touch with young people. Smithson et al noted how there was a tendency for some community stakeholders to use the term ‘gang’ and that they felt compelled to do so because this was the official view, moreover there were various government funding streams attached to this ‘gang speak’. This latter point is an issue that is not only confined to the Asian areas in the north of England but is pertinent to all of the alleged ‘gang-affected’ areas throughout the UK, many of which similarly feature large BAME youth populations and are stigmatised urban neighbourhoods blighted by acute levels of social and economic marginalisation. It is not surprising then that this chapter most definitely concurs with Smithson et al’s (see also Cottrell-Boyce, 2013) prognosis that as these communities become even more disadvantaged and marginalised – in addition to the poor and increasingly conflictual relationships between these stigmatised BAME 128

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communities and the police – they ‘will undoubtedly find more gangs in the absence of other viable funding streams that will further perpetuate the cycle of “gang speak” and elevation of risk’ (Smithson et al, 2013:126). Representations of urban (black) youth cultures Although in contrast to academic gang studies literature, the news media highlight the link between black youth and violent crime, there is very little discussion or acknowledgement as to the causes of this disproportionality, namely the acute social and economic disadvantage faced by many black young people, which is, according to liberal academics such as Sveinsson (2008), the direct consequence of institutional racism. In the absence of much academic engagement, contemporary race and youth crime debates, amplified and structured by the police and newsmedia reporting, are implicitly concerned with the deviant lifestyles and ‘gangsta culture’ of urban (read mainly black) youth. In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 UK riots, historian and television pundit David Starkey himself made the national news-media headlines when he said on national television the ‘whites were becoming Black’ (Hastings, 2011) and that this was the cause of the riots. While his comments predictably drew support and condemnation in equal measure from conservative commentators on the one hand and liberals on the other, his key point was that the wanton violence and criminality glorified within the ‘destructive, nihilistic gangster culture’ of black youth ‘has become the fashion’ and been appropriated by white youth. The riots, in Starkey’s opinion, demonstrated that Enoch Powell and his apocalyptic 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which warned against the perils of continued black immigration to the UK, was right. Tony Sewell, the black academic and head of a charity that encourages black young people to attend university, agreed with David Starkey that ‘gangsta culture is a poison spreading across all races’, and that the cause of the 2011 riots was not poverty or institutional racism, ‘but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music’ (Sewell, 129

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2011). Senior national politicians such as Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011 after the riots and in 2006 as leader of the Conservative Party, and the Labour Party’s David Blunkett in 2003 as Home Secretary, have similarly linked violent gangster rap music to gangster gun and knife culture (BBC News, 2003, 2006). Of course for all those commentators and politicians who blame ‘black gangster rap culture’ for violent urban crime, there are many others who dismiss such linkages. So what then do academics have to say on the matter? As already noted gang criminologists in the UK have tended not to engage with issues of race or indeed culture, consequently any engagement with the media-driven debate on the role of ‘black gangster culture’ has been limited. John Hagedorn in his book A World of Gangs takes issue with gang academics the world over for their blatant neglect of the significance of rap music culture in the lives of young men dealing with oppression, racism and increasing social marginalisation: … it’s the music stupid. Gangsta rap and the worldwide embrace of hip-hop culture have been almost completely ignored by scholarship on gangs … The gangsta persona is a textbook glorification of gang culture, the very definition of what West calls ‘nihilism’. It is in essence the tendency of the excluded to ‘direct their brutality against themselves and their immediate community’ rather than against their structural oppressors (Hagedorn, 2008: xvii– xviii). According to this reading, global ‘gangsta culture’ and hip-hop offer black British youth trapped in spaces of urban marginality a ‘resistance identity’ to the permanence of institutionalised racism. Interestingly, Hagedorn’s thesis has some similarities to the academic race relations discourses of the 1960s and 1970s with regard to the crisis of ‘lost’ second-generation black British youth, who, it was argued, were ‘prone’ to criminality due to family breakdown and intergenerational conflict, underpinned by a rootless ‘bastardised’ Caribbean culture (Patterson, 1965; Cashmore, 1979). Of particular resonance to Hagedorn’s ‘gangsta 130

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culture’ was the moral panic about the Jamaican cultural exports of reggae music and Rastafarianism, which were believed to be explicitly linked to black criminality and lawlessness, allegedly illustrated by the emergence of a deviant ‘Black street sub-culture in working class slums’ within the major urban centres of the UK, which was based on – and derived meaning from – illegal drugs, violent criminality and Rastafarian-inspired reggae music (Campbell, 1985:195). However, by the late 1980s and 1990s the police- and mediadriven moral panics about the ‘gun crime’ that was engulfing Britain’s black communities was blamed on the expressive Black Atlantic music cultures (Gilroy, 1993) of Jamaican Dancehall (Ragga and Bashment) and US hip-hop. At this juncture, UK academics interested in ethnicity and cultural theory tended to view black youth cultures as innovative and dynamic rather than problematic, with the problematising of popular black youth cultures becoming the sole preserve of the British media – which is where we find ourselves presently. Notwithstanding this latter point, in truth it is important to also highlight the fact that black British youth and their (‘urban’2) music-based subcultures are not portrayed in a wholly negative light in the media. Youth culture and urban music In contrast to the problematic news-media discourses and portrayals of ‘gangsta culture’ and violent crime, popular media and cultural representations of urban music youth cultures are viewed in a much more positive light. During the past five years or so,‘urban’ black artists and rappers such as Dizzee Rascal,Tinie Tempah,Taio Cruz, Estelle, Chipmunk and Tinchy Stryder have had a considerable presence in the UK music charts and on radio airwaves and music television channels, and have featured on the front covers of many music and style magazines. Dizzee Rascal, in particular, seemed to embody the new-found bonhomie and 2

UK ‘urban’ music might be referred to as the ‘politically correct’, and somewhat controversial, term for all contemporary music of black origin and incorporates Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) forms such as hip-hop, modern RnB and Bashment as well as UK forms such as Grime, Funky House and Dubstep. 131

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mainstream cultural embrace of hitherto marginalised black youth and their subcultures; as well as picking up a throng of prestigious awards including FHM magazine’s ‘man of the year’ (2010) and ‘male solo artist’ of the year at the BRIT Awards (2010), Dizzee was also one of the select number of music artists chosen to perform at the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Many of these urban music artists are also budding entrepreneurs with their own record labels and designer clothing and lifestyle lines:‘By judiciously dampening their road personas, embodying the respectable trope of the educated entrepreneur and demonstrating industry-leading marketing acumen, electrogrime artistes [such as Chipmunk, Daze and Tinchy] have stepped across the boundaries of marginalisation that they had previously faced’(Ilan, 2012:51). Indeed, it could be quite easy for any casual observer or listener to note that black British urban youth are now fully embedded into mainstream British society, and this might also perhaps convincingly dismiss the arguments of David Starkey and demonstrate that indeed Enoch Powell was wrong about black immigration. Of course accompanying every good news-media story are a further dozen bad ones, and so while Dizzee, Tinchy, Tiny and the rest have had their minute of fame, basking in the glory of mainstream musical success, some of their fellow black grime brethren have been attracting the attention of the media and the authorities for their rap portrayals of the ‘violent realities’ of ‘Road life’. Indeed underground UK rap artists such as south London’s Giggs best illustrate the flip side – or normative problematised portrayal – of contemporary black British urban youth culture: ‘... branding Giggs as “thug rap” just media-boxes him in as a stereotypical troublemaker aggressively glamorising violence, pragmatic Giggs pleads guilty.“I’m a thug”, he gamely shrugs, because according to nervous, middle-British standards that’s exactly what he is, … “and I rap”’ (Morley, 2010:1). The thug life and violent underworld alluded to in Giggs’ lyrics are rooted in his real-life experiences growing up on a tough Peckham housing estate in south London, and his serving a twoyear prison sentence for gun possession between 2003 and 2005. Even though he went on to become the hottest underground UK 132

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rap artist by 2009 and had come to the attention of XL records, the authorities – via the MPS and Operation Trident3 – banned Giggs’ 2010 promotional tour and had previously attempted to dissuade the label bosses of XL records from signing him because of his criminal lifestyle and riot-inciting music ‘eulogising vengeance and violence to susceptible youths’ (Morley, 2010:2). Even more concerning to the authorities is the fact that right behind the likes of Giggs: there’s a large ragged army of hungry MCs spitting blood and fire about the grim reality of everyday life. Banded together in crews … they engage in their own brand of warfare in which reputations can be won or lost in 16 bars … trapped in long abandoned pockets of the country where violent crime is rife and the street economy holds sway. Music is their only way out of the grime (Campion, 2004). Jonathan Ilan notes that the DIY and punk ethic that underpins grime allows for any would-be rapper or crew with ‘professed links’ to street crime and violence, to record their own music and produce their own videos, which can then be promoted quickly and cheaply via the internet and other social media. These ‘hood videos’ thus provide a window into the violent social street worlds of those making them by allowing urban youth the opportunity to ‘rep their ends’ or proclaim allegiance to a particular territorial place, thereby inserting themselves into the conflicts that exist over such spaces on the streets. Consequently, the boundaries between violent Road fantasies and violent Road realities become blurred, So much so that the demarcation line between reality grime music and ‘actual occurrences’ of gun- and knife-related violent crime ‘have arguably become difficult for the authorities to disentangle’ (Ilan, 2012:52). Clearly reality grime artists such as Giggs seemingly represent the uncompromising face of black and urban youth that middle England finds unpalatable and dangerous, as opposed 3

Operation Trident is an MPS specialist unit set up specifically to tackle and investigate gun violence in the black community. 133

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to the non-threatening and ‘endearing’ qualities of pop-tinged rappers such as Dizzee Rascal and Tiny Temper. This binary representation of black (now urban) youth culture is a theme that has dominated media, policy and academic discussions on the black British youth ‘problem’ during the past 50 years.Within this binary model of cultural representation young black males are often portrayed and viewed as problematic and criminogenic urban outlaws, or sometimes as cool cultural innovators and entertainers with mainstream appeal (Alexander, 1996; Sewell, 1997). Unfortunately, due to the current police-constructed and media-driven gangs crisis the criminogenic violent urban outlaw image is still dominant and thus represents a continuation of the perennial problematisation and essentialisation of the black British male subject (Gunter, 2010). Concluding implications and the ethnic penalty This chapter has argued that the UK gangs crisis is largely a police-media-driven phenomenon and that the Conservative (and previous coalition) government led anti-gangs policy agenda is both contentious and problematic. First, the agreed official definition of the ‘street gang’ as referred to by governmental and policing agencies is too broad and fails to distinguish between peer groups hanging about in public spaces ‘doing nothing’, or being rowdy and from time to time engaging in low-level antisocial behaviour, and those groups of young people whose lifestyles and friendship networks are primarily focussed on violent criminal activity. The ambiguity of the definition is further compounded by the fact that those academics working in this newly burgeoning area cannot even agree on definitions, typologies or indeed the prevalence of youth gangs in the UK. Second, current gangs policy, policing and preventative practice in the UK is premised on unchallenged police statistics and the work of principally one gang academic, John Pitts. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s Report (HMIC, 2014) on the inspection of crime data integrity in police forces in England

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and Wales,4 carried out between February and August 2014, although not specific to gang crime, nevertheless identifies serious concerns about the crime recording process. The MPS statistics on 6,600 gang crimes committed during the three-year period up to February 2014 detail 24 murders, 28 attempted killings, and 170 firearms offences, stabbings, and kidnappings allegedly ‘carried out by one of 3,484 gang members’, aged as young as 13 (Bentham, 2014:1). It turns out that these figures are derived from offending data recorded on the MPS gangs matrix, a database that ‘uses criminal records and intelligence from police, probation, prisons and other experts to identify Londoners who are gang members. A scoring system ranks each person according to the violent “risk threat or harm” that they present, grading the worst category red and the others amber or green’ (Bentham, 2014:2). The problem here relates to the reliance on criminal records and intelligence from justice sector agencies, including the police, to identify gang members. As already highlighted earlier in this chapter, the current official definition of the street gang is an ambiguous and catchall description that unfairly labels disproportionate numbers of young BAME males as gang members due to their urban street lifestyles, cultures and peer friendship networks. In addition, the use of the gangs matrix only serves to formalise the biases of police officers and other justice sector experts by criminalising family members, friends and acquaintances of alleged ‘known gang members’.The rather open-ended and ambiguous nature of the street gang label and the significant risk of discretionary bias on the part of individual police officers allows for them to incorrectly record any criminal offence – including stabbings, firearms offences, robbery, murder, sexual assault and low-level antisocial behaviour – as gang related. More concerning still, the 2015 Home Affairs Committee Report highlighted that many police services are not even using the standard definition of the street gang and that consequently they have not ‘flagged “gang-related” offences in a “systematic and unified manner across all forces”’. Moreover, it also reported 4

According to the HMIC it is the most extensive inspection of its kind that it has ever undertaken into crime data integrity. 135

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on the fact that while there are a number of forces which ‘have developed systems that list gang members and their associates based on internal “intelligence”, in the main, there has been ‘“very little research and official guidance in relation to this process and its products”’ (HM Government, 2015a:9). It is therefore unsurprising to further note that according to police statistics black young males are disproportionately involved in gang-related violent crime, as both offenders and victims (Alderson, 2010). Consequently, the gangs crisis draws on the perennial theme of black youth as the criminal ‘other’ (Keith, 1993) and it provides further justification for their continued targeting by the police and subsequent overrepresentation within all areas of the criminal justice system. The majority of gang academics prefer to largely ignore issues of race, for complex reasons that have been discussed at some length throughout this chapter. However, as Will McMahon argues, if ‘Justice Matters forYoung Black Men’ then gang academics will need to take seriously and address head on the ‘ethnic penalty’ specifically pertaining to why there are a disproportionate number of young black men in the prison population (McMahon, 2014). Prison population data as of 30 June 2013 showed that there were 10,000 black men in prison, which represents 13.3% of the prison population and four times their number in general population (Berman and Dar, 2013). Youth justice figures for England and Wales during 2012–13 showed that 21% of young people (under 18) held in custody in the secure estate were from a black ethnic background, even though they represented only 8% of the overall Youth Offending Team caseload (Youth Justice Board/Ministry of Justice, 2014). Also, according to survey findings published in the 2014–15 Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, 45% of children in YOIs were from black or minority backgrounds (HM Government, 2015b). Further evidence of the ‘ethnic penalty’ is provided in the Institute of Race Relations’ publication Dying for Justice (Athwal et al, 2015), which reveals that at least 509 individuals from black and minority backgrounds have died in suspicious circumstances while in state detention since 1991, with most deaths occurring in prison or police custody. Clearly the criminal justice system 136

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is disproportionately punishing black males, and while the news media report on police statistics and the problem of violent urban black youth (as a means to justify oppressive policing practice), academics within the gang area in particular continue to remain largely silent with regard to race by adopting a ‘colour blind’ approach to their work, yet nonetheless describing and scrutinising in some detail the violent social worlds and lifestyles of the ‘black street gang’. Engaging with the transitions, cultures and identities perspectives that are central to the work of those scholars working in the area of contemporary youth studies will allow gang criminologists better insight into the ‘ethnic penalties’ or disadvantages that black young men face not only in relation to the justice system, but also in education, employment and health.

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FIVE

Policy, prevention and policing into practice Introduction This chapter will examine, within a locally situated context, the impact of the national ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ and ‘austerity’ – and specifically the local ‘Enough is Enough’ – policy agendas on youth provision and policing strategy/practice in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. It draws heavily on data gleaned from a three-year study Youth Crime Prevention Practice & Neighbourhood Policing: A Study of one East London Borough1 (see also Chapters two and six). The research project set out to examine youth crime prevention practice and evaluate local residents’ perceptions and satisfaction with policing in their neighbourhoods. As well as utilising ethnographic research techniques, the study also comprises in-depth biographical interviews with 66 young adults aged 14–24, as well as interviews with 34 practitioners and key stakeholders, including police officers, youth workers, housing officers, local residents and parents. The majority of the young informants resided in the adjoining neighbourhoods of Gulley and Dungle2 – the two primary research sites featured in this ethnographic study. 1

2

This three-year youth crime and policing research project – supported with funding assistance from the British Academy SG100161 – forms part of a longer (five-year) ethnographic study of youth transitions and cultures in one east London borough. All names referred to throughout the remainder of this chapter, including participants and places, are pseudonyms. 139

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As well as being characterised by super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007) the research sites are also among the 20% of most deprived neighbourhoods in England (HM Government, 2010). The neighbourhoods of Gulley and Dungle are part of Manton Estate, built in the early 1970s and comprised of high-rise tower blocks and eight-storey flats, interspersed with owner-occupied Victorian terraced houses. Within the early part of the 2000s, Manton had been regenerated by the local Housing Action Trust into a low-rise housing estate. Nearly two thirds (64%) of the residents of Gulley and Dungle are from a BAME background (Office for National Statistics, 2012). In this study approximately 10% of the young respondents ‘self-identified’ themselves as White British, 50% as Black British or mixed (black/white) heritage, with the remainder describing themselves as White Other, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Moroccan, Iranian, Mauritian or Somali. The research project was initially embarked on to locally examine the impact of the many programmes and initiatives that had been introduced nationally by the New Labour government aimed at tackling youth crime and other associated ‘problems’ of marginalised youth.The research site where this three-year study was undertaken was initially identified because it was familiar to the researcher and furthermore because it was a London borough that had experienced increasing levels of serious youth violence including fatalities. In 2011, the coalition government identified the London Borough of Waltham Forest as a beacon of good practice with regard to its partnership arrangements for tackling its youth gangs problem. However, this chapter will argue that the gangs agenda has brought with it targeted funding for gangs youth work amid wholesale cuts to generic youth services, and more generally severe cuts to frontline services, as a consequence of the government’s austerity policies. Moreover, these drastic reductions in welfare spending negatively impact on those families and communities most affected by serious youth violence and other social problems driven by acute socio-economic disadvantage and marginalisation. Additionally, the focus on street gangs and associated operational policing strategy has led to the continued and increasing harassment and targeting of young black males. 140

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The core arguments contained in this, and the following, chapter are based on some of the key findings from the research study and additionally revisit and update my previous research in this area undertaken a decade earlier (see Gunter, 2008; Gunter and Watt, 2009; Gunter, 2010). Youth (gangs) and social exclusion According to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (HM Government, 2010), Waltham Forest is the 15th most deprived borough in England, ranks sixth in London and is also one of the most ‘super diverse’ (Vertovec, 2007; Wessendorf, 2014) areas in the country.The borough has a poor record regarding educational attainment; in 1996 all of the schools within Waltham Forest were placed under an Ofsted accelerated inspection. This was due to major concerns being raised, during earlier inspections, about the ‘possibility of large numbers’ of failing schools in the borough, indeed ‘seven schools were made subject to special measures’ (Ofsted, 2000:4). As well as highlighting the poor strategic management of education within Waltham Forest, the report also went on to outline the other areas of poor performance, most notably the ‘proportion of primary and secondary schools’ where both the ‘quality of education and school management requires some or much improvement is above that of statistical neighbours and national figures’.The report also found that the ‘proportion of pupils achieving five or more GCSE passes at grades A*–C is well below statistical neighbours and national averages’, while ‘attendance levels are below national rates and the number of exclusions is well above (Ofsted, 2000:4). As a consequence of the damning findings of this report, Waltham Forest Council took the decision in 2001 – under pressure from the Department for Education and Skills – to contract out its education service to a private company EduAction (BBC News, 2001a; Becket, 2001). However, a performance assessment of the council’s education and children’s social care services carried out by Ofsted and the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) in 2005 still found that ‘too many young people, particularly Black Caribbean boys, do not reach level 2 in their education/training by the age of 19’ (Ofsted and 141

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Commission for Social Care Inspection, 2005:7). In 2007 a report about educational attainment in Waltham Forest at key stages 2 and 3 found that while ‘there has been steady improvement across both key stages’ since EduAction was awarded the contract in 2001, ‘there is still a significant gap between results for Waltham Forest and our ambition to reach national averages’. Ofsted went on to highlight the fact that ‘these two measures in English and maths are key to the success of young people in gaining employment’ (LBWF, 2007:1). Nearly 15 years after the initial privatisation of its education service, 22% of children in Waltham Forest are still leaving ‘primary school without Level 4 in English and maths compared to just 10% in Richmond upon Thames’ (GLA, 2013:10). Historically, low-level and no qualifications have underpinned much of the labour market exclusion and disadvantage in east London (Syrett and North, 2008) which has impacted disproportionately on its youth population. Indeed, young people residing in east London are more likely to be recorded as ‘NEET’ when compared to those living in other parts of the city (GLA, 2007). Research indicates that there is a high correlation between being NEET and ‘later forms of disadvantage and poor welfare outcomes’ (Coles et al, 2010:7) including cyclical bouts of unemployment and under-employment, mental illness, homelessness and persistent offending behaviour culminating in custodial sentences. It is within this context of poor educational outcomes and increasing disadvantage/marginalisation – as well as concerns about escalating levels of violent crime – among pockets of its youth population, that in 2006 Waltham Forest Council commissioned John Pitts (2007) to examine the activities, structure and impact of gangs on life in the borough. According to the Council, the subsequent report entitled Reluctant Gangsters: Youth Gangs in Waltham Forest ‘was one of the first of its type in Britain.The report has informed Waltham Forest’s future efforts to tackle’ gang-related youth crime and ‘also significantly Dying to Belong – the Centre for Social Justice’s seminal review of street gangs in Britain’ published in 2009 (LBWF, 2010:28). Pitts’ report was compiled between the period September 2006 and March 2007 and draws on data derived from two surveys and 142

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54 key informant interviews undertaken with local residents, professionals and young people. It is important to point out that the report also draws heavily on police data and intelligence about the activities, structure and extent of gangs and violent crime in Waltham Forest. The ‘Reluctant Gangsters’ study identified up to 18 gangs operating in Waltham Forest and alleged that, in the autumn of 2006, there were roughly 600–700 young adults aged between 10 and 29 who were directly engaged in gang activity. At the time of the 2001 National Census, the number of 10–29-year-olds in Waltham Forest stood at just under 67,000; based on these estimates, 1% of all young people living in Waltham Forest in 2006 were gang-involved. Utilising the MPS’s ‘Harm Assessment Scoring Scale’, six of the gangs identified in the borough ‘appeared to be causing a high level of harm (A high level of harm equates with the commission of serious assaults, rape, kidnapping, attempted murder and murder)’ (Pitts, 2007:3).The report also found that gangs were estate based and not formed along ethnic lines, nonetheless, black African Caribbean and mixed heritage youth ‘predominate’. Moreover,‘Whatever their ethnic origin, however, gang members assume the style and manner dictated by popular, globalised, ostensibly “Black”, street culture’ (Pitts, 2007:40). In looking at the structures of gangs in the east London borough, Pitts noted that existing academic gang definitions failed to capture either the variety or complexity of its current gang situation. As a consequence, the report developed a new six-point typology of Waltham Forest gangs: the Articulated Super Gang, the Street Gang, the Compressed Street Gang, the Wannabee Gangsters, the CriminalYouth Group and the Middle Level International Criminal Business Organisation. However, Pitts’ (2007:37–8) report was mainly interested in the first four of these gang typologies. The Articulated Super Gang – it has a name and is ‘a local familial, grouping with a long history of involvement in organised crime’ particularly the illicit drugs trade. ‘Its subgroups are determined by age (Youngers/Elders) role Shotters/Soldiers and location’ and have horizontal links, via business dealings, to ‘other gangs both within and beyond the borough’. In addition, this type of grouping has vertical connections into ‘higher echelon organised 143

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crime’ and also ‘downwards to its retailers and the Youngers/ Soldiers who protect gang territory and gang business and support themselves via street crime’. In turn, Pitts alleges that these Youngers/Soldiers ‘delegate “jobs” to the aspirant Wannabees who hover on the margins of the gang’. Within the borough the Super Gang exerts a huge amount of control over both its ‘residential and drug-dealing territories … drawing reluctant gangsters into the fold’. The Street Gang – described as a ‘relatively durable, predominantly street-based group of young people who see themselves (and are seen by others) as a discernible group for whom’ violence and criminal activity ‘is integral to the group’s identity’. This grouping’s territory can be ‘either residential or based on opportunities for particular forms of crime’. The Compressed Street Gang – a new but relatively small grouping that has a narrow age range, no subgroups and whose territory is residential.‘Members see themselves (and are seen by others) as a discernible group for whom crime and violence is integral to the group’s identity. Its territory is residential’. The Wannabee Gangsters – as the name suggests, this grouping ‘have not developed the structural characteristics of traditional gangs’, rather they are characterised by ‘a narrow age range and high turnover’, but tend to ‘assume the trappings of street gangs, insignia, street names etc. and lay claim to territory’.Within the borough, Wannabees generally ‘are loosely structured groups, engaging in spontaneous social activity and impulsive, criminal activity, including collective violence against other groups of youths’. The main conclusion of the report was that the existence and proliferation of gangs in Waltham Forest was driving both gun-enabled and violent street crime in the borough. Drawing on police crime data, Pitts notes that between January 2005 and December 2006 there were ‘493 incidents of gun-enabled crime’, which is a term that incorporates threats with a replica firearm right through to wounding and fatalities. During this same period,Waltham Forest ‘had the seventh highest rate of fatal and non-fatal shootings of the thirty-two London boroughs’, with a total of 18 recorded incidents. (Pitts, 2007:44–5). Furthermore, with regard to gun-enabled crime data,African Caribbean males 144

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aged under 20 ‘are heavily over represented as perpetrators’ and victims. According to the report ‘a far larger number of white Caucasian children and young people’ were also found to be victims of gun-enabled crime.Within the borough, the problem of gun-enabled crime ‘is concentrated in certain “hotspots” which [are located in] or adjacent to, the major gang estates in the borough and overlap with street crime and drug-dealing hotspots’ (Pitts, 2007:45–6). Enough is Enough Between the years 2007 and 2009, Waltham Forest’s Gang Prevention Programme (GPP) was overseen by its Youth Crime Prevention Board (YCPB) and formed part of the SafetyNet Executive Board, the borough’s Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership (CRDP). During this period theYCPB was focussed on early intervention projects undertaken mainly in the south of the borough,‘with the targeting of gang member “wannabes” having been one of the principle projects’ (LBWF, 2009:64). Rather than deliver this work through its own statutory youth support service, the Council commissioned two social businesses, Catch 22 and the London Action Trust.TheYCPB reported that a default notice was issued to Catch 22 in December 2008 due to ‘performance difficulties’ concerning ‘their delivery of youth diversionary activities in the south of the borough’. Nevertheless, during the financial year 2008/09 approximately 189 young people had ‘been engaged in this service, with an average of 70 young people taking part in structured activities each month’. Over this same period, London Action Trust recorded that over 148 young people had engaged in their regular programme of diversionary activities (LBWF, 2009:64). Following the election of the New Labour-run administration in May 2010,Waltham Forest Council agreed that tackling gangs was one of its main priorities, to be personally overseen by the Chief Executive, and agreed/adopted a cross-portfolio and multi-agency approach and model. It also established a violence prevention board, attained capacity-building support from the Home Office and committed to protect the local voluntary and community sector (VCS) community safety budget from cuts. 145

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The borough’s gang prevention programme, drawing intensively on Reluctant Gangsters (1997) and the ‘recommended principles of Dying to Belong’ (Pickles, 2009), further added to the ‘mechanisms to achieve individual behaviour change based upon leading-edge practice in other fields and robust evidence’.As such the Waltham Forest model will ‘Focus on those families of most concern; Combine enforcement and an offer of support; Have 3 tiers of intervention’ that will include – ‘specialist interventions aimed at gang members; targeted interventions aimed at parents and siblings of gang members; and community capacity and resilience development (LBWF, 2010:29). At the heart of this model is the interdisciplinary gang prevention team (GPT) of family practitioners, comprising a team leader and three caseworkers, each of whom carries a caseload of ten families. The lead professionals in the GPT – which coordinates ‘all interventions targeting the cohort families, including enforcement interventions’ – were further supported by additional expertise with staff seconded from other council departments and partner organisations. Waltham Forest Council’s Police Youth Engagement Team was also ‘integrated into the GPT’ in order to ‘lead on targeted enforcement against the cohort. Enforcement will utilise “every possible lever” methodologically’ and includes ‘Proactive policing; Use of the range of remedies through the Criminal Court; ASB legislation; Housing remedies ...; Use of child protection legislation; and Financial investigation’ (LBWF, 2010:29–30). In January 2011 the council’s gang prevention model was rebranded and officially launched as ‘Enough is Enough’ (LBWF, 2012) with the cost of this three-year multi-agency programme estimated at £3.52 million. As was the case with the borough’s earlier gang prevention model, the ‘Enough is Enough’ project focussed on four key themes: the Family Partnership Team (or the GPT), Multi-Agency Partnership and Community working, Early intervention and lastly, Enforcement.According to the Council,‘we anticipated an initial rise in gang-related crime given enforcement activities and inner flux within our local gangs’. However, within the first nine months of launching the project ‘we have in fact seen significant reductions in gang-related violence and robbery’ (LBWF, 2012:4). 146

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This initial success, as claimed in the council’s 12-page glossy colour brochure entitled Enough is Enough: the first nine months, was due to the project utilising high-level police intelligence in order to target an initial cohort of 120 at-risk and gang-involved individuals and 33 families. In terms of enforcement activities, by September 2011 the police had compiled an ‘accurate list of known gang members’ and up to 60 search warrants for private premises and residential homes had been issued. In addition, there had been 80 gang-related arrests, up to 100 dangerous weapons including guns and knives had been recovered, and there had been convictions for a variety of serious violent and drug-related crimes (LBWF, 2012:10). These alleged enforcement successes in Waltham Forest had resulted in ‘a significant reduction in gang crime as compared to the same six-month period (January–June) last year’ (2011):

– Serious youth violence is down by 24% – Gun crime down by 31% – Knife crime down by 16% – Personal robbery down by 11%. This represents a saving to the taxpayer of £2.3million (LBWF, 2012:10).

At the end of 2014 Waltham Forest progressed on to stage two, an additional three-year project cycle which would take its GPP right through to 2017. However, in anticipation of this next phase, the Council first set about highlighting the successes of the first three years and, drawing on information provided by its preferred independent evaluator, Cordis Bright, claimed that in the first 24 months of the project ‘we worked with 191 gang members, 71 young people at risk of gang involvement and 12 victims of gang violence’ as well as some families. ‘In 2012/13 we saw the largest reduction in gang violence amongst 10–19 year olds anywhere in London. And whilst gang violence perpetrated by school children’ increased marginally across the rest of London ‘here in Waltham Forest it fell by more than half. In 2013/14 we have continued to see significant falls in gang violence amongst young people in the borough’. Furthermore, the number of ‘residents who report that they are worried about 147

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gangs in the borough has fallen from one in three to one in ten’. Lastly, the GPP’s ‘independent evaluator has concluded that the programme is targeting the right people and achieving real and lasting benefits’ (LWBF, 2014b:3). Cordis Bright, in its evaluation of the first phase of ‘Enough is Enough’, highlighted a number of issues raised by its ‘extensive consultation’ with key GPP stakeholders, which included decision makers, community members, key workers and some of the project’s young beneficiaries and their families.There was consensus among the stakeholders that ‘the leadership of the GPP could be improved’, and specifically the ‘lines of accountability and responsibility in the GPP could be improved’. Stakeholders also wanted more clarity ‘about where responsibility is for the overall strategic delivery of the GPP’, and agreed that a new strategic plan was needed in order to improve:

a) the understanding of the GPP and its aims and objectives across all stakeholders, b) the focus and direction for the programme in future years, c) mechanisms for measuring, demonstrating and reporting success, and d) helping to ensure an evidence-led approach to commissioning(LBWF, 2014a:5).

Although the majority of stakeholders felt that the GPP was ‘engaging the appropriate target audience’ and that ‘they understood the target audience well’, there were some who ‘felt that there was confusion across the GPP’. As such, ‘is the main target audience of the GPP young people at risk of involvement in gangs’, those already ‘involved in gangs, those exiting gangs, adults involved in gangs, former gang members exiting the secure estate, siblings of gang members, or all these groups and others?’ (LBWF, 2014a:7). There were also specific concerns raised by stakeholders about the police matrix used to identify gang ‘nominals’, those individuals labelled at-risk or gang-involved. ‘They felt that the matrix was unrepresentative in terms of identifying gang’

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members3 and was also perceived to be ‘self-perpetuating as it is based on police intelligence which is prioritised on how recent the information is’. Furthermore, ‘there was also a concern that once on the matrix nominals can never leave it’ regardless of whether or not they are ‘making progress through, for example, working with the GPP’ (LBWF, 2014a:7). According to Cordis Bright, ‘there is qualitative evidence collected as part of this evaluation which shows that’ the GPP is ‘having a positive impact on beneficiaries’ outcomes’. In this regard families targeted by the programme have identified the following: an improved sense of wellbeing, improved communication skills, re-housed/relocated to a safer area, re-engagement with education, dissociation from negative peer group, improved family relationships, and are less angry and confrontational. Also those key workers who were ‘supporting the original cohort were able to identify some progress that had been made against the identified impacts and outcomes at stage 1’, particularly with regard to a ‘reduction in serious youth violence incidents and relocation of families to a safe area’ (LBWF, 2014a:7–8). Official crime data indicated that there had been a reduction in gun and knife crime as well as serious youth violence in Waltham Forest during both the 2011/12 and 2012/13 reporting years. Nonetheless, the independent evaluators maintained that ‘caution should be applied in suggesting that the GPP is solely responsible for declining crime rates’ (LBWF, 2014a:9).This latter point is particularly pertinent given that there were also concerns expressed about the quality of the programme’s quantitative evidence. ‘There was agreement among all the key’ stakeholders that the GPP’s ‘approach to collecting, collation, analysis and dissemination of monitoring data that evidences impact of the service on beneficiary outcomes could be improved’. It was clear that a new approach was needed that provided ‘greater evidence of need, work completed and quality, impact against outcomes and consistency of data across GPP services’. The 3

Some stakeholders ‘felt that the only effective way of clearly identifying gang-associated young people was through their “self identification” as being in a gang’. As such, ‘a future challenge for the GPP is agreeing an approach around corroboration of gang membership claims’ (LBWF, 2014a:13). 149

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evaluators further reported that there ‘was some concern that current monitoring is not systematic and that requests for monitoring data is made on an ad-hoc basis’. Correspondingly, among the key decision makers and community representatives ‘there was also recognition that taking a systematic approach to collecting, collating, analysing and reporting on monitoring data requires sufficient resourcing’ (LBWF, 2014a:9). Of particular significance was the fact that ‘The majority of stakeholders were either unaware of how the GPP linked and embedded measures of success to value for money, or identified it as an area for improvement. The finances of the GPP were not regarded as transparent as they could be by the majority of stakeholders’ (LBWF, 2014a:13). Young people’s services and austerity The impact of neoliberal government social policies on young people’s services over the past four decades – specifically the continued cuts to public expenditure – has resulted in the move away from universalist to more targeted provision (see Davies, 2013). Multi-agency partnership working and the commissioning and delivery of early intervention programmes for ‘at-risk’ youth is central to this model of current practice. Although the development of targeted youth services dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was ambitiously revitalised under New Labour in the 1990s and is a key feature of the Conservative (and previous coalition) government’s youth and families social policy agenda. In a climate of austerity many third sector service providers, who have been particularly affected by severe cuts to welfare expenditure, are compelled to engage with central and local government initiatives like ‘Enough is Enough’ that have ring-fenced funding attached. Similarly, local authority service providers (who on one hand implement these cuts to front-line services) have to buy into national programmes like ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ (HM Government, 2011) and ‘Troubled Families’ (HM Government, 2012) in order to bring in extra resources. In March 2015 Waltham Forest Council proudly proclaimed, in its weekly newspaper, ‘SINCE 2010 WE HAVE SAVED 150

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£68 MILLION, BUT WE NOW NEED TO SAVE £57 MILLION MORE BY 2018’ (LBWF, 2015:2); however these savings have particularly impacted on frontline services such as housing, adult care, children and youth services. Interestingly, while acknowledging its new approved budget for the 2011/12 financial year included savings totalling £35 million, the Council boasted that it had found an extra £1 million for its gang prevention programme ‘Enough is Enough’ as well as £500,000 for 16 extra police officers (LBWF, 2012). It has become evident that the Council – as confirmed in all of its annual budgets since March 2011 – is prioritising control and punishment rather than welfare and support for its vulnerable residents (Wacquant, 2009); this is emphasised particularly by the decimating £5.9 million cuts (77% of total budget) to its youth services (BBC News, 2014): Mark:

INT: Mark:

INT: Mark:

Mark:

You know there hasn’t been a youth service in this borough for years. I mean I don’t want to get political on you, but going back to the 90s they’ve cut it to the bone, and now this latest one, well this now is officially the end. How can a service go from 60 FTEs [full time equivalent posts] to 12 in one week and still expect to deliver any kind of service. [Youth Work Practitioner] But they have invested in gangs youth work? Don’t get me started on that one.That’s another thing, every day we are picking up the pieces from all this over policing of our young people, and plus with all this talk about ‘cleaning things up for the Olympics’ things are getting worse, if you can believe that. You mean stop and search? Yeah. They don’t learn, and like they continue to target and be heavy handed with our youth, you know everything’s about drugs and gangs and what have you. All this targeted youth work stuff, its like we can only work with young people if they are in a 151

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‘gang’. I mean what the hell is a gang anyway? As my young people love to tell me, the biggest gang around here are the ‘feds’ [police]. All that generic youth work stuff, working with young people where they are at, empowerment, forget about that, its now all about disempowering young people. Basically we are now working for the police and the justice system. While targeted and multi-agency working has had a profound effect on the management and delivery of youth services, clearly not all beleaguered practitioners – whether in housing, youth offending teams or youth services – are happy about their new role as ‘junior partners’ to the police and other justice sector agencies. INT: Marvin:

Is your work targeted? Yeah, it is now. My job used to be around youth achievement, where I used to work with young people across the borough but because of the high profile cases of two young men being stabbed in the south [of the borough], all the councillors started jumping up and down about the youth service needs to be doing more. So then my job got changed and I was deployed to the south to work on the crime prevention project. [Practitioner – Youth Support Service] INT: So you work closely with the police and gang prevention team? Marvin: I don’t know about the gang team, they’re supposed to be working round here, but I’ve never come across them and nor have the young people I work with. But I hear they have a bigger budget than we do [laughs]. INT: What about the police? Marvin: I mean our job was to a certain extent to prevent crime, but the police I just found they got in the way. They just really did get in the way. We did a SUS panel, like workshop, and 152

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we called in some police and then we got some young people to come in and address them, do you know what I mean, and speak to them. And it was just really interesting that they, the police, had no idea what was going on, do you get what I mean? And then when the young people actually said to them, well, we want a place where we can ride our bikes, we want a place where we can play football late at night, we want a place where we can play basketball. These were the sort of questions, and they just danced around it.They, say they’re interested in crime prevention but really they’re not. They [police] just come in and cause problems and leave, there is no come back for them, so they feel they can act how they like. The way I see it if you police properly, you know going back to the old community policing, where you had your community officer who walks the beat that builds relationships locally, you then wouldn’t have these problems. But now its like they want to use the police to solve everything … While the Council was proud of its award-winning gangs project and constantly boasted about the increased investment in policing and crime prevention, there was an increasing amount of frustration and cynicism among many practitioners and community stakeholders: Janice:

Gang crime prevention. It’s just politics.They’re not interested in the young people, because if you was you’d change the conditions they’re living in. Do you get what I mean? There’s no point throwing millions at it. It’s just ways for people to stay in office. They don’t actually do anything. Do you know what I mean? How can I come in as a youth worker and have a young person for three hours, all right, and change the way that young person thinks, when 153

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they’re going back to their situation straight afterwards. [housing association – Community Engagement Team] Surveillance as early intervention

The fundamental questions that arise from the currently in vogue targeted and multi-agency partnership approach are first who gets to define who is at-risk (and who is gang-involved) and what are the defining criteria? This model of working, amply illustrated by Waltham Forest’s GPP, requires that representatives and ‘professionals’ from housing, probation, children and youth services, youth offending teams, education, social services, third sector organisations and the police hold regular case meetings to categorise, label and monitor those children, young people and their families whom they deem to be ‘at-risk’, ’gang-involved’ or ‘troubled’. Additionally, the payment-by-results public sector funding model currently in favour incentivises statutory and third sector service providers – all of whom are faced with severe cuts to their core funding – to secure extra or ring-fenced funding by identifying as many at-risk young people as they possibly can. This is not very difficult as just like the problematic official definition of the ‘street gang’, it is a very broad and catchall label: INT: BW: INT: SW:

… how do you target those young people who are part of the [Gang Prevention] project in terms of the need, who they are? What on the matrix? [Waltham Forest GPP Coordinator] On your matrix, on your measurement matrix? I think what we’ve got to say is we have to have a starting point, so we’re very very careful to give a caveat around those young people that have been identified, they are identified by intelligence across the police really, so where they are involved in criminal activity, all of those type of things. The risk matrix ... was built … and then populated … with our top 90 or 80 I

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BW: SW:

BW:

can’t remember? [MPS Borough Commander for Waltham Forest] It is 88, yeah. … we have like a monthly meeting where we actually screen and we look at those young people who are those at most risk … those that cause the most risk, so the most risky people from both sides … And that isn’t decided by one or two people, we have a whole set of professionals sitting round that table ... youth offending team chairs it with the police, I sit there, housing sit there, … extended provisions and educations sit there, and we look at all of those on probation, so it’s around looking at those with the greatest need to have support and/or those who are creating the most risk for the wider community … I wouldn’t say it was scientific but it’s actually, like we say it’s matrixed, we’re looking at them. And you know, as you say, it was the matrix that was populated across the partnership because we, you know we all tend to be dealing with the same people sometimes, but in isolation, this was about bringing the partnership together so we populated that list. Now that is reviewed on, you know on a daily basis because we’re always getting information and intelligence. Sooner or later schools could be putting people forward, it could be parents … youth offending, youth workers, it could be the police ...

As highlighted by the interview discussion above, outside of safeguarding and child protection, the two categories or warning signals that trigger the ‘at-risk’ label to be applied the most are those pertaining to education and crime; unsurprisingly black male youth score highly on both of these. In Waltham Forest, police intelligence and statistics have consistently indicated that black young men are disproportionately involved in gangs and violent crime, even though there have been concerns expressed – 155

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and highlighted in the Council’s own independent evaluation of its anti-gangs programme – about the veracity of this information. Enforcement as punishment

With regard to gang enforcement activity, it is Waltham Forest’s black youth population who are the ‘usual suspects’ (see McAra and McVie, 2005; Sharp and Atherton, 2007; Medina, 2014) that bear the brunt of oppressive policing tactics on the streets: INT:

Do you think that the police target certain types of people at all? Solomon: Its like, blatant, I think yeah its only a certain type of person who they think is doing whatever [black male, 16]. INT: What type of person is that? Solomon: Like black, mostly it is, they think all of us like are probably in a gang or something like that Ayo: … well, in Dungle they basically only focus on certain people, because in that area so many, well it’s only black people that are getting stopped all the time.There’s only like one or two white kids that are rolling around with the black kids, but they just look at how you’re dressed, how you walk, they just target those people. [black male, 17] In discussing his role as a ‘junior partner’ working alongside the police, youth work practitioner Marvin stated earlier that:“They just come in and cause problems and leave, there is no come back for them, so they feel they can act how they like.” This ‘acting how they like’ refers to the aggressive and confrontational manner in which the police interact with black youth in Dungle and Gulley on a daily basis, on the streets and other public spaces. Of particular concern is the behaviour of officers working within the Territorial Support Group (TSG) who, in contrast to the Safer Neighbourhood Teams, have no connection to the local communities they are deployed to police.There were a number of incidents and occasions where I observed TSG officers swooping 156

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into action and harassing countless numbers of predominantly black young people in the pursuit of drugs or weapons – even threatening myself and other concerned adults who attempted to intervene. Often they would attempt to publicly humiliate their young ‘victims’ by making them take off their socks, footwear, head gear and any outer clothes garments, throw them forcibly up against walls, make racist comments and insult their mothers. Unfortunately, it was such an everyday occurrence that many black young people in the two neighbourhoods viewed it to be ‘normal’: Jamal:

T-jay: INT: T-jay:

INT: T-jay: INT:

To be honest like, I get stopped on a regular when it first happened I was like angry and that because they can get rude and a bit hyper. They try to intimidate you and get a reaction and all the good cop bad cop s**t, and when you are younger it like kinda works. But now, after a while I just got used to it, like I thought it was normal … You know to be true like, I been stopped too many times, I can’t really remember how many but definitely too many. (black male, 16) [laughs] yeah … one day I think I was stopped about seven times [black male, 17]. Why, did they give you a justifiable reason? Apparently I fit the description of someone that robbed a gang. Well, I’m not robbing a gang. And, what was the other one? The other one was because I was riding a bike, er, I was doing a wheelie round the park, they said it was reckless riding, but really, I’m not on the road so I’m allowed to do that, they just kept stopping me as well. This was all in one day? One, yeah. And other than that, have you been stopped and searched as well?

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T-jay:

Oh yeah, there’s been like a month where I have, like every day I go out, I get stopped and searched. INT: So it’s a regular occasion for you. T-jay: Yeah. Official government statistics indicate that ‘compared with the White ethnic group, stops and searches’ are ‘more likely to be carried out on the Black (four and a half times more likely)’ ethnic groups (HM Government, 2015c:7). However, it should also be noted that the vast majority of stop and searches do not end up in the official statistics, as they are not necessarily recorded and the discretionary nature of police work allows for this. Consequently, according to the young respondents there were many instances where they had not been issued with a ticket4 acknowledging that they had been stopped and searched, or indicating the reason why and by whom: INT:

Did they [police] tell you why they stopped you? Marlon: Yeah … said it’s because they thought we was carrying knives? [black male, 17] INT: Okay and how did that make you feel? Marlon: Was like, after a while I didn’t understand but I just got used to it, like I thought it was normal. INT: So you get stopped and searched quite frequently? Marlon: Yeah. INT: So from the first time you got stopped up until now, how many times would you say you’ve been stopped? Marlon: Probably for more than 15 times. INT: So did they give you a ticket every time they stopped you?

4

Where before the search they are informed by police officer that they can have a record of the search and if this is not possible at the time, how they can obtain a copy. 158

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Marlon: What like where they can fine you an that? INT: No, its for you, to record the police officers name and number and reasons for them stopping you. Marlon; I didn’t know about any of that. Most times its hectic like, what you’re saying makes it sound all calm and nice like. INT: So they never explain your rights around stop and search? Marlon: No. Most times the way the police approach is quite heavy and over the top.And like if you do say something to them they’re like “stay there, shut up, right, one more word and we’re gonna arrest you”. There are a number of youth work projects (some even involving the MPS) that aim to train young people to know their rights around stop and search, as well as guidance on how to avoid conflict situations on the streets with police officers. However, while such projects are in principle clearly a positive development, I would also hasten to add that they can also be counter-productive – as highlighted above by Marlon. This is because many police officers do not take too kindly or react well to a young person (or even an adult, as I have experienced myself), whether they are polite or not, asking them questions and reminding them about the procedures that they should be following. View from the boys and girls in blue

The issue of stop and search has been intrinsically linked to those long-standing and ongoing concerns about police racism and the disproportionate surveillance and punishment of black Britons. While there are many commentators who interpret the higher rates of stop and search for black people as evidence of police bias, there are others who argue that this disproportionality is due to structural and demographic factors beyond the police’s control (see MVA and Miller, 2000;Waddington et al, 2004).Within this study also these same arguments, denying racial bias, were put 159

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forward by both senior officers and those on the ground in order to dispute that black young men are being unfairly targeted: INT:

SW:

… Is there an issue around stop and search and, for instance, would you say that the majority of young people involved [with gangs] would be black young men or minority ethnic young people, young men who, therefore, the police need to target particularly because they are, disproportionately affected …? I’ve got 922 staff on this borough, that’s not just all police officers ... and they are all one team … everyone understands what our priorities are, and the performance framework, beneath that, their activities, both the inputs, outputs, outcomes … it’s all being measured … Now stop and search is … really one small part within that. We have a stop and search monitoring group … you know we’re here to be accountable, it’s been a subject that’s discussed by scrutiny committee within the Local Authority … I would suggest to you that the training that officers have had around the use of the power and how it is used, we’ve not seen any increase in complaints and grievances by members of the community, but we are very conscious how it could be perceived, particularly when you have young people … most victims of crime and perpetrators are young people, police have more interaction on the streets with young people, so there is always a risk of disproportionality both more males are stopped, more young people are stopped and if we are targeting a particular crime in a particular community then there will be some disproportionality possibly around peoples race … , but we’re very conscious of that … I don’t see it as an issue, but you’re right, we have to be really conscious that there’s not a 160

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perception that we are therefore picking on people [Borough Commander for Waltham Forest] The MPS has 20 Safer Neighbourhood Teams (SNT) operating in Waltham Forest, and every ward has its own Police Community Support Officer and Dedicated Ward Officer. There are also additional officers that support these dedicated ward teams by working flexibly across a larger neighbourhood area, and such teams are usually led by an inspector and sergeant. According to the MPS, officers within the neighbourhood teams spend the majority of their time patrolling the streets on foot and engaging with the community in order to identify and deal with those crime issues that are of most concern to local residents (MPS, 2016). Gulley and Dungle’s SNT, although not solely concerned with gang-related youth crime, did work closely with the borough’s GPP and supported other MPS specialist units with regard to enforcement and raids/searches of private properties and residences.Without doubt they were the everyday face of the MPS in the two neighbourhoods, however the local SNT was perceived by many young people as a ‘joke’ and in particular the Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) were described as ‘Toy Cops’: INT:

So do you think that the Police Community Support Officers and the Safer Neighbourhoods Teams, have they helped improve the relationship you know between the police and the young people in … [Gulley and Dungle neighbourhoods] … or is it worse? Marvin: Are we talking about the ones that the young people, and I quote, call the Toy Cops? ...They really have no power, they have no purpose. The young people don’t take them seriously at all.When I was there, I found that they, they were kind of in a bit of a no win situation, where young people were quite prepared to be aggressive with them, do you get what I mean. Because they just didn’t see them as real … 161

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they didn’t see them as proper Feds [police] or whatever they want to call them.Yes, they didn’t really help the situation, to be honest with you. Officers working with the SNT in Gulley and Dungle were perceived by many members of the local community as the benign/ineffective and sometimes ‘bumbling’ local representatives of the MPS.Their largely supporting role to the TSG and other specialist police units meant that often they had to stand aside while their more aggressive and ‘real police’ colleagues descended into the neighbourhood, ‘caused havoc’ and then left the scene promptly, after which the SNT would then have to pick up the broken pieces of an already problematic relationship with the local community. As with their Borough Commander, SNT officers on the ground in the two neighbourhoods also denied that police bias and racism were an issue: INT:

Are the accusations of racism against the police fair or unfair would you say in your personal opinion? PC B: Unfair, totally. [police officer B, SNT] INT: Do you agree? PC A: Yes totally unfair, yes, I mean even as a team we’ve got, our team is made up of various [police officer A, SNT]. PC B: Ethnic backgrounds. PC A: Religious beliefs and that and our community is very very diverse as well. It’s the part of London really, it’s a very diverse culture and I don’t think the accusation of racism is fair in any way. INT: Yes. PC B: I think historically there may have been something there but I think people play on it, I think a lot of members of the public, or offenders should we say play on that fact. Personally since being in the job 17 years, 18 years, I haven’t seen any of it. I have worked all over the place and so it astounds me when people make the allegations that we are being 162

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racist towards them. However, when you actually ask someone to define what racism is they struggle to actually give you the correct definition and whatever they make a complaint about is not racism at all, it’s just us doing our job and picking on the people that we think are offending. The above responses of the two police officers from the SNT that covers Dungle and Gulley mirror the arguments put forward by Waddington et al (2004:890), who hypothesise that the disproportionate targeting of black young men attests more to their ethnic subcultural criminal lifestyles and ‘their greater availability’ – in contrast to the elderly and women who are ‘increasingly disinclined to venture onto’ or hang about the streets for fear of crime – ‘for being stopped and searched, rather than any particular selectivity on the part of the police’: INT: PC A: INT: PC A:

PC B: PC A: INT:

OK, so what race or ethnic groups do you feel are predominantly responsible for the crime in the neighbourhood? For the crime or the gang side of things? We’ll go with the gang side of things first. Gang side of things, there’s probably a mixture of the black community, from the Caribbean community,Asian and probably a small mixture of like what we call the Mediterranean type, Turkish, that type of thing, but in terms of crime I mean it depends on what crime will have a lot of bearing, I know it sounds silly but you might get one crime that is predominantly being committed by, or more likely to be committed by a specific ethnic background. For gangs here specifically South Leytonstone, mainly black and Asian I would say. Asian mainly. With a little bit of everything else thrown in. And again that’s from like the age of 16 upwards, for those kind of [gang] crime? 163

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PC B:

Yes, yes.

It should also be noted that primary the role of SNTs is to foster a close working relationship with all sections of the local community, in order to gauge opinion and gather key information about antisocial behaviour and local crime problems and ‘hotspots’: INT: PC B: PC A:

INT: PC A:

PC B:

Do you feel that the local community respect your work that you are doing? Yes. I think for Safer Neighbourhoods definitely, that’s what I think we’ve done really well as a team is we are quite well established in the community, we’ve got very strong links within certain groups, and that’s been kind of born over several years and that’s allowed us to go and speak to members of the community and pass messages on through the community via them. And they now, I think feel that they have got a team of people that they can contact if there’s a problem whereas before it’s like, “oh I can’t be bothered to call the police”, won’t do anything about it, “I don’t have anyone specific to talk to”, that’s kind of got rid of that problem and they all come to us. And I think they are more than happy with us as a community team yes. Do you think they are informed of the local Safer Neighbourhood Team properly? Yes. I think we do quite a lot with that. It’s a lot of, there are always different ways to kind of plug it from things like, what we have now is street briefings where we move around different locations at a certain time and that would be posted through people’s doors, and information on the internet.And also we hold various, what we call panel meetings and other meetings. Every quarter.

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PC A:

PC B:

Yes we do quite a bit to make sure that you know we are known about if you like and newsletters as well, we have newsletter drops as well. Neighbourhood Link which is an email system we put out.Yes there’s loads.

Interestingly, a Home Office Study by Caroline Turley et al (2012:7) identified a number of barriers ‘to delivering effective neighbourhood policing in partnership’, two of which were most definitely pertinent to Gulley and Dungle: first, ‘Engaging with too narrow a part of the community’ in that more often than not local crime-community consultation meetings and events failed to involve young people, BAME and more affluent residents. Rather, events organised by SNT or the borough Community Safety Team [such as the Mayor of London ‘Waltham Forest Community Conversation’] generally comprised residents who were already involved in other residents’ groups, or residents who felt particularly strongly about a specific issue facing them personally. Second, the financial climate in the age of austerity and the impact on the SNT with regard to resources and personnel: INT: PC B:

What extra resources or support do you think that you would need to do your job better? More officers is always the one, we are so restricted even with the recent crime spread that we’ve had, actually getting the assistance of specialist teams to work with us has been nigh on impossible, because they are all, even ourselves we are being abstracted to help other parts of the ward, borough or even other boroughs, tackle their own problems even though we’ve got what we class as massive problems on our own, perhaps in relation to other parts of the borough our problems are nowhere near as massive, but to us they are. So it is very very difficult. The abstraction level at the moment is extremely high, in other words 165

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PC A:

where other officers are getting removed from their day to day jobs and being told to do something else. Strike, tomorrow for example, we’ll all be abstracted tomorrow for that. So things like that are causing us lots of issues. And there’s just not enough police officers to go around and there’s only going to be less. Yes, with cuts they are making.

Residents’ perspectives

INT: LK:

INT: LK:

Are you aware of the Safer Neighbourhood Team for your area … are they still around? I don’t know, I don’t see them. I mean that’s the irony, I’ve very rarely seen them, but my understanding at a meeting last week was that budget had now been cut, and that was a direct criticism of not having enough police officers, so what they’ve done is obviously decided to get rid of that bit [SNT] and bring in more police officers … the plan that B [GPP Coordinator] put forward was, very, very targeted work, and I don’t know, I’ve no idea whether that’s working or not. I mean living on our estate, we’ve lived there for eight years. I had an argument with a police officer who told me that the number of emergency calls that they have from our estate is so low that it’s not even worth registering and I explained that from our perspective we’ve dialled 999 I think about four times and we’ve had no response … So, yeah … our relationship with the police hasn’t been particularly positive. [older female resident] So do you think the police could ... from your perspective do you think the police could do more? Well, I think yes, because I’m not quite clear what the police are doing … I don’t know what more they could do. I mean on the surface 166

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of it, where we had the “Call to Action” the police were all there, we had some big words, we had some big promises around how they were going to tackle this issue [around gangs]. I would still come back to the fact that I don’t think we have a big gang issue. We have youth violence, and I don’t think that’s particularly pleasant, but I’m not sure that that’s being tackled in a constructive way because services [youth provision] are going to be taken away from them [young people]. Most of the residents in Gulley and Dungle were oblivious to the role/work of the SNT and, and indeed tended to have a rather negative view of the police in general: INT: SA:

INT: SA: INT: SA: INT: SA:

… so then do you think the police are adequate at their jobs? No, not really, to be honest.You know, they are good and, you know, they do get their jobs done and they do what they have to but there are a lot of, you know, but I’d have to say no [older female resident]. Okay. And do you think that there are enough police officers patrolling the area? From what I see, obviously I’m at work most of the day and when I come back I don’t really ever see any police, to be honest. Okay, do you think that the police target young people, in particular maybe young black males in the area? Yes, definitely, and, not even probably just within that area but, you know, throughout the borough, and beyond. So do you think that maybe the whole stop and search powers, maybe the police take advantage of their power to do so? Yeah, definitely, definitely, because they do, you know, they stereotype and they think, you 167

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know, all these young, there are a lot of black boys within the area and they probably think, you know, they’re all the same and, and it’s not the case, just because they’re wearing a certain clothing or whatever, it don’t necessarily mean that, you know, they’re up to no good, so yeah, they do stereotype, definitely. INT: And does this challenge or influence your views on the police? SA: What, by what I’ve seen what happens and? INT: Yeah. SA: For me it does in a way, whereas I’m a girl, I don’t really get this problem of the stop search, but I’d worry, you know, if I had sons and whatever but, yeah, it does make me feel that they’re just, you know, sometimes they’re wasting their time, rather than stopping proper crime, they’re just, you know, doing silly stuff like stopping little kids. Conclusion The UK gangs crisis as heralded by the 2011 riots has resulted in the rolling out of law and order-focussed anti-gang initiatives at both a national and local level.‘Ending Gang andYouthViolence’ (EGYV) and Waltham Forest Council’s ‘Enough is Enough’ programmes both brought with them ring-fenced funding aimed at strengthening local police-led partnership working to tackle gangs. However, this was at the same time (since 2010) that the Con-Lib government’s austerity agenda was wreaking funding havoc (via swingeing cuts) on frontline local authoritydelivered welfare services such as youth work, Connexions, adult care and housing. During the 2011/12 financial year the council proclaimed that it had made budgetary savings totalling £35 million while at the same time boasting that it had found an extra £1 million for its GPP ‘Enough is Enough’, as well as £500,000 for 16 extra police officers (LBWF, 2012). Since March 2011 Waltham Forest Council has clearly sought to prioritise control and punishment rather than welfare and 168

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support for its younger or vulnerable adult residents (Wacquant, 2009).As the findings from my research study illustrate, it is black young males who bear the brunt of this punitive turn largely because they are – via their dress wear, musical preferences and peer friendship networks – unfairly and disproportionately labelled as gang members. Unfortunately, due to the all-pervasive gangs matrix the targeting and criminalisation of black youth now extends beyond policing (and their use/abuse of stop and search), youth justice and probation into other sectors such as housing, youth services and schools.

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SIX

Road life realities and youth violence This chapter will draw on data from my own ethnographic research (see also Chapters two and five) with regard to youth crime/prevention and policing in one east London borough, and the findings from a number of recent empirical research studies that explore the realities of urban youth violence in the UK away from the label of the street gang. In particular, I will be looking to revisit and further discuss the role and significance of ‘Road culture’ (see Gunter, 2008, 2010) in the lives of young people growing up in poor neighbourhoods. Drawing on the voices and direct experiences of young people, this chapter will demonstrate that contemporary Road-based1 subculture plays a largely positive and creative role in young people’s lives. Nevertheless, the chapter will also revisit and discuss the violent social worlds and hyper-masculine modes of behaviour associated with ‘life on Road’.Whereas the current policy, prevention and policing agenda on serious youth violence in the UK is focussed on gangs, the discussions by the young people themselves about ‘on Road’ culture (as have been the findings of a number of recent studies examining urban youth violence) demonstrate that while the threat of violence was everywhere, its cause was not necessarily gang related. Rather it was about territoriality and specifically the ‘code of the street’ (Anderson, 1999) whereby 1

The term ‘On Road’ is consistently referred to by the young respondents to capture and describe the social and cultural worlds that they both create and inhabit, it also informs their musical preferences, dress wear/styles and speech patterns (see also Gunter, 2010). 171

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young males living in particular urban neighbourhoods can easily find themselves caught up in violent confrontations (or beefs) with their peers, and for a myriad of petty reasons usually linked to some kind of perceived ‘disrespecting’. Consequently, Road life survival is dependent on the adherence to a ‘street logic’, which demands that any young person caught up in beef is able to defend (back) themselves, or their friends, against the violent threats of others by any means necessary (Gunter, 2008). Road life realities I: leisure and pleasure In contrast to contemporary media-driven portrayals and discourses that criminalise and misinterpret the ‘urban music’based Road subcultures of marginalised young people, my earlier research findings revealed that Road culture largely played a ‘seductive yet humdrum and functional role’. Indeed, as opposed to the ‘spectacular’, Road culture served as a means by which the young people ‘derive camaraderie, entertainment as well as a strong sense of identity’ (Gunter, 2010:93) and attachment to neighbourhood life. At the heart of neighbourhood life is the public setting of the open space or ‘Road’, and as such ‘Road culture in Manor and its (and the surrounding neighbourhoods) is played out predominantly within the public sphere’. Consequently, the majority of young people tended ‘to spend the majority of their leisure time on the streets or within those open spaces to be found around the various local housing estates’ (Gunter, 2010:103). Research evidence also points to the fact that street life is a central component of working class youth subcultural identities, leisure activities and neighbourhood attachment (Coles et al, 2000; McCulloch et al, 2006; Shildrick, 2006; MacDonald and Shildrick, 2007; Landolt, 2012; Neary et al, 2012). Furthermore, the public setting of the street/Road has significant historical cultural resonance throughout the Black Atlantic (Liebow, 1967; Lieber, 1976; Anderson, 1990; Stolzoff, 2000; Sansone, 2003). A number of more recent criminological studies have similarly made reference to the ‘on Road’ subcultures of black and urban youth (Hallsworth and Silverstone, 2009; Earle, 2011; Ilan, 2012; Young et al, 2013; Glynn, 2014) but solely in relation to gangs and 172

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violent crime. However, this over-emphasis on deviance largely misinterprets and ignores the larger and more significant role that Road culture plays in the lives of poor and BAME urban youth: The young participants in this study noted their own subtle but significant distinction between ‘being on road’ as opposed to ‘living on road’. Whilst many of the young people spoke about ‘being on road’ and ‘catching joke’ with their friends, it was only those young people involved in ‘badness’ who were referred to as ‘living on road’ (Gunter, 2010:103). The latter observation is still pertinent to Road life in Gulley and Dungle as it was a constant theme that recurred in group discussions and interviews with the young participants: INT: Where do you spend most of your leisure time? Ramone: If I ain’t at college or at football then I’m on the endz with these lot. Jamal: On Road ... with the fam ennit. Skitz: Yeah … yeah OTF. All: [laughing] INT: What happens on Road? Ramone: Nothing really, Jus out doing whatever ennit. Kotch see whose about and that. Skitz: Bus joke Jamal: Link some Yats … Skitz: Definitely on that. Jamal: Go over Memorials. Skitz: Pass through the youth club … bare tings really. Yeah just out on Road. INT: Just out doing whatever? Jamal: Yeah, with the man dem, the girls. More time in summer there’s nuff bodies around. Everything is lively like, always something happening when we’re on Road.The youngers are usually trying a ting [being playfully rude] Skitz: [laughing] You know them ones.

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Jamal: Skitz: Jamal:

They try it with you all the time to get a reaction. But man’s ain’t on that running around getting all sweaty and shit. Yeah but you have to ennit, it’s all jokes though still. Something’s always going down on Road, definitely.

The majority of young people are involved in some way in the public settings of Road cultural life in their neighbourhoods, and this cuts across ethnicity and gender. Road life is particularly vibrant during the spring and summer months when the public spaces are full of young people on BMX bikes, skateboards, ‘kicking ball’, ‘spitting bars’(rapping) over beats that are playing on their phones or just sitting on benches or play apparatus chatting and whiling away their time doing nothing (Corrigan, 1979). During the winter months neighbourhood life is quieter but there are still pockets of activity and movement on the streets. There is seemingly no particular pattern as to why the youth club is the place to be, for whatever reason, while at other times – and for relatively long periods of time – hardly anybody will ‘go club’. Activities within ‘club’ are largely an extension of those activities undertaken in the other ‘public spaces’ of Road culture, so some young people will play computer game consoles,‘deejay’ and ‘spitting’ using club’s decks and microphone, or make their own beats on portable studios in club or just ‘kotch’ and ‘bus joke’. Also there is always one young person whose home serves as the unofficial youth club/indoor hang out spot where young people can congregate and ‘spit’, play computer games or ‘jus chill’ and ‘bus joke’. Additionally, Road life for some young people – particularly young women – also extends to meeting friends in shopping malls outside of the neighbourhood and going to the cinema or ice skating: Julie:

... sometimes go cinema.We been going to the mall quite a bit actually as well, since it opened. A load of us from the endz used to all go up there and just walk around and that, looking around all the shops. It’s nice. 174

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INT: Julie:

Does everyone go, I mean boys as well? Yeah, well at first anyway. But like the security started getting stupid and that, stopping and hassling some of the boys like on a regular, so now they ain’t bothered as much. But we still like going up there and just walking around.

Road life realities II: risk and danger From the ethnography, Road life is central to the young people’s neighbourhood identity and their leisure activities, and it also represented a place of risk and danger – particularly to the young males (see also Evans et al, 1996; Taylor et al, 1996; Watt and Stenson, 1998; Reay and Lucey, 2000; Gunter, 2008; Kintrea et al, 2008; Parkes and Conolly, 2011). When walking about or hanging around the neighbourhood the young men tended to adopt a confident street persona or ‘swagger’, which indicated they could handle themselves physically if they had to and that they also had ‘back up’ if needed. In order to successfully pull off the ‘swagger’ the young males had to be dressed in the right ‘garms’ including designer clothes and sportswear, and tended to also adopt a slow and rhythmical walking style or ‘bowling’. This swagger was a visual signal that was deliberately given out by young males warning off potential foes indicating that they were not weak individuals or easy targets for bullying and robbery. My 2010 study similarly noted that: … the majority of young males involved in road life will tend to walk around in small groups, wearing designer sportswear … When walking these young black males will look to ‘hog the pavement’ (thus making it difficult for other members of the public to pass by without having to step into the road) by walking in small groups oblivious to other pavement users needs. They also will adopt a ‘screw face’ [described at best as a blank expression, at worst as hostile and aggressive] in order to warn potential male foes that they are ‘not to be messed with’. In short these young males are putting out a message that they 175

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are not victims [weak or ‘pussies’] rather they are the victimizers (Gunter, 2010:99–100). Many of the young people felt most safe when ‘hanging about’ within their own neighbourhoods, while at the same time being acutely aware of the dangers and risks posed outside their local area. INT: Kaydee:

Where do you feel most safe? In my area because I know where to go, where I can go and basically I know who I can contact. If you go somewhere you don’t know [its more dangerous when going to other areas]….. it [referring to his own neighbourhood]can be a safer place INT: Yeah. Kaydee: But there’s always idiots on the Road and always people out there to rob someone so. You just got to mind your back. INT: But generally you feel most safe in Gulley [name of neighbourhood]? Kaydee: Yeah, I feel more safe in Gulley because I know what the threat is and where the safest spots are. INT: And where would you say you feel least safe? Kaydee: Probably in Haverhill, yeah, I’m not too bothered about it, I’d walk the Streets there, I couldn’t give a f***k if someone tried to rob me, I wouldn’t give them my phone, I’d rather get stabbed than f******g give my stuff to them. Hamid: Definitely not Manley. I go to Manley. I used to go there on a regular, near enough every Tuesday because my Nan lives down there, but when I go down there on a bike ride, I’ve had people come to me, trying to stab me, one says he was going to shoot me. It didn’t happen.

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All of the young males talked about the threat of physical violence and robbery when travelling to and through different neighbourhoods: JJ:

INT: JJ:

INT: JJ:

Karl:

Its crazy like, some of them man are hungry always looking to do something to someone and usually you find it’s the weakest one in the crew, you know causing all the drama, trying to earn stripes to gain a rep … Most times, they gonna try something when they know you can’t do nothing, you know like when you’re with your girl, visiting your gran or when you’re coming home from training. You said they are looking to do something? Rob you, like take your phone or something like that, or talk to you in front of your girl like you’re an idiot. But it gets really on top when one of them says that you or someone from your crew [friends] robbed this one or whatever. What fighting you mean? Basically, that’s why mans always got to be prepared cos you don’t know, but really I kind of make sure I ain’t slippin, you know I don’t put myself in those situations where man’s can feed off me [laughs] I’m going through all the back streets and that. Most of them boys you see on Road now, they get too hyped, they watch too much of them videos [UK urban music videos], … they all wanna be gangsters … it’s the youngers that are most impressionable still, cos they see the olders talkin all that hype talk and they think “yeah I’m on that still”, like it’s the way to be … they ain’t no gangster … they smoke too much of that punk [weed] … makes them think that the gangster fantasy world … is real, and so they start believing the hype. So when they see you walking through their endz its all “what, what” and the other person is like “what what”… then 177

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it’s like, beef and more beef. And then this one runs back to his endz “hear what, dem pagans tried to shank me” and then his crew they go looking for them … it’s just, jus madness really. The above statements by the two young men illustrate what Elijah Anderson (1999) refers to as the ‘code of the street’, a behavioural code that creates and regulates cultures of violence within poor urban neighbourhoods. This ‘street logic’ resulted in many of the young male respondents who featured in my earlier ethnographic study Growing Up Bad feeling that they had no other choice than to resolve disputes through the threat of physical violence in order to avoid losing street ‘rep’ or themselves becoming victimised (Gunter, 2008). Fiona Brookman et al’s investigation of a code of the street in the UK found that among violent street criminals, alongside a concern with maintaining a fearful reputation, and insuring against victimisation, perhaps ‘the strongest element of the code’ was punishing disrespect – ‘that personal slights that might affect personal identity and social status should be dealt with by forceful retaliation’ (Brookman et al, 2011:21). For those young males in Gulley and Dungle who attended school in places that were located far away from their homes, the risk of violence and robbery from other young men was a daily occurrence/risk as they had no choice but to travel to different east London neighbourhoods or boroughs: Milton:

Like we would look at the school gates and then we’d see a bunch of people running. And like why they running? INT: Yeah. Milton: And then someone will call me and they’ll say yeah, blah, blah, blah these guys are here. INT: Yeah. Milton: And they’re here for this one [some young person] and that’s the way it is, and sometimes at my school people will come, for boys and if they’re not there, they’ll just come for whoever’s

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INT: Milton:

around. I’ve had people getting stabbed in the head with a screwdriver, that’s at my school. Is that when you went to school in Manley [neighbouring borough]? No, no, I didn’t go to school in Manley, I went to school in Riplets Bow [another neighbouring borough].

Apart from school, the socio-spatial worlds of the young males was narrow and limited to the imagined boundaries of the neighbourhood estate. The young males only left the confines of their estate by themselves when they had to attend school, college, football training or visit family, otherwise they would deliberately visit other neighbourhoods mob-handed. This was done either for ‘back up’ and protection in numbers and this in itself is perceived by youth in other neighbourhoods as a provocative act, or to ‘bring it’ by engaging in retaliatory acts of violence in response to a previous incident or new threat of violence by young males from opposing neighbourhoods. In my previous study the majority of its young male respondents were similarly wary about venturing out of their home ‘safe’ neighbourhoods and into other ‘dangerous’ places: Raymond: Well I definitely don’t feel safe in Reema [east London neighbourhood] cos there mans always looking to prove something, when you go Reema you have to go with ‘back up’, with a crew, if I have to go by myself then I got to be carrying something [a knife, or other weapon] cos them man from Reema will look to jack you (Gunter, 2010:125–6). Although it was the young males who were more at risk from getting drawn into Road life ‘beefs’ (petty disputes that quickly escalated into violence with use of knives or even guns) and robberies, young women in the neighbourhood were not immune to these risks and dangers:

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INT:

OK so what are the types of crime that happen in your area? Jamila: Mugging people, people getting their phones nicked or something like that. Saraya: Yeah. My friend in the school, she was going home one day after a school club at school and she got loads of boys following her and they attacked her and took her phone and stuff. INT: Really? Saraya: Yeah, it was like this time of year where it gets dark earlier so she was like on the way home from school. INT: And how old is she? Saraya: She’s now in Year 10 but it was when she was in Year 9. INT: Have you ever been a victim of any of these crimes? Jamila: No but I’ve been chased by two people on bikes. INT: And what did they want? Jamila: I don’t know, I don’t know because my aunty lives in a place where there’s an alleyway and I was walking down and they just started calling some random names and started running after me with their bikes and I just went into a shop. Saraya: On the way to school in the morning me and my friend were walking and we got this boy come up to us with a pen, but he kind of pretended it was a knife or something. He was threatening us and saying he wanted to talk to someone else that we knew that’s in the school and we basically said we don’t know where they are. He followed my friend the day before as well to where she was going, so the next morning when he came up to us he was asking us questions and trying to threaten us.

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Road culture beyond the ‘Road’ Street logic and the code of street extended beyond young people’s daily interactions ‘on Road’ with regard to neighbourhood risk/ danger and cycles of retaliatory violence, to school/teacher relations and encounters with other adult authority figures. Intrinsic to Road cultural life is the role of ‘badness’ which specifically refers to a ‘social world characterised by “spectacular” hyper aggressive/hyper masculine modes of behaviour’ (Gunter, 2010:93). Contemporary UK urban Road cultures – through adopted and adapted speech styles, dress wear, attitudes and postures – have been greatly influenced by the expressive Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) popular music cultures of Jamaican bashment and American hip-hop. Of particular relevance to this study is that both of these musical ‘forms have successfully managed to convey, through song lyrics, the significance and general acceptance of “badness-honour”’ (Gray, 2003) and the ‘perennial appeal of the “bad ass”, the “bad nigger”’ (Van Deburg, 2004) and ‘the “rude boy” within the ghettos and poor neighbourhoods of Jamaica and Black America’ (Gunter, 2008:352). Many of the informants of this (and my earlier) study tended to bring aspects of Road cultural life into the school classroom like ‘catching joke’ and ‘badness’ – specifically ‘the “not having it” “rude boy” or “facety black” girl2 persona’ (Gunter, 2010:52) – and this often brought them into conflict with their mainly white teachers. These everyday confrontations in the classroom arose because many of the young people brought the street logic of Road culture into school; they were not prepared to be disrespected or ‘chiefed off ’ by rude adult teachers and so tended to argue back. Almost all of the black young male respondents, as well as a considerable number of their female peers, expressed their dislike of school and in particular the unfair treatment that they had received from teachers. Although some teachers were held in very high regard by the young people, they described 2

The ‘facety black girl’ persona plays upon stereotypical images of the ‘mouthy’ black young woman who will cut her eye at and ‘cuss down’ anyone who disrespects her. 181

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many others as “rude”, “biased” and “condescending” and who would routinely put down black students saying that they would end up “stacking supermarket shelves” or “in prison”. It would seem that these confrontational statements were intended to humiliate the young people who in turn would respond in an equally confrontational manner. However, it would more than likely lead to the young person being disciplined and refusing to accept the punishment, which would lead to a temporary exclusion. Of course, in the most troubling of cases, temporary exclusions would in a short space of time escalate and become a permanent exclusion. There were a number of occasions that I recorded in my fieldwork diary where the young people got into conflict situations with adult authority figures while engaging in numerous organised activities undertaken in predominantly ‘white places’ outside of east London.Whether it was ice skating, bowling or quad biking in Essex or attending residential outdoor activity centres in Buckinghamshire, participants from Gulley and Dungle usually stood out from other youth groups due to their dress wear and because they were predominantly from BAME backgrounds. Notwithstanding some of their inherent dangers and risks, most of the young people felt very comfortable and safe in their local east London neighbourhoods. On leaving or ‘escaping’ the ‘endz’ the respondents felt very vulnerable due to their visible differences, and apprehensive about how they might be received. To the untrained eye this nervousness could come across to ‘outside adults’ as over-confidence and belligerence on the part of the young east Londoners. Nevertheless, in general, residential experiences were viewed very positively by the young people as it gave them space and time to get away from the hustle, bustle and ‘problems’ of east London and experience something different. A standard occurrence: on arrival at the residential centre and before bags could be unloaded off the minibus, the concerned duty manager would beckon the youth leader in charge for a meeting where the ground rules would be firmly laid down and expectations of trouble would be communicated in a very subtle manner. The young people, still seated in the minibus, would be conscious and perturbed/offended by the attention and 182

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commotion their arrival on-site had engendered among other groups of white youth and their adult charges. So even before the residential stay had commenced battle lines had been drawn and future confrontations anticipated, but as far as the Gulley and Dungle youth were concerned “dem country boys” were no match for street-wise urbanites. An example: during a five-day summer residential programme in an activity centre outside London, my colleagues and I were constantly being called into the manager’s office to discuss the latest incident that our group of young people had allegedly been involved in. Most of the allegations – ranging from throwing bread rolls around at the dinner table, playing football in the television room, talking too loudly, to smoking cigarettes in the dormitories – were very petty and often unfair, with many of the complaints stemming from other groups. By the lunchtime of the second day tensions were very high as the residential staff had constantly been reprimanding our group and had issued us with a final warning that we would be sent home if things did not improve. The confrontations had escalated to the point of breakdown because our youth felt unfairly victimised and “chiefed off ” by the centre’s staff and so were now planning to give them something to “really get upset about”. The last straw was when our group were accused of smoking marijuana in the pool room.The centre could not identify which of the young people were the culprits but they were sure it was one of them. We rounded them all up to talk to them about this latest allegation at which point ‘all hell broke loose’, as they started to say “mans is taking the piss”, “it’s off ”, “what, so its only us that’s here like”. In east London there was only one way to resolve disputes like this and that was with physical violence; they felt that they were being treated like “idiots” and “P****s” and so had to represent their “endz” and “bring it” to them. We eventually managed to calm them down by saying this is exactly what the other groups and centre staff want, for them to play up to the stereotype of aggressive and unruly youth from urban London. We said they “could come better than that”. We persuaded our young people to put together a list of complaints about how they had been treated and made to feel since they had arrived, which detailed that they felt unfairly 183

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labelled and stereotyped by others including the Centre’s own staff. In fairness to the Centre manager, he took on board many of the complaints and acknowledged that his staff team did not have much experience, surprisingly, of hosting inner-city groups from London and so it was a learning experience for them as well. But he asked that our group of young people “try to meet us half way”. As an aside, it also turned out that our group were not responsible for the marijuana-smoking incident, and again to the Centre manager’s credit he did apologise to the young people, who managed (just about) to see out the remaining three days at the activity centre. Low-status (gang-affected) areas Neoliberal government social policies and local authority housing decisions had combined, by the late 1990s, to create pockets of socio-economic disadvantage in particular localities of the UK ‘and on social housing estates in particular’ (Coles et al, 2000:1). Correspondingly, some estates – or more precisely those ‘low status urban areas’ (Hope, 1996) such as Dungle and Gulley – are characterised by above average concentrations of children, young people and lone-parent households and high rates of unemployment, worklessness, educational disengagement and crime. The ongoing ‘history of respectable fears’ (Pearson, 1983) and continued problematisation of poor youth has mainly been concerned with their unsupervised leisure activities/use of decaying urban (public) spaces and resultant creation of deviant subcultures (Mays, 1954; Downes, 1966; Parker, 1974). Bob Coles et al’s study (2000:24) of young people’s experiences growing up on ten deprived social housing estates in England and Wales found that the biggest issue – according to ‘key adult players’ including residents, housing managers, police and youth workers – ‘related to groups of children and young people “hanging around”’. Many older residents in Gulley and Dungle viewed ‘gangs’ of youths hanging about on the streets as a problem, even though they were not actually engaging in any kind of criminal or antisocial activities:

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INT: JV: INT: JV:

MW:

INT: MW:

INT: MW:

… do you think that the police do enough to stop crime in your area? Do they do enough? Well, they’re not patrolling, so that would be a start, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say they are doing enough. [female resident] Okay, so what more do you think they could be doing in the area? Well, you know, they could patrol for one and, you know, break up any gangs on the street or whatever, and it’ll make people passing through the area feel a lot safer. They can hold, like I don’t know, within the community little speech things to make the kids aware that the police aren’t there just to stop and search. There is definitely an issue with young people, you know congregating, making noise. Now I know, well mostly anyway, they have nowhere else to, to do this, but they do, you know, they can be are intimidating, to older people definitely they are. [male resident] So what sort of things do they do, you know what are the problems? I mean, well to be honest [laughing] nothing really, they are loud but … but you know, its not nice you, you know trying to force your way through big groups, and as I said its more, definitely more an issue for older people. So they are more of a nuisance than say a crime issue? Yes, yes definitely, they can be a big nuisance and big groups of them as well making noise, they talk so loudly [laughing] … but they are young people so, I suppose, but still it is a problem.

As Bob Coles et al (2000) found in their study, while in Gulley and Dungle there was a consensus among the residents and other key adult players about the problem of young people ‘hanging around’, there was less agreement on the causes and solutions for this. ‘Hanging around’ in public spaces is a historic and key 185

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feature of working class community life, which has become increasingly criminalised (Blackman and Wilson, 2014), and this situation is unfortunately no different within Gulley and Dungle: SD:

INT: SD:

I’m not sure that the police are too effective currently, I think they’re getting better, you know, with the PCSOs now being that link between the police and the young people, because they’re on the ground and they’re interacting with people within the community and they know the youngsters within the community, I think things are getting better … So yeah, it’s moving in the right direction but, unfortunately, policing took a backward step before it’s now moving forward. [male resident and part-time youth work practitioner] Okay, so do you think then that the police target only certain types of young people? Yeah. I would say that if you, if they see a group of young people, they [police] immediately think that they’re up to no good. And they will target them, they will watch them … They will follow them, they’ll intimidate them, they will try to disperse them and that’s not necessarily the right way to go about things.

It was clear that the official risk discourses – created and utilised by the local authority, police and other justice sector agencies within Waltham Forest – had labelled ‘the low-status’ neighbourhoods of Dungle and Gulley as ‘gang-affected areas’ and this in turn influenced policing practice and impacted on youth work provision. But while many residents referred to ‘gangs’ of young people ‘hanging’ or walking about, they did not believe that there was a gang problem in the area or the borough as a whole: LK:

Actually, I don’t think there is a major issue of gangs in Waltham Forest. I think we have a major issue of worthlessness, with the young people in 186

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MO:

INT: MO:

HW: INT:

HW:

INT: HW:

what is a relatively impoverished and transient population with poor schools, poor academic schools, very, very little, qualified professionals, youth workers, taking responsibility for the young people and engaging with them properly. [female resident] I have to say, I’m as guilty as everyone else in that I always talk about gangs of young people blah blah blah, but really I’m talking about groups of them, all together. But they’re not gangs, you know proper gangs like you see in films. [female, resident] But do you think there are ‘proper gangs’ in the borough, is there a gang problem then in the borough? No, there are no gangs that I can see as my gran would say, there are some bad bruck [poorly parented] and ambitionless youth, but in truth you’ll find them everywhere, but it has nothing to do with gangs, from what I can see. Look, to be clear there is no problem with youth gangs around here, never has been. [male resident] That’s what I hear everybody say, but if that is the case why do the police and the council say they have a gangs project because the community has been telling them there is a big gangs problem here? So who are these people “in the community” that they keep talking about? I haven’t had no conversation with the Council or the police and I don’t know anybody who has. Okay, so you don’t think there is a problem with youth violence? Now I didn’t say that, I said I don’t think that gangs is a problem here. But there is a real issue with the young people around here, but I can’t, you can’t blame it on gangs, I’d say it’s

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a parenting thing, schools, actually society in general … Practitioner perspectives on gangs

In his study Youth Crime and Youth Culture Bill Sanders (2005:3) spoke to and interviewed a wide array of professionals (and young people) in Lambeth, south London about ‘delinquent groups and collectives who have offended on a consistent basis’. There was nothing said by any of the author’s respondents to suggest that youth in Lambeth were gang-involved ‘or engaged in gang-like behaviour (such as possessing identifiable colours or insignias, or long-standing territorial disputes)’. Moreover, there was also scant evidence to substantiate media claims that young people ‘gathered in “posses” or as yardies, groupings somewhat akin to gangs’.According to a detached youth work practitioner based in Brixton, ‘“this posse thing” was largely based on media “hype”’ (Sanders, 2005:3). In this ethnographic study the majority of youth work practitioners also, as was the case with most of the residents, did not believe there was a ‘gang problem’ in Gulley and Dungle specifically, or generally throughout Waltham Forest. Nonetheless, they did acknowledge that there was a real problem with certain groups of young men getting involved in territorialbased violent conflicts: INT:

So do you think there is a gang problem in … [Gulley and Dungle] and in Waltham Forest generally? Marvin: Well the gang situation, if we’re going to say that there’s a gang situation now, it’s more like a postcode issue.You know, young people were living and doing everything in particular areas. So you had the Bridge House guys who didn’t move outside of Bridge.You had the Temple lot who didn’t move outside of there, and you had the Hammond boys, and so on and so forth.And a lot of it stemmed from schooling, the music scene, you know, a lot of them were into the whole grime [UK rap] scene and they were 188

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MC-ing, as a collective. And that’s where a lot of it used to stem from, really. So that, you know, you’d have a lot of young people that actually went to school together during the day, but then in the evening, now that’s when you’d find that the situation would kick off and the problems would start. So yes, that was a lot of the issues that I faced, really down there. Having to try to get young people to just cross boundaries, that was a lot of it. It was more estate area based, no one really had, they didn’t really have names, like, oh, we’re the Gangster Boys or blah blah. It was more like, oh we’re Bridge we’re Temple, we’re Hammond. It was like that, yes? Moncur Close would call themselves the MC Boys. [practitioner – Youth Support Service]. INT: But to a lot people they would say you are talking about gangs? Marvin: You know, if you said to the young people, are you in a gang, they would not say they were.You know, they wouldn’t say they was, they would say like, no, no, no, we’re not in that, but they very much attached to their areas and estates, as they say, representing their endz. INT: Yes, so you don’t believe it was a whole gang kind of situation? Marvin: Well, it wasn’t, because you’ve got to look at the word gang, haven’t you? Was it organised? And that was the thing. These boys were very much, very disorganised, and their whole lives were disorganised, do you get what I mean? So, you know, I can’t really say that they were like an organised gang that brought in money into the family or what have you. They just were protecting pieces of rock and mud and earth, basically, and that’s what they were doing. Oh, this is Bridge, you can’t come in Bridge sort of thing.

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Keith Kintrea et al’s (2008:4) Young People and Territoriality exploratory study examined the manifestations and impacts of territoriality on youth behaviours in six disadvantaged urban areas of the UK. For the purposes of their study territoriality was defined as a ‘social system through which control is claimed by one group over a defined geographical area and defended against others’. Significantly, the authors found that territoriality was embedded within the everyday activities of youth and manifested itself particularly in those situations where ‘young people’s identity was closely associated with their neighbourhoods and they gained respect from representing them’. However, territorial identities – ‘frequently expressed in violent conflict with territorial groups from other areas’ – and associated behaviour often had negative consequences including ‘constrained mobility, problems with access to amenities relating to their location, and the risk of violent assault and criminalisation’ (Kintrea et al, 2008:4). Like many residents and young people, some practitioners liberally used the term ‘gang’ to describe groups of young people engaging in any type of collective behavioural activity, ranging from hanging around ‘doing nothing’ (Corrigan, 1979) and petty crimes right the way through to serious violence: INT: Krish: INT: RES: INT: RES: INT: RES:

Do you think there is a gang problem in Waltham Forest? Yeah, yeah. [part-time youth worker] Do you think it’s fair to call groups of friends gangs or do you think there is an actual gang problem? No there is an actual gang problem. And do you think that there is a high crime rate in relation to gang crimes? Yes. [laughs] Yes. What crimes do you think that gangs in Waltham Forest mostly commit? Mostly just nonsense, mostly just being bored and doing stupid stuff and having the wrong role models.

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INT: Devon:

INT:

Devon:

Do you think there is a gang problem in Waltham Forest? Yes … Absolutely, absolutely, it’s blatantly, it’s evident. A student of mine last year was afraid to walk alone from college to get the bus to his home and it was simply because the college was located in the wrong side of Waltham Forest and he was afraid of other groups of young people that knew him and knew that he was not from that side of Waltham Forest. And it became really obvious when that young lad was killed last year, when he tried to run away from a group of youngsters and he ran in front of the bus and got killed … But yes there is a serious gang problem. [part-time youth worker] And so the young boy that you were just talking about, what kind of consequences would he have had to face if he had left college on his own? Well I’ve spoken to him and he said they would have beaten him up, or he would have been stabbed or you know ... He was in genuine fear of his life … Well my views on gangs is that they’re equivalent to a pack of hounds hunting and they are not really bothered about who their prey is. As long as they are together, if that person is not even in a gang, that person is potentially in danger from them as well. So it’s not just the people who are known to them who are in rival gangs, but just any youngster on his own.

Much of the information about gangs in the borough was derived from police intelligence and the official risk discourses of the Council’s gangs agenda ‘Enough is Enough’, which was then fed into the work plans of the Youth Offending Service, Children and Families Department and the Youth Support Service:

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INT: Maria:

INT: Maria:

Okay, so you think there’s a gang problem in the borough? There is a gang problem in the borough, there is a problem. They … it was the Connections worker, Simone, she gave me a printout of the borough where the police have hot spotted the gangs. So this area … [Gulley and Dungle] have got the most gangs. But in Walthamstow there’s three, no there’s definitely five. I was surprised because like the little tiny areas, like the Black Gang, and I was a bit surprised seeing this printout from the police. [practitioner – Youth Support Service] So its mainly from the police’s information, about gangs in the borough? Its from the police information that they’ve gathered over time … Yeah, so you’ve got the Grey Gang, and in Chamber Hill the group of young men that we worked with, we weren’t aware of they were a gang until the police pointed it out, we had a fun day to prelaunch the huts [youth space], and then the following week we had a group of kids that came in and then we had the police [SNT] come down, and the sergeant came down that was in charge of them. And he then wanted to inform us of who we were working with. He said the youth club members were part of the Grey Gang, and I said “No we don’t want to know who they are,” I said “We just treat them all the same, when you tell us who they are we’re going to treat them differently” ... and he just said “Okay then,” he goes “Well you do have some gang members that are part of the Grey Gang attending your session,” and we said “That’s fine, not a problem.”

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Youth perspectives on gangs

As was found in Hannah Smithson et al’s (2013) study of a gang-affected multi-ethnic neighbourhood in the north-west of England, none of the young participants in this study identified with or validated the official risk discourses around ‘gangs’. Most felt that the gang problem was a media invention and did not speak about the daily realities of east London Road life. INT:

Are any of your friends, or do you know anyone in a gang? Uddin: No. INT: You don’t know anyone in a gang? Mo: No. What do you mean by a gang? INT: I don’t know, you tell me.When people talk to me, they always talk about gangs. Uddin: Gangs as in they mean a group of friends. INT: Okay. Uddin: If you think a group of friends is a gang, then we can say then we know a lot of friends or group of friends, but I don’t call them a gang as such. That’s a strong word to say. Mo: It’s the media. INT: So if there’s violence between gangs it’s just groups of friends who are fighting you think, it’s not necessarily gangs? Mo: I wouldn’t call them gangs. Uddin: It’s one group of friends from one area and another group of friends from another area fighting. INT: So gang violence doesn’t really exist you don’t think? Uddin: No. Mo: No, not really. It might exist but not that I know of. This is clarified by the young people who did use the term ‘gang’ when discussing violence and crime – sometimes its use was pejorative, reflecting the influence of news-media and official 193

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agencies’ youth risk discourses (see also Parkes and Connelly, 2013). Debra: INT: Debra: INT: Debra:

I do feel safe in my area, but there are a lot of gangs round here. Do the gangs fight each other? No, they don’t fight each other.They all friends and hang around together. Do they fight gangs from other areas? Some of them might, but mostly they just hang around area together doing stupidness.

During the ethnography I met with a 16-year-old male, Marlon, who sat on the youth advisory panel of the local authority’s borough-wide gang project and was officially described as an ex-gang member. I asked him about his experiences of gangs: Marlon: INT: Marlon:

Really when I talk about being in a gang, mostly I’m just talking about me and my boys on the estate … chillin and doing whatever [badness]. So the way you use the word gang is different to say how the gang project and police use it? Yeah, I sit down with them [managers in gang project] all the time and try explain to them that this gang stuff ain’t real on Road.

All of the young respondents depicted the nuanced complexities and dangers of Road life beyond simplistic gang narratives and ‘postcode war’ territorial disputes: INT:

Do you think that there is a gang problem in East London? Michael: There is a gang problem but that’s only because if you go to someone else’s area.They just want to rob you. INT: And is this in relation to young people representing their postcodes in areas? Howie: Yeah but I wouldn’t really call it a postcode war, it’s all about money. 194

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Michael: It’s just their way of getting through isn’t it. Howie: If you see another kid and honestly if they’re not from like your own neighbourhood. INT: Yeah. Howie: You can rob them because you know the next day you’re not going to see him walking down your road or at your front door. INT: Okay but you wouldn’t define these young people as gangs, you’d define them as friends, yeah, like you said, friends from certain areas? Mike: Yeah. Howie: Mates like in a group you know what I mean, if f***king, if they’re all living in the same area they’re going to be mates. Michael: Because it’s not really a postcode war it’s basically more like. Mates in groups. Howie: If you come to my area then basically you just rob someone. INT: And there is no comeback? Howie: Exactly. More times they don’t know who robbed them. While official youth risk discourses view gangs as inherently pathological, drawing on my biographical experiences and perspectives of my research subjects, I maintain that Road life and gangs are normal and largely positive developments in young people’s lives. As such this study is greatly sympathetic to Thrasher’s (1927) understanding of gangs and more generally the Chicago School approach, which emphasises the normality of ‘deviance’ by explaining it in ‘its cultural and community context in opposition to seeing it as a pathological condition’ (Blackman, 2014:498). Understanding urban youth violence In attempting to examine both the causes of and preventative solutions to urban youth violence, criminologists and sociologists have been attracted to subcultural theories and identities linked to street gangs (Klein, 1995; Decker and Weerman, 2005; Pitts, 195

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2008; Densley, 2013) territoriality (Kintrea et al, 2008) or retaliation/‘code of the street’ (see Anderson, 1999; Gunter, 2008; Brookman et al, 2011; Parkes and Conolly, 2013). This is not surprising given that ‘one of the attractions of the concept of subculture is its power to define and describe deviant behaviour in society’ (Blackman, 2014:507). Within this study discourses around territoriality and the code of the street in conjunction with other neighbourhood factors – linked to poverty, worklessness, poor educational attainment, homelessness and overcrowding – provide better analyses for youth violence than do those that fixate on the escalation of youth gangs and their associated hyper-violent youth cultures (Pitts, 2008). While most practitioners acknowledged that violent crime was a serious issue among a small segment of Gulley and Dungle’s youth population, they also believed that it was part of a much bigger social problem.As ‘low-status areas’ these two multi-ethnic neighbourhoods have historically been seen as crime ridden, impoverished and blighted by poor schools and decaying social housing stock accommodating large numbers of lone-parent families and long-term jobless. In Chapter five, youth practitioner Marvin, while discussing his recently acquired role working in the area of community safety and crime prevention asserted that: “You’re looking at people living in extreme poverty, you know you got poor schooling, poor health, followed by things like high levels of crime. So trying to prevent it, you know, is a problem.” Many other practitioners shared his frustrations: Sammy:

You have to start by addressing what is the real issue. Its bigger than my job or even the police’s really, but I guess we are the cheap easy option. [families intervention worker] INT: What is the problem, in your opinion? Sammy: Families, housing, the wider community that many of these young people are from, live in. Families are needing support because of a high number of single parentage in the community. You can’t do everything, my personal view that is. Mum can’t do everything, and then when she’s trying to go to work the son’s out there but 196

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if your neighbour can’t take some responsibility as well when he sees your son out … in the road not to say something like, hey Johnny or Susan how comes you’re, you shouldn’t be out here doing that. I think you know the whole community can get involved because we have turned our backs. INT: So it starts with the family you think and then the community, youth violence that is? Sammy: To me it’s blatant, if you’ve got a family of six living in a high rise, sorry for the stereotype, and then you’ve got the teenage boys who are acting, again, as the father. Again, apologies for the stereotype, but unfortunately it is a reality of how a lot of these people are living. You know, the whole family structure’s gone, even things like Sunday dinner’s gone. The whole thing’s gone. These guys are out fending for themselves, so they’re thieving and doing whatever … to survive a lot of the time. They need money to have a decent standard of living. And in some cases, the mothers who know that their children are doing wrong, still need to live off of this money … people are living in impoverished housing estates, that’s the problem ... So young people living in, growing in those conditions, they only understand one way to deal with problems and that’s with violence and aggression. For some young men, crime and engagement in illegal activities, including carrying of a weapon – Kintrea et al’s (2008:5) study undertaken in six British urban areas similarly found that young males ‘were the most active in territoriality and were certainly most visible and most likely to carry weapons’ – was viewed as standard and everyday practice and a rite of passage learnt from older siblings and peers:

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Lloyd:

INT:

Tunde:

If you look into crime as a whole, that they were committing, they were taking drugs, some were selling drugs. Some were carrying knives … I know many other people would probably want to ask them “but why do you have to walk around carrying a knife?” But if you spoke to them [young person], they’ll say, yeah I have to carry a knife. There was one young man who was thirteen who was wearing a stab proof vest, that his step dad bought for him … I mean, it was the summer holidays and we were outside the youth club, having a kick around, playing football … and this particular young man was playing football with us he was getting hot, so he took off his jumper and he had on a stab proof vest! … we just looked at him, you know, because basically, we were astonished. “What’s that?” someone asked him “oh it’s a stab proof vest.” “Where did you get that?” “Oh my step dad bought it for me.” Why? “Because I’ve got some issues with the … [boys from another neighbourhood].” As a youth worker what can you say to that? [practitioner – youth support service] What was the main crime issue then, you know with the young people while you were working in that part of the south of the borough [Gulley and Dungle]? I think it was, probably [pause] violence, I wouldn’t like to say, street robbery. I’d say that they, they were hitting each other. Like if you, as they [young people] call it, were caught slipping outside of your area, you could end up getting robbed and getting beaten up. So probably violent crime, as a whole, against one another, between a certain age, was probably the crime that I saw the most, or heard about the most ... was fights, lots of what the young people called “beefs” and that type of thing, so 198

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yes it was violent crime, definitely. [practitioner – youth support service] Rebecca Wood’s study of violent teenage crime in the UK between 2008 and 2010 found that there was a strong correlation between the ‘measurements of deprivation and locations of teenage homicides (by other teenagers and/or following the knife-gun-gang pattern)’. According to the data that she examined ‘if you are poor and come from a disadvantaged background, you are more likely to be caught up in a cycle of violence’. Moreover, if you are from a BAME background or ‘have a refugee background, this risk is heightened’ (Wood, 2010:98). Youth perspectives

Responses from the young people about the causes of crime and youth violence included bad parenting, lack of youth centres, poverty, the media, status and peer pressure – trying to emulate the badness (and the neighbourhood respect that comes with it) and reputations of older siblings and peers: INT:

So you think more youth clubs would help reduce crime in the area? Rafi: It’ll be good for the little kids, because little kids are getting influenced by the older kids … because for the little ones basically there’s nothing happening in Dungle. I remember when there was youth clubs. Karl: Even I used to go to a youth club, and when the youth club stopped everyone needed somewhere to hang out. INT: Yeah. Rafi: Yeah, so basically for younger kids, because younger kids have nowhere to go so they go with their older brother and go out. Basically just his being with him and his friends, that’s it and then I know my other cousin he was twelve and he used to carry a gun. 199

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INT: Yeah. Rafi: And when I found out I just slapped him up got it off him and threw it in the bin. INT: So you think peer pressure is a big factor? Santi: Yeah cos its like, all this badness and robbery ting that they’re on, I think it’s because like the young ones they’re looking to the elders isn’t it, like and they see what the elders do, so like they just following the footsteps, some of them don’t need to do this ting because like they do have houses and things like that but I think they just do it because of the peer pressure really you know what I mean. While some young people felt that peer pressure was a key factor with regard to youth violence and crime in the neighbourhood, many participants talked about the need to have ‘back up’ or the protection that comes from ‘moving’ in a big group of friends: Jamila: INT: Jamila:

Saraya:

I think that some people don’t know what the meaning of gangs are. Like, because gangs might mean a little group of friends. Do you know anyone that’s been part of gangs at all? I think my brother has probably been involved but I don’t really know. Like he’s older now but like when he was younger he always used to get in trouble and stuff like that. And like when I was younger I used to get bullied by this girl at primary school and he [brother] kind of ended up having an argument with her older brother and so it kind of didn’t help him. And then he would be telling his friends and stuff moved on from there. So yes. Three of my cousins, they are involved in gangs but not like the sort of gangs where the police think they are going to do crime, like just a gang, but like a big group of friends hanging around. 200

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Jamila:

Yes, if someone says they are involved in a gang it’s like they just want to be involved just so they know that if something goes wrong they have their back and they are going to help them.

The viewpoints of these young participants echo the arguments of Waller (1932:180) and his discussion of Thrasher’s classic study, which asserts that ‘the gang makes an indispensable contribution to personality, and a contribution which adults sometimes overlook’ (cited in Blackman, 2014:498). In contrast, compared to the pioneering work of Thrasher and the Chicago School in the 1920s, during the past couple of decades gangs have become a demonised ‘plastic folk-devil’ largely understood outside of any kind of social historical context. According to Brotherton (2015:175), ‘Thrasher’s approach was open, based on a strong humanistic concern for youth and for a progressive, rational urban social development’. As a consequence, ‘he resisted the temptation to pathalogize and reify these groups’ and deny the wider pressures of race, class and the impact of uneven capitalist development on immigration and migration. Moreover, the humanist tradition – which followed on from the Chicago School – advanced first by Merton and later by Cohen and Matza among others ‘so hopeful yet critical of the failings of the Good Society, has now firmly taken a back seat to an atheoretical positivism and empiricism reflective of neo-liberalism’s’ current hegemony within the field (Brotherton, 2015:175). Conclusion Drawing on the young voices from my ethnographic study undertaken in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, this chapter has sought to highlight the largely positive and creative role that contemporary Road-based subcultures play in young people’s lives. Road culture still largely serves as a means by which youth derive camaraderie, entertainment, a sense of identity and attachment to neighbourhood life. This key finding is in stark contrast to the alarmist rhetoric propagated by politicians and some academics about contemporary urban youth subcultures being responsible for the proliferation of violent street gangs 201

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across Britain. From the ethnography it was evident that Road life also represented a place of risk and danger, particularly for young males who had to be vigilant against the constant threat of physical violence and robbery. However, the beefs and violent confrontations that occurred on Road were not caused by street gangs; rather they were linked to ‘territoriality’ (see Kintrea et al, 2008) and specifically the ‘code of the street’ (Anderson, 1999).

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SEVEN

Youth, social policy and crime Introduction In the UK we have now reached the point where there are more African Caribbean young males in prison and young offenders’ institution than are at university.This statistic can also be broken down to demonstrate that more black British men – relative to their numbers in the general population – are incarcerated than is the case even in the US. In 2003 I noted that ‘when looking at the innumerable indices of social alienation and discrimination it is more than likely that’ black British male youth ‘will head many of the lists that detail poverty, mental illness, school exclusions, educational under-achievement and criminal conviction rates’ (Gunter, 2003:22). More than a decade has passed since that statement was written and rather than the situation having improved, the current gangs agenda has exacerbated what was already a very worrying trajectory. When Thrasher was writing his classic text about gangs in 1920s Chicago, he managed to describe a plethora of white ethnic gangs in addition to those concentrated in the developing black ghetto. Nearly a century later, the US-led global media-academic fixation with street gangs has also coincided with their becoming synonymous with urban decay, violent criminality, immigration, and race/ethnicity. Although there has been a long-standing interest in the academic study of gangs in the US, it is only since the 1990s that the problem has been deemed to be escalating out of control, caused by an unprecedented proliferation of violent street gangs 203

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(Klein, 1995) within the black and Latino ghettos. Federal and local law enforcement agencies were similarly making sombre predictions about the serious threat to national security, not just in the US but throughout Central America and the Caribbean, posed by the spread of violent gang culture nurtured and developed in the US and then exported via mass deportations of convicted foreign-born nationals.The real headline story during the past 40 years is not the social havoc wrought by youth gangs, but rather the hyper-ghettoisation and impoverishment of large numbers of poor African American neighbourhoods ravaged first by chronic un(der)employment and latterly crack cocaine. But as Loic Wacquant (2009) outlines in his powerful tome Punishing the Poor, the neoliberal post-industrial state, rather than tackling racial injustice and acute social and economic inequality, has instead focussed on criminalising poverty and punishing (via oppressive policing and mass incarceration) its poor and surplus populations. According to Danny Dorling (2015), there are five ‘beliefs that uphold injustice in its contemporary form’ and these can be categorised as follows: ‘elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable’. Moreover, each of these beliefs ‘also creates a distinct set of victims – the delinquents, the debarred, the discarded, the debtors and the depressed’. With regard to the first set of victims (the delinquent or the young criminal/gang member), drawing on the insights and questions raised by humanist scholars like Howard Becker and C. Wright Mills, as researchers whose side are we on? Gang academics like Klein and Pitts argue that youth gangs pose the most risk to other young people in the same racial and class position as well to their own wider communities. Klein also makes a clear distinction between the work he is involved with in comparison to that of law enforcement and other agencies concerned with gang suppression. Nevertheless, in reality the work undertaken by these gang scholars is utilised by the punitive arm of the neoliberal state as justification for its racialised war on violent crime and drugs waged in poor urban neighbourhoods.

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Race, crime and policy transfer There has been an overused saying in journalistic circles for many decades stating that ‘when the US economy sneezes Europe and the UK catches a cold’.This metaphor also extends beyond finance and business to encompass the US influence on social welfare policy in Britain – with the areas of crime, policing and justice being no exception. Since the 1980s local, state and federal laws focussing on drug crimes linked to street gangs have resulted in a prison crisis that has seen several generations of young African Americans being disproportionately imprisoned. In 1965 the US prison population stood at approximately 200,000, however by 2002 this figure had dramatically grown to almost 2 million and almost 50% of those incarcerated were black (Kitwana, 2002). The war on drugs, or what Michelle Alexander (2012:49) describes as The New Jim Crow, introduced by President Reagan in 1982 ‘from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race’. This new public policy focus of waging war on the inner-city drugs menace resulted in Reagan making good on his two major campaign themes of crime and welfare, both of which were presented in racially coded terms such as the ‘welfare queen’, the ‘food stamp program’ and fighting ‘street crime’. In order to facilitate this new national punitive turn, the federal agencies were now required to play a much bigger role, in what had hitherto been viewed as a local crime problem, in the war against drug dealers and users. During the period 1980–91 the FBI saw its anti-drug funding escalate from $8 million to $181 million, while the Department of Defense’s funding pot to tackle drugs had skyrocketed from $33 million to over $1,000 million by 1991, and the DEA drugfighting budget similarly ballooned from $86 million to $1,000 million.The funding experiences of those federal agencies tasked with delivering programmes around drug treatment, prevention and education were by way of contrast quite catastrophic. The National Institute on Drug Abuse saw its budget slashed from $274 million in 1981 to $57 million in 1984, while the Department of Education’s anti-drugs funding allocation was reduced from $14 million to $3 million (Alexander, 2012). The 205

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Comprehensive Crime Control Act, passed in 1984, introduced a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for gun possession while engaging in violent or drug-related crimes. Additionally, this Act resulted in persons with three previous robbery or burglary convictions found carrying a firearm automatically receiving a mandatory minimum 15-year prison sentence. The crack epidemic gave further legitimacy and impetus to Reagan’s war on drugs and his administration had by the mid 1980s been embarking on an all-out media offensive as thousands of stories about black ‘crack whores’ and ‘gangbangers’ flooded the newspapers, television screens and radio airwaves. In 1986 national legislation was passed which provided for an extra $2 billion dollars for the fight against drugs and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was signed into law. In addition to a raft of other harsh penalties contained within it, this piece of legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for those convicted of trafficking cocaine and in particular the inclusion of more draconian punitive sanctions for dealing crack in comparison to the distribution of powder cocaine. The election of the Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1992, rather than arresting the new national punitive turn instead saw the war on inner-city crime and drugs escalate into the prison crisis that we now see today. In 1994 the Clinton administration endorsed and oversaw the introduction of the federal ‘three strikes and you’re out’ law targeting gang members and the $30 billion crime Bill, which ‘created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders’, and made available an additional ‘$16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of state and local police forces’ (Alexander, 2012:56). The fallout from the US war on drugs is not just related to the alarming rates of black male incarceration but also to the corrupt and brutal/lethal style of policing that it is closely associated with. The law enforcement tactics employed in poor African American neighbourhoods is deliberately ‘war like in appearance, not by coincidence but by design’. Leading the charge are paramilitary and tactical units that in reality are specialist divisions of police departments ‘trained to deal with hostage situations, bomb threats, suicide attempts, and the apprehension of murder suspects’. However, utilising military equipment and tactics, they are 206

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deployed ‘primarily in urban communities to serve drug warrants, carry out raids’ and sometimes to ‘conduct street patrols, stopping mostly young citizens for minor offenses and arresting them for drug possession or outstanding warrants’ (Kitwana, 2002:62–3). In addition to national legislation, throughout the 1990s many local jurisdictions throughout the US introduced laws that criminalised, again usually via heavy-handed law enforcement tactics, the behaviours and activities of black youth. Gang loitering initiatives – which were rolled out in many of the country’s poor urban centres during the early 1990s – prohibiting two or more young people from hanging around in public areas such as parks, sidewalks or even outside their own homes could result in convictions leading to imprisonment and heavy fines. In Chicago the introduction of this particular piece of legislation led to the arrest of nearly 40,000 young people in the two- year period between 1992 and 1994. Other anti-drugs/ gang laws led to African American youth styles and fashions such as wearing hair in braids and bandanas becoming criminalised as gang insignia, resulting in offending culprits being banned from shopping malls and schools. During this same period law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles and Chicago as well as smaller cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland began to produce ‘gang profiling’ databases: These databases consist of suspected gang members and their family, friends, and associates … Most of those found in these databases are young Blacks and Latinos, as some of the characteristics of the profiling include being a member of a racial minority, graffiti writing, and dressing in a particular manner. In Los Angeles, the sheriff ’s department stores information on at least 140,000 individuals, many of whom have not committed any crime. Across the country, policies like these have became common in the 1990s (Kitwana, 2002:16).

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Gangs in austerity Britain

Fast forward two decades and a transatlantic crossing later and we find Britain firmly in the grip of its very own US-style gangs crisis, framed around a national war on ‘gangsta rap’-fuelled violent urban crime. Since the mid 2000s the UK has witnessed a worrying and increasing number of anti-gang laws and policies, including gang injunctions for 14–17-year-olds, joint enterprise, specialist gang policing units, gang profiling databases/ matrices, and minimum mandatory sentence for possession of a knife or offensive weapon by a 16- or 17-year-old in public or on school premises. Although there are no statutory bans in place either nationally or locally, there have nonetheless been numerous reports about black British youth being excluded from schools and colleges for wearing alleged ‘gang colours’ as items of clothing or for having their hair styled in braids. In 2011 a 12-year-old African Caribbean male pupil won his test case in the High Court against the secondary school that had permanently excluded him for wearing his hair in cornrows. According to the Daily Mail (2011) the ‘school had expressed concern that it was serving an area where there was gun and knife crime, much of it gang related. Hairstyles could be “badges” of gang identity, it said’. The focus on urban crime and street gangs in the UK, just like the war on drugs and gangs in the US, can be viewed as being race neutral both in its inception and implementation, but this perception is in fact grossly incorrect because race does matter; it certainly matters to the police as well as those other statutory and justice sector agencies and professionals who disproportionately monitor, target, arrest, prosecute, convict and then imprison disproportionate numbers of young black males. Of course the racialised gangs crisis is part of a much bigger social policy landscape which has been shaped by the ongoing British obsession – as manifested through the national political discourse and news media – with the evils of welfare, crime (including terrorism) and immigration. Although the problems of inner-city crime and immigration have preoccupied the post-war British national consciousness for several decades now, the 1980s neoliberal political agenda for ‘rolling back the state’ 208

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has since, under the coalition and Conservative governments, been transformed into a radical legislative programme centred around fiscal austerity. Following on from the 2011 riots the coalition government used the gangs crisis to garner support for its flagship programmes ‘Ending Gangs and Youth Violence’ (EGYV), rolled out in the November of that same year, and ‘Troubled Families’, launched six months later in April 2012. The cross-governmental EGYV report (HM Government, 2011:5) asserted that the ‘government has already set in motion a number of far-reaching reforms to address the entrenched educational and social failures that can drive problems like gang and youth violence’. In particular, the report went on to claim that the coalition’s ‘welfare reforms will give young people better opportunities to access work and overcome barriers to employment’, while its proposed ‘education reforms will drive up pupil performance and increase participation in further study and employment’.The government also used the November 2011 launch of its anti-gangs strategy to promote the benefits of its forthcoming Troubled Families programme: ‘Our plans to turn around the lives of the most troubled families will also be crucial.A new Troubled Families Team in the Department for Communities and Local Government’ was to be established tasked with turning ‘around the lives of 120,000 troubled families with reduced criminality and violence among key outcomes for this work’ (HM Government, 2011:5–6). Although the Troubled Families initiative was expediently linked to the thriving gang and youth crime agenda by the coalition, the principal reason behind its creation was in fact austerity. This three-year results-based funding scheme costing £448 million – which set out to tackle the deep-rooted and intergenerational problems of the 120,000 most ‘troubled’ families, which allegedly cost the public purse £9 billion each year – would, it was proposed, enable the government to make huge savings on its social welfare bill. Considering that the coalition’s five-year legislative timetable included up to £17.5 billion worth of national budgetary cuts, this initial outlay on the Troubled Families programme appears to be a rather small investment, particularly given that nearly ‘half of the budget

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(£200 million) is reserved for addressing worklessness’ (Wincup, 2013:127). However, by the end of its five-year term: When all austerity measures are taken into account, including cuts to public services and changes to taxes and welfare, the poorest tenth of the population are by far the hardest hit, seeing a 38% decrease in their net income over the period 2010–15. By comparison, the richest tenth will have lost the least, comparatively, seeing a 5% fall in their income (Oxfam, 2013:4) As a result of their 2015 election victory the Conservatives, for the first time in 18 years, were able to form a majority government and subsequently set about delivering on their political manifesto to slash welfare spending by an additional £12 billion and drastically reduce the size of the state.Yet according to Oxfam and many other critics of austerity, the continuation of the government’s radical social welfare agenda for another fixed parliamentary term ‘threatens to solidify the UK’s position as a country of growing inequality and poverty’ (Oxfam, 2013:4). Although fiscal austerity was most definitely one of the main drivers of both its EGYV and Troubled Families programmes, another key influence was New Labour’s law and order and social policy agenda, specifically its adoption and utilisation of a range of ‘managerialist and coercive measures’ (Evans, 2011) to ensure personal, parental, familial and civic responsibility in addition to encouraging community stakeholder partnership working and targeted early intervention. Youth, social policy and New Labour Within a few months of its election victory in May 1997, the New Labour government launched the Social Exclusion Unit to ‘improve government action to reduce social exclusion by producing “joined-up solutions to joined-up problems”’. It was deemed necessary because ‘Social Exclusion is what can happen when people or areas suffer from a combination of linked problems’ including worklessness, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime, poor health and family breakdown (HM 210

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Government, 2004:2). Nevertheless, this focus on exclusion instead of poverty allowed the government to propose policy actions and measures that forced individuals – including young people, parents, families and entire communities – to take responsibility for their attitudes and behaviours rather than tackle entrenched structural inequality. Indeed, much of Labour’s ambitious cross-governmental approach to social policy between 1997 and 2010 centred on the regeneration of decaying urban neighbourhoods while at the same time tackling the causes, as well as the consequences, of social exclusion – most notably crime and disorder. Central to New Labour’s law and order agenda, which unashamedly took inspiration from the ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric and policies emanating from the US, was its ‘joinedup’ approach to crime and social policy. The Blair and Brown governments ‘deepened and widened the project of further criminalisation’ through the implementation of policy initiatives that connected criminality and antisocial behaviour ‘with a range of different areas of social life, including education and housing’. As well as ‘boundary blurring between the goals of welfare and punishment’, this process resulted in the ‘displacement of goals’ whereby ‘crime control becomes the goal of social policy interventions as criminal justice solutions are sought to social problems’ (Wincup, 2013:12). In 1998 the government launched the New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme, which provided funding for 39 area-based initiatives (ABIs) throughout England and Wales, and was aimed at tackling social exclusion and urban decay. In addition to its ambitious strategy to regenerate poor neighbourhoods, Labour’s core legislative priority centred on addressing crime and antisocial behaviour.The passing of the Crime and Disorder Act in 1998 and the introduction of the Anti-Social Behaviour Act in 2003, alongside the Together and Respect campaigns, provided a range of measures and powers aimed at preventing and tackling antisocial behaviour and strengthening local communities. Launched by New Labour in 2003, the Together campaign focussed on what was termed the ‘more serious end’ of antisocial behaviour and disorder by introducing, or strengthening existing, criminal and civil justice powers in order that local agencies 211

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could better tackle the problem.This particular strategy resulted in the following punitive sanctions being meted out to adults and young people throughout the country: acceptable behaviour contracts, penalty notices for disorder, dispersal orders and the now infamous antisocial behaviour order or ASBO. The 2006 Respect Action Plan also continued to address the issue of antisocial behaviour except that it went further and ‘adopted a much broader and deeper approach to intervene early’ – in every area of life encompassing schools, tenants and home owners, public sector workers and entire local communities – ‘and tackle underlying causes’ such as poor parenting, school truancy and exclusion, deprivation and individual factors including substance and alcohol misuse (HM Government, 2008). At the heart of the Respect programme was an overarching concern with, as well as a series of interventions targeting, ‘problem young people’, ‘problem parents’ and ‘problem families’, in addition to strengthening deprived communities. The Blair and Brown governments saw the ‘problem’ behaviours of young people residing in deprived neighbourhoods and run-down housing estates as the most pressing social issue affecting British civil society. Consequently, the key policy responses were concerned with regenerating decaying local communities while regulating the activities of disadvantaged youth, and in particular their use of public space and engagement with compulsory education.This increasing formal control was most clearly evidenced through the creation of punitive sanctions that were made available to be imposed on individual young people and/or their parents by a new and growing army of local agents representing official authority. Clearly, the long-standing ‘history of respectable fears’ (Pearson, 1983) with regard to poor and working class youth was rebranded under New Labour to incorporate the new themes of social exclusion and urban renewal, but in essence the main concerns about feral behaviour, crime and educational disengagement remained the same. Young people matter

UK youth policy during the period 1997 to 2010 provides ample examples of the government’s strategy: ‘to mould youth to a 212

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particular communitarian vision of the deserving and respectable individual’ who accepts and takes full ‘responsibility for their own personal outcomes, engaging in community and voluntary activities and becoming a full participant in the country’s economy and waged work’ (Evans, 2011:89).This communitarian rights and responsibilities agenda resulted in the requirement that all young people be taught about democracy and citizenship in school, in addition to a myriad of new programmes and ambitious policy objectives. The national Connexions Service was launched in 2001 with an annual budget of £450 million. It was delivered through 47 local partnerships and offered advice and guidance to young people about the range of post-16 choices and opportunities available to them. Similarly, the Youth Matters and Youth Matters: Next Steps Green Papers, published in 2005 and 2006 respectively, outlined a number of expected positive outcomes for young people as they made their transition into adulthood, as well as a wide range of new targeted support programmes and funding opportunities that would be made available to them. Labour’s investment to support Youth Matters totalled £200 million and this was in addition to the £1.6 million it was spending on youth services and opportunities to further bolster this initiative. Connexions, Youth Matters and the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) – a funding scheme which encouraged 16–19-year-olds from low-income backgrounds to continue on into further education and unpaid training programmes – illustrated the rights or ‘carrot’ approach of New Labour’s communitarian agenda. Likewise, the enforcement measures and sanctions laid out in its Together and Respect strategies targeting individuals who fail to conform to ‘decent’ and ‘respectable’ standards of behaviour amply demonstrated the punitive or ‘stick’ elements of its youth policy framework. Further examples were that EMAs were to be withdrawn for those young people not sufficiently engaging with their course of study and the funding opportunities provided within Youth Matters were also to be withdrawn for those who failed to break the cycle of offending and antisocial behaviour. The government’s ‘joined-up solutions to joined-up problems’ led to the creation of the Department for Children, Families and 213

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Schools (DCFS) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), both of which replaced the former Department for Education and Skills. These departments helped to inform further what was an already broad and ambitious children and youth policy landscape, and in tandem they were key to New Labour’s grand legislative project.The separate aims and priorities of the DCFS and DIUS), when examined in tandem, set out to impact on every area of individuals’ (specifically, those at the bottom of society) lives, starting at birth through childhood and into adulthood, and where normative societal expectations extended to civic as well as parental responsibilities. Thus, there was a concern about children born into the most disadvantaged families, and to counter the ill-effects of poor parenting and social exclusion, the government invested in Sure Start Children’s Centres providing a range of integrated services and extra support for families, from pregnancy and throughout the early years. At the other end of the education spectrum, the government’s widening participation agenda promised that by 2010, 50% of all young people would be expected to be attending university. Holding up the middle, with regard to this lifelong education agenda, were secondary schools with their beefed-up roles as one-stop shops catering to young people’s holistic needs with citizenship learning experiences as well as advice and guidance offered by Connexions Personal Advisors. Moreover, schools would prepare their charges for the future world of work by providing, or guiding them onto, a range of relevant post-16 academic and vocational courses at college and later on university. New Labour viewed education as the essential ingredient required to propel individuals out of poverty by providing them with the skills and technical abilities to compete effectively in the 21st-century labour market. Furthermore, its investment in, and commitment to, the transformative and positive impact of education on the lives of disadvantaged youth was in many ways overly simplistic and problematic. Neoliberal policies, as pursued by the Blair and Brown governments, together with post-industrialisation and the ‘recomposition of class have given education a new role in social control as the age of entry into the labour market has been raised’ (Allen and Ainley, 2007:40). Education has always been linked to social control, however it 214

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now plays an even more significant role in the lives of young people whose experience of the labour market is very different when compared to previous generations. Rather than the traditional route into waged labour – as was the experience of school leavers during the 30-year period of ‘full employment’ after 1945 (see Willis, 1977) – many 14–19-years-olds are warehoused in extended schools/colleges and placated with a confusing range of foundation-level vocational courses – and the ‘promise of often receding eventual employment’ (Allen and Ainley, 2007:34). Although the government was clear about the financial investment required to holistically tackle social exclusion, and in so doing ensure that as many children and young people as possible ‘grow up’ happily and healthily, there was nonetheless a major problem with its common-solution approach to children and young people’s problems: ‘the assumption that individual agency and taking personal responsibility are sufficient to improve a person’s’ life chances/outcomes and ‘given the right information and guidance that the individual has the capacity to act on that advice to take a more positive path’ and thus be lifted out of poverty (Evans, 2011:91). The Blair and Brown administrations would point to their urban renewal strategy, and the funding of 39 ABIs in England Wales, which aimed to rebuild decaying neighbourhoods and tackle the ill-effects of social exclusion. Regeneration and crime

The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), set up in 1981 by the Thatcher Conservative government, was a largescale ABI that sought to regenerate the depressed Docklands area of east London. At the centre of this major initiative was the key role played by private business, local government and third sector partnership working and this model was to provide the future template for all subsequent ABIs. In the wake of the establishing of the LDDC, east London became a major laboratory for a large number of ABIs, which were also rolled out nationally, and included City Challenge, Single Regeneration Budget, Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, Sure Start, Children’s Fund, 215

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Youth Inclusion Programme, Education Action Zones, Health Action Zones, Housing Action Trusts, Connexions and the New Deal for Communities. Unsurprisingly, all have been concerned in one way or another with improving the life chances and experiences of those children, young people and adults deemed ‘at risk’ from social exclusion, by implementing preventative programmes that physically renew neighbourhoods as well as tackle employability, poor skills, high crime rates, poor health outcomes and educational under-achievement. Nevertheless, despite four decades of a myriad of regeneration programmes, Britain is still characterised by deep-rooted poverty as well as broader socio-economic disadvantage, which, in addition to being largely concentrated in ‘urban, metropolitan, and (post) industrial areas’, has also widened considerably during the past 40 years (Fahmy et al, 2011:594). New Labour and the previous Thatcher and Major Conservative governments have all been fixated by ABIs, nevertheless, research evidence points to the inherent limitations of ABIs with regard to tackling poverty and wider social disadvantage (Atkinson and Kintrea, 2002; Lupton, 2003; Rhodes et al, 2005; Lawless, 2012). Fundamentally, ‘locality managerialist approaches’ (Ball and Maginn, 2004:757) to poverty and inequality fail to address the complex structural contributory factors – global economic pressures combined with national government policies – which impact on housing, labour markets and the provision of welfare services like health and education. While ABIs that rebuild and redesign dilapidated housing stock and surrounding estates ‘might encourage local people to be more positive about their local environment … they are unlikely to sustain change with regard to people based outcomes’ (Lawless, 2012:325). Large-scale ABIs, as primarily witnessed in east London – such as the development of the London Docklands in the 1980s or more recently the London 2012 Olympic Legacy – are likely to lead to further gentrification and exclusionary displacement (Butler et al, 2013; Watt, 2013) by ‘addressing primarily the housing and consumption needs of the expanding’ number of high- and middle-income households (Poynter and MacRury, 2009:148). Research evidence indicates that ABIs, in whatever guise or permutation, are piecemeal and problematic as they distract from addressing the ongoing issue 216

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of poverty and the worsening social and economic inequities within British society. These deep-rooted inequalities require radical social policy interventions (Goldson and Muncie, 2006; Dorling, 2010; Rogowski, 2010) and ‘solutions focused upon a sustained commitment to the redistribution of wealth’ (Fahmy et al, 2011:612). As discussed above, the Blair and Brown administrations’ holistic approach to social exclusion was evidenced by the NDC, Respect and Youth Matters agendas. However, these programmes served also to confirm Labour’s pronouncements about being the party of ‘law and order’, while in office they constantly sought to address and respond to a series of ongoing media-fuelled moral panics about disaffected and marginalised youth, namely the problems of antisocial behaviour as well as gun and knife crime. Also, in attempting to push forward their communitarian agenda Labour politicians like Tony Blair sought to convey their ‘tough on crime’ message through the ‘rhetorical (persuasive) arts of emotional manipulation and rich figurative language … filtered through and shaped by the mass media’ (Stenson, 2007:24), thus providing ample publicity and justification for their policy agenda with regard to urban governance and urban renewal, in particular: the widespread assumption that securing the regeneration of post-industrial cities is dependent on reducing (the perception of) crime and ASB has been used to justify targeting the most marginal groups whose behaviour, lifestyle, or hardships are deemed obstacles to regenerative efforts. For some of the most disadvantaged and politically powerless – such as the homeless and young people – the ‘right’ to occupy public space has been effectively suspended (Hancock, 2007:69). In addition to the raft of punitive measures linked to crime and ASB, the government introduced a plethora of targeted programmes aimed at ‘hard to reach’ youth growing up in deprived neighbourhoods. Many of these initiatives were based on early intervention with ‘at-risk’ children and young people 217

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to steer them away from crime by involving them in multiagency-delivered positive programmes and activities. In this respect, the ambitious and far-reaching Youth Crime Action Plan (YCAP) launched in 1998 sought to make partnership working at all levels, ‘from Government departments to local youth workers, sentencers, police and third sector colleagues’ central to tackling youth crime (HM Government, 2009:3). At the heart of the government’s youth crime prevention strategy, and in keeping with its ‘joined-up’ approach to social policy, were the key partnership roles that are played out at the local neighbourhood level between local authorities, residents, the police and third sector agencies. Gangs matter – but do young people? The election of the Conservative-Liberal coalition government in May 2010 saw an end to 13 years of New Labour’s communitarian agenda. The key role of the state, as envisaged by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, was to tackle social exclusion and promote individual citizens’ rights and responsibilities. In order to achieve its ambitious ‘joined-up’ social policy objectives, Labour sought to invest heavily in public expenditure and welfare-oriented services – many of which were to be delivered through a ‘beefed-up’ third sector and private business rather than the state. As part of this new social contract, those who failed to take up their civic, community and/or parental responsibilities would find themselves on the wrong end of a range of punitive sanctions incorporating both criminal and civic powers. Interestingly, the coalition and the Conservative governments’ austerity-focussed social welfare agenda displays both continuities and discontinuities with regard to the previous administration’s communitarian grand plan. Since 2010 the role of the state has been redefined to focus solely on providing space and opportunities for the market, whether that be private business or large social businesses, to create jobs and wealth and operate ‘more efficiently’ and cheaply public utilities and services. The discontinuity here relates to the drastic cuts in public expenditure and not so much the role of the market and social business. New Labour was happy for 218

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government to administer and oversee the massive spending programme but was less inclined for it to directly provide these services. The continuity of David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity programme is largely concerned with the criminalisation and responsibilities agenda that is closely associated with New Labour. The Conservative government, and coalition before it, can be said to be ‘all about the stick’ and less about ‘the carrot’ and this is brought into sharp focus when looking at its social welfare policy in general, and specifically youth and gang crime. During its time in power, New Labour invested on average more than £1 billion pounds annually into youth support services alone; in contrast, George Osborne’s fiscal austerity drive and Iain Duncan Smith’s zeal for welfare reform resulted in billions of pounds’ worth of cuts. This over-emphasis on individual responsibility – with little mention of what individuals might expect in return from the state – is evidenced across the entire spectrum of the Conservatives’ social policy agenda, even during those five years when forced into coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. As Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith had overseen the dismantling of the welfare state, to the point where it ‘no longer provides an adequate safety net. Many people are struggling just to meet their basic needs. Precarious employment is rising’, moreover, research evidence indicates that ‘in-work poverty has overtaken out-of-work poverty for the first time’. Severe cuts to benefits and tax credits have led to their becoming not only less generous, but also ‘more conditional, and increasingly punitive’. Furthermore the ‘divisive rhetoric of “strivers versus skivers” demonises people who are unable to work through no fault of their own’. Services aimed at preventing those needs associated with the ‘growing risks of food and fuel poverty, homelessness and indebtedness’ - like youth services, social care, and housing services - ‘are being cut back, piling up problems for the future’ (Slay and Penny, 2013:4–5). New Labour social policy discourses made much mention of the fact that children, young people and tackling social exclusion ‘matter’, in addition to ASB and crime. For the Conservatives it seems that only gangs, radicalisation, benefit scroungers, troubled families, immigrants and tackling the budget 219

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deficit matter. Amid the measures introduced to address ASB and crime, the Blair and Brown administrations also invested billions of pounds into providing services and opportunities for children and young people. During the financial year 2005–06, the Labour government spent a total of £1.8billion pounds on youth services. In addition to the £200 million ring-fenced for the Youth Matters programme, this expenditure administered through, and part delivered by, local authorities in England and Wales covered universal youth services – undertaken in youth clubs or on the streets via detached and outreach work – and targeted work. This specialist youth provision included services and programmes such as Connexions and in areas such as youth counselling, teenage pregnancy, sexual health, substance and alcohol misuse, music and youth arts, and educational support for excluded pupils. By 2012–13, and according to figures obtained by BBC journalists after a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Education, spending on youth services in England and Wales had fallen to £793 million. They showed that in real terms the amount of money spent by councils on services for young people had fallen by nearly 40% (£438 million) during the two-year period 2010–11 to 2012–13 (Barton and Edgington, 2014). Unsurprisingly, there has been much criticism of the funding decisions of local authorities – including from the former coalition Children’s Minister and Conservative MP Tim Loughton and the chief executive, at the time of the cuts, of the National Youth Agency (NYA), Fiona Black – which have impacted disproportionately on youth services. However, in response to this widespread condemnation, the chair of the Local Government Association’s children and young people’s board noted that ‘councils faced no easy choices’ because many of them ‘have been badly affected by the level of reductions in government funding’. As a consequence, ‘we’ve seen some areas where the level of funding going into youth services has gone down really quite substantially’ and many councils have therefore had to prioritise some services over others’ (Barton and Edgington, 2014). These cuts to youth services need also to be placed within the wider social welfare policy context of

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fiscal austerity, which again has impacted on the most vulnerable sections of society, not least children and young people. New Labour’s mantra ‘joined-up solutions’ for ‘joined-up problems’ was underpinned by its almost evangelical belief in the key role of early intervention services. These ring-fenced local authority grant allocations covered a wide range of provision including children’s centres and other early years services, and family support services, in addition to both universal and targeted youth services support.After the coalition government’s five-year term, New Labour’s legacy around early intervention had been comprehensively downscaled and in many respects dismantled. According to a joint report by the National Children’s Bureau and The Children’s Society, the ‘value of the early intervention allocation to local authorities has fallen by 55%’, down from £3.2 billion in 2010–11 ‘to just £1.4 billion in 2015–16 – a cut of £1.8 billion per year’ (NCB, 2015:8). So, then, an overview of the coalition years and what it has meant particularly for young people, their families and communities: the disbanding of the Connexions careers service, abolition of EMAs, tripling of university tuition fees, severe cuts to other youth, children and family support services, not to mention the swingeing cuts to benefits (such as abolishing housing benefit for all 18–21-yearolds) and tax credits resulting in rising housing costs, exacerbating further the acute shortage of affordable housing, amid falling incomes. Nevertheless, while undertaking their full-scale assault on the welfare state, the coalition and Conservative governments have found time and a relatively small amount of money, in comparison to the billions of pounds’ worth of cuts, to address the problem of youth gangs and violent crime. By the end of its time in office in May 2015, the coalition government had spent just over £10 million on its EGYV programme and most of it was distributed to the local areas before April 2012.The ‘refreshed’ Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation’ (EGVE) strategy was launched in a relatively low-key manner by a junior minister from the Home Office in January 2016. This was in stark contrast to the media fanfare that accompanied the former Home Secretary Theresa May and the former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s introduction of EGYV in November 2011. Interestingly, 221

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while the EGVE sets out the government’s six new priorities to deal with gangs in 52 areas across England, there is no explicit mention of any kind of additional funding/financial investment attached to the programme.The EGVE strategy document (HM Government, 2016) does briefly discuss – under priority heading 6: ‘Promote meaningful alternatives to gangs such as education, training and employment’ – some of the cross-governmental work being undertaken with young people. However, again much of this work makes no specific references to any extra or significant new funding streams. In February 2016 the Home Office quietly announced that it would no longer be funding the ‘Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation Peer Review Network’, which was an expert advisory panel that provided ongoing advice and support to the EGYV local areas. Although there were no specific details about the actual costs of the Network, and subsequently the exact savings its abolition represented to the government, it did not stop Labour MP Chuka Amunna proclaiming in the Londonbased news media that Ministers were ‘risking the lives of young Londoners by scrapping a “very important” scheme set up to stop teenagers from being lured into gangs’ (Bentham, 2016). In truth, the scrapping of the Network is of no real great significance to the running of the EGVE programme. Nevertheless, it is clear that the government’s anti-gangs policy has moved even further away from early intervention and prevention and is rather more concerned with law enforcement and drug offences. This is evidenced first by the two key EGVE priorities below: 1. Tackle county lines – the exploitation of vulnerable people by a hard core of gang members to sell drugs. 2. Reduce violence and knife crime – including improving the way national and local partners use tools and powers. In particular and falling under priority 3 of the Conservatives new and ‘refreshed’ anti-gangs strategy, it was noted that: The Government implemented the extended and amended gang injunction power in June 2015, including an updated statutory definition of gangs, 222

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and this allows the police and local authorities to take pre-emptive action against possible gang violence and drug dealing. In July 2015, we also brought into force the new sentencing provision that anyone caught in possession of a knife for a second time will now face a mandatory minimum sentence in prison or secure youth custody if convicted by the courts (HM Government, 2016:4). The other remaining priorities of EGVE were largely concerned with safeguarding and information sharing, which were to be addressed by local agencies working in the 52 priority areas. For safeguarding this meant the implementation of new, or strengthening existing, regulations and guidelines aimed at practitioners working with children and young people at risk of being exploited and used by gangs. With regard to information sharing, this centred on the compilation and dissemination of research evidence, and innovative ways of working, to local agencies to help vulnerable young women – whether as victims of abuse or to help them exit gangs – and promote early intervention in order to stop young people joining gangs in the first place. But as discussed above, the information-sharing element of the new anti-gangs strategy, which was not that significant anyway, has been downgraded further still due to the disbanding of the EGVE Peer Review Network. Risky youth behaviours and violence It is clear that the UK has gone full throttle in its wholesale adoption of many of the social policies and political rhetoric from the US concerning the need for welfare reform and tough law enforcement measures to fight urban crime. However, it is a shame that British policy makers did not review the US research evidence, which indicates, first, that the overwhelming majority of violence and crime in poor neighbourhoods is not attributable to gangs; and, second, gang suppression and law enforcement tactics have spectacularly failed to tackle crime and violence. A good example is Los Angeles: as the ‘the undisputed gang capital of the US, more police, more prisons, and more 223

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punitive measures haven’t stopped the cycle of gang violence’. Furthermore, findings ‘from investigations of gang enforcement efforts in 17 jurisdictions over the past two decades yield few examples of success and many examples of failure’ (Greene and Pranis, 2007:3–5). Of particular concern is the fact that it is black and Latino communities who have disproportionately borne the brunt of heavy-handed police-led suppression efforts as well as the cost of failed gang enforcement initiatives. Rather than more law enforcement, what is required by policy makers to address violent offending and other risky youth behaviours is the commitment to a youth development model. Such an approach would offer a range of formal and informal educational, as well as health-related services and interventions that seek to address many of the risky activities engaged in by young people. The onset of adolescence is a time of great change and uncertainty for many young people, moreover this period of transition is closely associated with risk taking and other transgressive behaviours. Media and popular culture representations and portrayals of teenage angst, rebellion and stroppiness provide further credence to academic literature about the normalcy and universality of youth rule breaking. Newspaper stories about loud and threatening groups of youth loitering in public spaces abound, as do concerns about graffiti, vandalism, school truancy, shoplifting and fighting. Indeed, findings ‘from multi-country studies in Europe and beyond demonstrate that participation in risky behavior during adolescence is global though patterns may vary across countries’, similarly risky behaviour can also vary across racial and ethnic lines within countries (Bowe, 2016:130; see also, for example, Enzmann et al 2010; Richter, 2010). Of particular concern to public health is that the youth life stage ‘is a common time of adoption of many behaviours with adverse long-term impact on health’ including smoking, unprotected sexual activity, and alcohol and substance misuse. There is strong research evidence which suggests that health risk behaviours embarked on during the period of adolescence will continue on into adulthood. Moreover, although ‘interventions to prevent young peoples’ participation in health risk behaviors have traditionally focused on single behaviors’, there is a body 224

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of research literature which indicates ‘that health risk behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and drug use, as well as sexual risk and violence co-occur in high-risk young people’. Research findings also show that ‘low socio economic status’ and ‘poor mental health’ are two of the common ‘factors related to higher risk of health risk behaviours’ (Viner et al, 2006:16; see also, for example, Chen and Kandel, 1995; Lynskey et al, 1998; Boreham and Shaw, 2002; Zweig et al, 2002). Additionally, according to Anica Bowe, when examining risk-taking behaviour it is essential that the researcher ‘turn a lens on communities whose environments contain risk factors that might encourage more risky behavior in their adolescents’. Black African and Caribbean British youth are one such community that, according to a number of research studies, ‘face educational and social challenges that can be conceptualized as environmental risk factors’ (Bowe, 2016:130). As well as suffering with relatively high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage, black adolescents in England are also more likely to have poor levels of educational attainment, higher rates of school exclusion, low teacher expectations and have been identified as pupils with emotional and behavioural needs. In addition, this particular youth demographic is also most strongly identifiable with Black Atlantic informed Road cultures that glamorise the aesthetics, attitudes and behaviours of ‘Badness’ and the ‘badass’. This is combined with the longstanding and negative police-informed news-media images that portray black youth as intrinsically criminogenic and violent. Unsurprisingly, with regard to identity formation, research studies on black British youth ‘demonstrate that some may internalize and subsequently enact these negative ethnic identities and fail to recognize their deleterious effects on their personal successes’ (Bowe, 2016:131). It is a combination of the above complex educational and social challenges that result in black young males’ disproportionate involvement in serious youth violence, both as victims and as perpetrators. However, we should not allow the gangs crisis to obscure the fact that gun and knife violence are still relatively rare, albeit troubling, occurrences; and not – as the police and some academics and journalists would have us believe – a national pandemic.

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During the ten-year period 2005 to 2015, there were 185 teenage homicides in the Greater London area as a result of fatal stabbing with a knife or sharp instrument. The overwhelming majority of knife and gun crime murder victims in the capital are young black males with an average age of 16. This disproportionality is also replicated nationally: between the twoyear period 2008 to 2009 there were 124 victims of murder and manslaughter, aged 10–19, in England and Wales; 39 of the victims were black males who had been fatally wounded by the use of a knife or gun. While these statistics are quite troubling and need to be addressed, it should be noted that according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), homicide is not the leading cause of death among young people. ‘Of the 1,574 youngsters aged 10–19 who died in England and Wales in 2007, half were killed by illness and 546 by accidents, of which the vast majority were road deaths’ (Jeavans, 2008). Overall, chronic health conditions and road traffic accidents are, and have been for many decades, the leading cause of death for children and young people in England and Wales. So, returning to the issue of gun and knife violence, again it should be remembered that the overwhelming majority of black young people are not, and will not, become engaged in these or any other type of offending activity. Nonetheless, what African Caribbean and other young people growing up in Britain’s poorest localities are desperately in need of are universalist and targeted support services that encompass health, education, sporting activities, music and the arts. A wide-ranging and holistic national youth offer would help many to navigate more successfully the challenges and inequalities they are presented with on a daily basis. Conclusion The rolling back of the state first mooted in the early 1980s was by the late 1990s and 2000s accompanied by the increasing criminalisation of social policy. The ‘tough on crime’ policies and political language emanating from across the Atlantic found a home in the ‘joined-up’ government departments of the Blair and Brown administrations. Between 1997 and 2010 New Labour set about its communitarian agenda, investing billions 226

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of pounds into health, education, children and youth services, while introducing a range of punitive measures aimed at tackling crime and social disorder in order to promote personal and civic responsibility. By 2010, the ‘rolling back’ agenda had been transformed into an all-out political attack on the welfare state alongside the continuing policy zeal for hard law and order.This neoliberal realist orthodoxy on crime control consolidated in the early 1990s maintains that tough ‘and smart policing, prevention and punishment’ by themselves ‘can provide public safety and security’. A key feature of hard law and order is the misplaced ‘can-do confidence manifested by many practitioners, politicians’ and a number of ‘criminologists in the crime control capacity of criminal justice without tackling the deeper causes of crime’ (Reiner, 2012:30).This latter point is amply illustrated when one examines recent youth crime prevention and policing strategies in some of England’s poorest multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. The coalition and Conservative governments’ anti-gangs policies which have been implemented since 2011 have been both misguided and problematic. First, they have been premised on the core (but contested)1 principle that all youth violence and crime in urban communities is gang related. Second, the EGYV and updated EGVE programmes have provided the official cross-governmental seal of approval (and funding) to the contested notion of youth gangs and the further criminalisation of black youth. The Conservatives’ quasi-religious mantra of welfare reform and fiscal austerity has led to the decimation of early intervention services and targeted youth support services. Unfortunately, these swingeing cuts to public expenditure have disproportionately impacted on the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society, particularly children and young people.Young people growing up in England’s poorest neighbourhoods are daily faced with a variety of socio-economic and educational challenges such as poor educational attainment, high rates of unemployment, homelessness and ‘sofa surfing’. These environmental pressures are also more likely to lead to youth engaging in risky behaviours that can negatively impact on their 1

There is not even a consensus of opinion (or research evidence) among UK gang criminologists themselves to support such a contentious premise. 227

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long-term physical health and/or psycho-social development. Within this broader social and political economic context, it is very clear that many disadvantaged young people, along with their families and communities, are in desperate need of more support from the state and not less. The over-representation of black male youth in knife and gun violence, as both victims and as perpetrators, is very concerning, as are the other statistics pertaining to their high levels of socioeconomic and educational disadvantage. However, black youth are not the only groups of young people in the country who are facing complex social and educational challenges which make them particularly vulnerable to engaging in problematic risk-taking activities such as offending behaviour and alcohol and substance misuse. Serious youth violence should be looked at in the same way as other high-risk behaviours, and therefore it is as much a health and education issue as it is a policing and crime one. Moreover, it should be contextualised alongside the many other adaptive responses (or risk-taking activities) of marginalised young people to their entrenched socio-economic disadvantage. The current precarious position of young people growing up in poor neighbourhoods can only be tackled by the implementation of ‘radical’ social policies. Such a progressive legislative agenda will commit to the long-term financial investment in the country’s beleaguered health, education and other welfare services. This renewed vision as to the key role of the state with regard to promoting the ‘social good’ will lead to the re-imagination and creation of universalist and integrated service provision tasked with improving the life experiences, opportunities and choices of all young people. Crucially, it will be important that policy makers ensure that the voices and experiences of young people are integral to any future decision making and service delivery.

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Conclusion Contrary to the official statutory UK definition of gangs, which is (or should be) now used across all police and public services, there is still no consensus of opinion or agreement about the problem and proliferation of youth gangs in the US, never mind in Britain. Almost 100 years since Frederic Thrasher’s classic study, still ‘the least settled issue in gang research is the age old question:“What is a gang”’. Ironically the overwhelming majority of gang experts do seem to be able to ‘agree on only one point in this regard: that there is no agreement – neither among’ those academics who study gangs ‘nor among the cops who police them’ (Greene and Pranis, 2007:9). The picture becomes no clearer when we narrow the issue by asking, what is a youth gang? or what is a street gang? Moreover, what is the difference between drug gangs and street gangs? There is clearly much confusion and boundary blurring and these definitional issues are amply reflected within much of the literature on gangs. The prescribed and dominant definitional boundaries as proposed by influential American scholars such as Malcolm Klein and Irving Spergel have also resulted in the racialisation and criminalisation of youth gangs. Portrayals of black and Latino gangs in the global media, which are informed by those dominant academic and police definitions, have further helped fix in the public’s consciousness the strong association between race and violent urban crime. If as researchers we become embroiled in looking for a world of gangs, as is suggested by Hagedorn, what definition or typology of gang are we to search for? Are we only to focus on groups of poor urban male youth from racial/ethnic backgrounds who are engaging in violent conflict? Even if we do, we run the risk of travelling down a dangerous academic cul de sac, because just as there is a great deal of contention around definitions, there are equally major concerns about linking youth gangs and violent 229

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crime too closely. First, there is insufficient research evidence to justify the widely accepted belief that gangs cause crime (Katz and Jackson-Jacobs, 2004; Greene and Paranis, 2007); and second, gang academics who define gangs in terms of criminal behaviour provide the empirical evidence that the police, news media and mass society ‘feed on and reinforce the tendency to reify gangs’ (Sullivan, 2006:6). This book has sought to address the above concerns and in particular the continued demonisation and criminalisation of black urban youth and their friendship networks under the guise of national government-led gang prevention and law enforcement strategies. This book is premised on the belief that violent youth crime is not just a policing and criminal justice issue; rather it is better understood (and tackled) from a youth development approach.Therefore, instead of fixating on gangs I started out by discussing the wide range of social harms and risky behaviours, of which gun and knife violence are manifestations, that poor and marginalised young people engage in. It is the case that many young people around the world are growing up in healthy, supportive and cohesive environments, however at the same time many young adults are facing serious social, economic and cultural challenges. In rich and poorer nations alike, youth are faced with a complex array of social ills and risk, including crime, violence, homelessness, substance misuse, sexual exploitation, fragile families and limited access to health and educational services. As such, I specifically explored youth violence within the comparative urban contexts of Brazil, Jamaica, the US and Central America, taking into account national historical (and cultural) processes and the political economy. One of the main issues within the global South relates to rapid population growth and increasing urbanisation, which are closely linked to poverty and the prevalence of slums. Under-employment is a key feature of these slum communities as is the issue of crime and other social problems; as such as they are ‘characterized by their transient households and “counterculture” social patterns’ (UN-HABITAT, 2003:xxvi). The physical and social manifestations of urban poverty and inequality as experienced by those in the developing world are also becoming a major problem that is being witnessed in the 230

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decaying inner-cities/suburbs of North America and Western Europe. As with the slum dwellers of the developing world, poor urban neighbourhoods in the industrial North are similarly stigmatised as areas blighted by violent crime, illegal drugs and high rates of social dysfunction, a prevalence of lone-parent households, absentee fathers, teenage pregnancy, worklessness and welfare dependency. Rapid urbanisation, neoliberalisation and uneven capitalist development have disproportionately impacted on young people. resulting in them experiencing higher levels of inequality and deprivation. Disenfranchised urban youth residing in the Brazilian favelas, black and brown US ghettos, South African townships or the banlieue in France are faced with similar yet differing social stigmas and development issues; all of which are related to their precarious existence on the margins of mainstream society. Consequently, because the fabric of urban marginality is not the same everywhere we will only be able to fully understand it if we embed the ‘generic mechanisms that produce it, like the specific forms it assumes’ into the differentiated cultural, social, political, economic and historical contexts ‘of each society at a given epoch’ (Wacquant, 2008:2). While the global conditions that help ferment urban marginality are in many respects similar, rather than looking at a ‘world of gangs’ we need to work to develop more complex and differentiated perspectives about the causes and manifestations of urban youth violence in different national contexts. The social menace of gun and knife violence has been a constant fixture within the newspaper headlines and comment pieces for more than two decades now. But it was not until the 2011 English riots that the much more established moral panics concerning black youth and violent urban crime became transformed into the UK gangs crisis. From the research evidence generated thus far about the summer disorders it is clear that street gangs were not responsible for causing the five days of looting, burning and violence. Moreover, contrary to the initial commentaries that appeared in the news media, the riots did not announce a new chapter in violent youth disorder; Britain has been in the thick of a moral panic concerning its young people stretching back the last 150 years (Pearson, 2012). The 231

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histories of the youth problem run the gamut of both the 19th and 20th centuries to include widespread mass public anxieties about child pickpockets, marauding youth gangs and juvenile crime. But it was the emergence of the Teddy Boys in the 1950s which represented a new watershed in British social history. As the first working class subcultural formation to take the nation by storm, the Teds were vilified and portrayed through the mass media as both an unprecedented and entirely foreign threat to the traditional British way of life. Indeed, the subsequent moral panics of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond have similarly drawn on metaphors of increasing lawlessness and other imagined threats caused by retrograde and malign foreign cultural influences.The numerous post-war social crises engineered in the national press about youth depravity and delinquency included a cacophony of opinion pieces demanding government and police action (Cohen, 2011). By the 1970s, the long-standing history of respectable fears about problematic white working class subcultures had been updated to take into account the new and incendiary national debate about race and immigration. For the next couple of decades, with help from police-derived crime statistics and stereotyped media portrayals, black British youth became synonymous with street crime. The range of folk-devil roles assigned to them during the past 40 years has been varied while at the same time depressingly similar, incorporating slight adaptations of the original theme of the violent ‘mugger’: villainous lead roles have included the drug-dealer, inner-city rioter, street robber, gunman and knife crime perpetrator. All of the above descriptions and incarnations of urban black criminality have been distilled and condensed within/under the catchall label of the street gang.This convenient label can be used by the police, politicians and journalists as shorthand for the drug dealers, street robbers and knife/gun-wielding criminals that are laying siege to many metropolitan areas of the country. It would be remiss of this author not to highlight the fact that in between the national fixation with the black mugger in the 1970s and today’s black ‘gang banger’ – and before the September 2011 New York attacks and the subsequent US/UK-led international ‘war

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on terror’ – was the Asian youth gang crisis, which generated plenty of newspaper headlines throughout much of the 1990s. The perennial national obsession with problem youth and their subcultures is not only evidenced by the thousands of column inches that these issues have taken up in newspaper headlines and commentaries, but it is very much reflective of the academies’ gaze also. As far back as the 1920s, British researchers (see for example Burt, 1925) utilising medical concepts derived from biology and the eugenics movement have been interested in examining delinquency and mental subnormality among deviant youth group members. Post-1945, youth studies became the preserve mainly of those working within the academic fields of psychoanalysis and psychology, and again was dominated by investigations into deviance and the interrogation of theories concerning the ‘affectionless personality’ and ‘inadequate socialization’ (Bowlby, 1944, 1953). There were a number of community-based youth studies in the 1960s which focused on the role of working class subcultures with regard to (a) structural inequality reproduced through schooling and (b) delinquency as a solution to socio-economic disadvantage and inequality. Nevertheless, it was Phil Cohen’s ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community’ (1972) research paper which asserted the need to separate subculture from delinquency and thus became an early sign post as to the future direction of UK youth studies.This bright new beginning, encompassing the remainder of the 1970s as well as the early 1980s, would largely involve the seminal multi-disciplinary theoretical and empirically informed work developed by researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).The fixation with working class young people’s subcultures, styles, symbols and bricolage had by the late 1990s fallen out of favour with British scholars. Indeed, researchers are no longer attracted to the CCCS model and instead have over the last two decades adopted either the ‘cultural’ perspective or the ‘transitional’ approach to addressing the youth question. Notwithstanding James Patrick’s study, research literature on gangs within the UK context during the past 60 or 70 years has, for the most part, been almost non-existent. Since the early 2000s there has been a steadily growing interest in the gang among a very small number of UK criminologists, however 233

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even today the body of work is still rather scant. Regardless of the postulations of John Pitts and others, the research evidence about the proliferation of violent urban gangs in the UK is partial, biased and has still to be empirically proven. So the continuing debates about gang typologies remain: why is it that the definitional boundaries espoused by high-profile gang experts such as Malcolm Klein exclude large numbers of white deviant urban groupings but include large numbers of black and brown collectives? Even if we put aside concerns about the definitional inadequacies, no sound empirical data (in the UK or the US) has yet been provided which demonstrates the clear and categorical causational link between gangs and violent crime. Most of the information about gang-related violent crime has been gleaned from unchallenged police statistics and intelligence corroborated, and extensively drawn on, by one or two gang experts. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary report (HMIC, 2014) on the inspection of crime data integrity in police forces in England and Wales – carried out between February and August 2014 – highlighted a number of serious concerns about the crime recording process. The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) statistics on 6,600 gang crimes committed during the three-year period up to February 2014 detail 24 murders, 28 attempted killings, and 170 firearms offences, stabbings, and kidnappings allegedly ‘carried out by one of 3,484 gang members’, some individuals were aged as young as 13. It turns out that these figures are derived from offending data recorded on the MPS gangs matrix. This database draws on ‘intelligence from police, probation, prisons and other experts to identify Londoners who are gang members’ (Bentham, 2014:1–2). Unfortunately, the current official statutory definition of the street gang is an ambiguous and catchall description that unfairly targets and labels large swathes of young black males as gang members. Even more importantly, the use of the gangs matrix only serves to formalise the biases of police officers and other justice sector experts by criminalising family members, friends and acquaintances of alleged ‘known gang members’.The rather open-ended nature of the gang label and the significant impact of discretionary bias on the part of individual police officers allows for them to incorrectly record any criminal offence – including 234

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stabbings, firearm offences, robbery, murder, sexual assault and low-level antisocial behaviour – as gang related. An independent evaluation of the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s (LBWF) gang prevention initiative ‘Enough is Enough’ reported that there were specific concerns raised by stakeholders about the police matrix used to identify gang ‘nominals’, those individuals labelled at-risk or gang-involved. ‘They felt that the Matrix was unrepresentative in terms of identifying gang’ members and it was also perceived to be ‘self-perpetuating as it is based on police intelligence’ (LBWF, 2014a:7). Although none of the inherent problems associated with ‘gang talk’ (Hallsworth andYoung, 2008) have been resolved, what has changed is the use/abuse of the gang label to justify the oppressive policing tactics utilised disproportionately against black and minority youth. Interestingly, the small but growing cadre of British gang criminologists have/had nothing to say about the racialisation of the issue by the news media, or the impact gang prevention-led policing and criminal justice practice has on African Caribbean young males. Historically, black British communities have been ‘over-policed’ while at the same time being under-protected by the law (Bowling et al, 2015).This over-policing has/is manifested in the heavy-handed abuse of stop and search powers as well as by the disproportionate number of deaths in police custody and fatal shootings by the police. In addition to the problem of racialised police violence, official government statistics have, during the past three decades, consistently indicated that black people are over-represented at every stage of the criminal justice process. In comparison to their white and Asian peers, black suspects/ defendants are more likely to be on remand after having been refused bail, face prosecution, and receive a (lengthier) custodial sentence. In June 2013 black males comprised 13.3% of the prison population, which was four times their number in the general population (Berman and Dar, 2013). Furthermore, during the period 2012 to 2013, 21% of under-18s held in custody in the secure estate in England and Wales were from a black background (Youth Justice Board/Ministry of Justice, 2014), and 45% of children in Young Offender Institutions are from a black or minority background (HM Government, 2015b). 235

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The police-media-constructed gangs crisis has provided further opportunities for the state, via the agencies of the criminal justice system, to specifically target and punish black young people.They are still over four and a half times more likely to be stopped and searched compared to white ethnic groups, however of particular concern is the extensive use/abuse of joint enterprise law in cases involving groups of young people and where the suspects are alleged to have committed gang-related violent offences. Many critics and campaign groups have argued that this controversial ancient legal principle is unjust and inherently flawed as it often results in overly harsh sentencing decisions. It has also been found to be discriminatory in that it has been excessively utilised against black individuals and groups. However, the sum total of all these collective criminal justice sanctions ‘which are designed to “disrupt” and “end” the gang, is the disproportionate punishment of ’ BAME youth – particularly those from African Caribbean backgrounds – ‘while failing to adequately curtail levels of serious youth violence across England and Wales’ (Williams and Clarke, 2016:3). Drawing on data from my ethnographic study, I provided a locally situated account detailing the impact of the anti-gangs punishment agenda on young people and examined Road life realities and youth violence.As indicated by national government statistics, I found that it was black youth who bore the brunt of oppressive policing tactics on the street, much of it instigated under the guise of preventing/tackling gang-related crime. Stops and searches were a daily occurrence and a constant hazard for many of the young black male informants, and all too often these street-level police interventions were overly aggressive and confrontational. I have witnessed/observed (via my ethnographical research) on numerous occasions police officers swooping into action and harassing countless numbers of predominantly black youth in the pursuit of illicit drugs and weapons. However, these hard law enforcement tactics aimed at reducing gang activity have largely served only to alienate further large sections of the community, including young people, while failing to get to grips with serious youth violence. Whereas the current policy, prevention and policing agenda on serious youth violence in Britain is misguidedly wrapped up in 236

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‘gang talk’, the young informants’ discussions about the realities of neighbourhood Road life contradicted such postulations. As has been found by a number of recent studies examining urban youth violence, its main drivers are not gangs per se but rather territoriality and specifically the ‘code of the street’ (Anderson, 1999). Road life in urban neighbourhoods provides young people with innumerable opportunities for leisure, pleasure and the forging of strong friendship networks; but it also represents a place of risk and danger. The young males were most at risk of getting drawn into Road life beefs – usually petty disputes that quickly escalated into retaliatory knife or gun violence– and robberies. Road life survival is dependent on the adherence to a ‘street logic’, which demands that youth embroiled in beef are able to physically defend (back) themselves, or their friends, against others and by any means necessary (Gunter, 2008).Young males from African Caribbean backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to becoming involved in knife and gun crime, both as victims and perpetrators. Although it is still a relatively rare albeit worrying problem, weapon-enabled violence represents just one of the countless other health risk behaviours that young people engage in. The youth life stage is synonymous with high risk and problematic behaviours, which are further compounded by economic and psycho-social challenges including poverty, joblessness, poor educational attainment, homelessness, mental illness and chaotic family circumstances. As a consequence of globalisation many young people around the world are facing very uncertain futures. This situation has been further exacerbated by neoliberal government policies of neglect and austerity on the one hand, and hard law enforcement on the other. During the past two decades, Britain has become a much more punitive nation and this has been accompanied by the wholesale dismantling of the welfare state and the notion of the social good. Many children, young people, families and communities throughout Britain are in crisis and are daily having to contend with the effects of fuel poverty, food poverty, in-work (and out-of-work) poverty, indebtedness, homelessness and an array of associated mental and physical health problems.What is criminal? Actually it is not the fact that there are allegedly hordes 237

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of marauding gun- and knife-wielding gang-affiliated youth running amok on housing estates in Birmingham, Manchester and London, but rather that there is a small band of criminologists (and other academics) who are happy to criminalise large swathes of urban youth while turning a blind eye to the actions and behaviours of the police, media and governments; who clearly believe that not all young people matter.

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270

Index

Index

A ABIs (area-based initiatives) 211, 215 – 16 academic research on causes of 2011 riots 59 – 64 critiques of ‘gang crisis’ 107 – 10 Eurogang Paradox 86 – 8 gang definitions in examples 79, 87 – 8, 91, 95, 96 – 7, 98 – 9, 101, 102 – 3, 143 – 4 as problematic 14 – 15, 79, 87, 234 and gang industry 113 – 14, 117, 124 gangs in post-war Britain 82 – 6 government use of 204 Gunter’s work 50 – 1, 139 – 40, 171 Manchester gangs 88 – 93 overview 6 – 7, 77 – 8, 233 – 4 qualitative studies on youth violence 98 – 107 subcultural studies 77, 78 – 82, 233 surveys of gang members 93 – 8 under-theorisation of race 7 – 8, 124 – 8, 137 in USA 39, 79 ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) 13 – 14, 75, 116 – 17 activity centres 182 – 4 adolescent street groups 83 African Americans 40 – 3, 44 – 5, 204

age 54, 55, 98 Aldridge, J. 128 Alexander, Clare 109 Alexander, Michelle 205 antisocial behaviour 211, 217 area-based initiatives (ABIs) 211, 215 – 16 Articulated Super Gang 143 – 4 Asian youth 69 – 74 Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) 13 – 14, 75, 116 – 17 at-risk young people 148 – 9, 154 – 6, 217 – 18 austerity see public expenditure cuts authority figures 181 – 4

B badness-honour 38, 181 Barrows, Julie 14 Becker, Howard 78 Bennett, T. 93 – 4 Birmingham, Handsworth disturbances 68 black American ghettos 20, 41 – 3, 204 black youth criminalisation of 64, 65 – 7, 69, 119 – 20, 207 relations with police 61 – 3, 66, 68, 156 – 9, 167 – 8, 236 police perspectives 159 – 66 social challenges for 225 black youth cultures 41, 129 – 34 Bowlby, J. 77 Bowling, B. 121 Bradford disturbances (1995) 70, 71 271

Race, gangs and youth violence Bradshaw, Paul 96 – 7 Brazil 34 – 5 Briggs, Daniel 60 Bristol disturbances (1980) 66 – 7 Brixton disturbances, (1981) 67 – 8 Broadwater Farm disturbances 68 –9 Brookman, Fiona 178 Brotherton, D.C. 201 Bullock, K. 90 – 2 Bureau of Investigative Journalism 123

Crime and Security Act (2010) 118 crime statistics 72, 113, 119, 134 – 5, 149, 234 – 5 criminal justice system see judiciary; law enforcement practices; policing criminal offences 53, 95 – 6, 98 cultural inclusion 22 cultural studies 81 culture see youth culture

D

C Cameron, David 48 Campbell, Anne 86 Cantle, Ted 71 Caribbean 29 – 30, 36 – 9 Catch 22 145 CDRP (Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership) 145 Central America 29 – 30, 32 – 4 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 7, 81 – 2, 233 child soldiers 36 Children and Young People in Gangs (Medina) 97 – 8 cities 17 – 21, 22 see also urban contexts of youth violence; urban regeneration civil war 31, 32 coalition government policy 218 – 21 code of the street 178 Cohen, Phil 80 – 1, 233 Coles, Bob 184 Colombia 35 – 6 communitarian policy 213, 217, 218 community relations with police 165 see also residents Compressed Street Gang 144 Connexions Service 213 Conservative government approach 221 – 3 Cordis Bright 147 – 8 crime moral panics about youth, race and 6, 64 – 74, 118 – 19, 232 – 3 and slums 20 Crime and Courts Act (2013) 118 Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership (CDRP) 145

DALY (disability-adjusted life year) 27 databases 207 see also police matrix de-industrialisation 41 – 2 deaths in custody 121, 136 delinquency 77, 80, 84, 233 delinquent youth groups (DYGs) 95 – 6 Delinquent Youth Groups and Offending Behaviour (Sharp) 95 – 6 Densley, James 102 – 4, 126 Department for Children, Families and Schools (DCFS) 213 – 14 Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) 214 Deuchar, Ross 99 – 100 deviance 7, 77 – 8, 233 deviancy theory 78 disability-adjusted life year (DALY) 27 disadvantage see inequality and disadvantage Dizzee Rascal 131 – 2 Doddington gang 89, 91 – 2 Dorling, Danny 204 drug use 35 drugs, US war on 205 – 7 drugs trade and Asian youth 72 gang involvement in 88 – 9 global comparisons 30 – 1, 32, 34, 37, 42 – 3 government responses to 115, 222 – 3 Duggan, Mark 52, 62 Duncan Smith, Iain 219

272

Index

E early intervention services 214, 217 – 18, 221 economic inclusion 22 education 39, 141 – 2, 214 – 15 Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) 213 Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation Peer Review Network 222 Ending Gang and Youth Violence (EGYV) programme 8, 13 – 14, 48, 75, 114 – 15, 209, 221 – 2 Enough is Enough programme 8, 146 – 50 ethnic penalty 136 ethnic street gangs of Manchester 88 – 9 ethnicity see race and ethnicity Eurogang Network 86 – 8 Eurogang Paradox, The (Klein) 86 –8 exclusion from school 182, 208

F families 149 ‘Female Voices in Violence Project’ (FVV) 105 – 6 firearms prevalence of 31, 37 UK gun crime 90 – 2, 144 – 5, 226 US law on 206 friendships 193, 195, 200 funding anti-drug funding in USA 205 –6 for gang-related work 128, 140, 150 – 6, 221 for Troubled Families programme 209 – 10 for youth services 150 – 4, 220 –1

G Gang and Beyond, The (Hallsworth) 124 – 5 gang industry 113 – 14, 117, 124 gang injunctions (Gangbos) 1, 118 gang insignia 207, 208 gang loitering initiatives, in USA 207 gang members

identifying 135 – 6, 148 – 9, 154 – 6, 207, 234 – 5 prevalence 28, 33, 55 surveys on 93 – 8 violence between 104 gang prevention programme (GPP) (Waltham Forest) enforcement as punishment 156 –9 and funding 150 – 4 identification issues 154 – 6 overview 8, 145 – 50 police views 159 – 66 residents’ views 166 – 8 gang prevention team (GPT) 146 gang profiling databases 207 see also police matrix Gang, The (Thrasher) 79, 201 gangs in Central America 32 – 4 definitions official definition 4, 13 – 15, 75, 116 – 17, 134 police use of term 234 – 5 as problematic 14 – 15, 87, 108, 134, 229 in research see academic research residents’ use of term 187 young people’s use of term 193 –5 focus on 16, 221 – 2 see also gangs crisis funding work with see funding in global context 15 and law see law enforcement practices news media reports 70, 93, 107 – 8, 109 Pitts’ report on Waltham Forest 142 – 5 practitioner views 188 – 92 research on see academic research residents’ views 184 – 8 role in 2011 riots 48, 63 – 4 and violence see youth violence young people’s views of 9, 171 – 2, 193 – 5 gangs crisis contextualising 1 – 4, 13 – 17, 49, 50, 75 – 6, 231 – 2 new Asian criminality 69 – 74 post-war Britain 64 – 9 critiques of 107 – 10

273

Race, gangs and youth violence and moral panic 7, 107 – 10, 113, 118 – 19, 231 – 2 policy responses to 208 – 10 role of police 113, 119 – 24, 134 – 6 role of research 113 – 14, 124 in USA 203 – 4 ‘Gangs and Delinquent Groups in London’ (Scott) 83 Gangs, Marginalised Youth and Social Capital (Deuchar) 99 – 100 ‘gangsta’ culture 89, 90, 129 – 31, 177 – 8 gender 54, 55, 97, 107 – 8 see also women/girls Geneva Declaration Secretariat 29 – 30 ‘Getting Real About Gangs’ (Hallsworth and Young) 108 ghettos (US) 20, 41 – 3, 204 Giggs 132 – 3 Glasgow 84 – 5 Glasgow Gang Observed, A (Patrick) 84, 85 – 6 Global Burden of Armed Violence 29 – 30 global context 5, 15, 17, 230 – 1 Jamaica 36 – 9 Latin America 32 – 6 prevalence of violence 26 – 31, 36 – 7 USA 39 – 43 globalisation 18 – 20, 41 – 2 Gooch gang 89, 91 – 2 government see social policy Guardian/LSE study 60 – 1, 63 gun crime 90 – 2, 144 – 5, 226 see also firearms Gunter, Anthony 50 – 2, 139 – 40, 171

hip-hop culture 41, 130 historical context of gangs crisis 13, 50, 75 – 6 new Asian criminality 69 – 74 post-war Britain 64 – 9 of US racial oppression 40 – 1 of youth research 77 – 8 Eurogang Paradox 86 – 8 gangs in post-war Britain 82 – 6 Manchester gangs 88 – 93 youth subcultural studies 78 – 82 Holloway, K. 93 – 4 homicide 26 – 7, 36, 40, 47, 123, 226 House of Commons Justice Committee 122 – 3 How Gangs Work (Densley) 102 – 4, 126 Huff, Ronald 14 hyper-ghettoisation 41, 204

I identity, badness-honour 38, 181 immigration 64 – 5, 208, 232 inclusive cities 22 industrialisation 18 inequality and disadvantage educational 39, 141 – 2 in global context 5, 17, 18, 19 – 24, 35 – 6, 230 – 1 impact of 196, 199, 227 low status urban areas 184 and New Labour policy 210 – 11 role in public disorder 60, 61, 62, 68 and urban regeneration 216 – 17 in USA 40 – 3, 44 – 5, 204 youth experiences of 21 – 4 information sharing 223 Institute of Race Relations 136 interactionist approach 78

H Hagedorn, John 15, 130 Hall, Stuart 81 Hallsworth, Simon 108 – 10, 117, 124 – 5 Hancock, L. 217 Handsworth disturbances 68 hanging around 184 – 6, 190, 207 Harding, Simon 101 – 2, 126 health risk behaviours 224 – 5 ‘Hidden Behind the Gunfire’ (Medina) 104 – 5

J Jamaica 36 – 9 joint enterprise 122 – 3, 236 judiciary 56 – 9

K Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) 38 Kintrea, Keith 190, 197 Kitwana, Bakari 41

274

Index Klein, Malcolm 15 – 16, 86 – 7, 204 knife crime 198, 226

L labelling 78 labour market 42, 68, 215 Latin America 29 – 30, 32 – 6 law enforcement practices 8 and antisocial behaviour 211 – 12, 217 in Central America 33 – 4 and gangs 119 – 24, 135 – 6, 208 judicial responses to riots 56 – 9 and LBWF gang prevention programme police views 159 – 66 practitioners’ views 146, 147, 151, 152 – 3 residents’ views 166 – 8 youth views 156, 157 – 9 and race 119 – 23, 135 – 7, 208, 235 – 6 in USA 10 see also policing law and order, and social policy 2, 117 – 18, 211 – 12, 217 – 18, 222 – 3, 227 LBWF see London Borough of Waltham Forest legislation 40, 117 – 18, 206, 207, 211 London Action Trust 145 London Borough of Waltham Forest (LBWF) 140 educational attainment 141 – 2 gang prevention programme 8, 145 – 50 enforcement as punishment 156 – 9 and funding 150 – 4 identification issues 154 – 6 police views 159 – 66 residents’ views 166 – 8 gangs in Pitts’ report on 142 – 5 practitioners’ views 188 – 92 residents’ views 184 – 8 youth views 193 – 5 social context of youth violence in 195 – 201 London Crime Reduction Board (LCRB) 120

London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) 215 Longsight Crew 91 – 2 loose antisocial groups 83 looting 52 – 3 low status urban areas 184 see also London Borough of Waltham Forest

M Macey, Marie 72 McMahon, Will 136 Manchester 88 – 93 Mandelle, Paul 56 – 7 maras 32, 33 Mares, Dennis 88 – 90 marginalisation see inequality and disadvantage materialistic consumerism 60, 61, 62, 63 May, Theresa 114 media see news media Medina, Juanjo 97 – 8, 104 – 5 migrants 24 see also immigration Milnitsky, C. 35 mobility 24 moral and social panics critiques of 107 – 10 and gangs crisis 7, 107 – 10, 113, 118 – 19, 231 – 2 relating to youth 6, 49 – 50, 64 – 74, 75 – 6, 84, 231 – 3 Morrell, Gareth 61 – 2, 63 – 4 mortality rates 26 – 7, 29 – 30 see also deaths in custody mugging 65 – 6 music 41, 131 – 4, 181 Muslim youth 69 – 74

N National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) 61 – 2, 63 – 4 neighbourhoods local views on gangs and 188 – 90, 194 – 5 regeneration 212, 215 – 17 and Road culture 172, 176 – 80 see also ghettos; London Borough of Waltham Forest; slums New Deal for Communities (NDC) 211

275

Race, gangs and youth violence New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring programme (NEW-ADAM) 93 New Labour policy 117 – 18, 210 – 18 news media critiques of 107 – 8, 109 on gangs 93, 109 and moral panics 232 on race, ethnicity and crime 70, 71 – 2, 118 – 19 on street crime 3 on youth violence 28 – 9, 47, 57

O Offending Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) 95, 97 Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) 106 – 7 organised crime, drugs trade 30 – 1, 32, 34 Ouseley, Herman 71 outdoor activity centres 182 – 4 outlaw identity 38

P pandillas 32 Patrick, James 84, 85 – 6 PCSOs (Police Community Support Officers) 161 – 2 Pearson, Geoffrey 107 peer pressure 200 Pit Bull Crew 91 – 2 Pitts, John 98 – 9, 123, 125, 142 – 5 police responses to 2011 riots 57 – 9 role in gang prevention 152 – 3 role in gangs crisis 113, 119 – 24, 134 – 6 Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) 161 – 2 police custody, deaths in 121, 136 police intelligence 135, 148 – 9, 191 – 2, 234 – 5 police matrix 135, 148 – 9, 234 – 5 police racism 121, 162 – 3 police relations with young people 60, 186 black youth 61 – 3, 66, 68, 156 – 9, 167 – 8, 236 police violence 121 – 2 policing gangs, race and 119 – 23, 135 – 6 and race 66, 235, 236

Safer Neighbourhood Teams 51, 161 – 8 stop and search powers 52, 120, 157 – 61, 167 – 8 Targeted Policing Initiative 90 – 1 in Waltham Forest 156 – 9 police perspectives 159 – 66 residents’ perspectives 166 – 8 Policing and Crime Act (2009) 117 policy see social policy political conflict 31 political context, in Jamaica 37 political inclusion 22 political protest, riots as 60, 61 popular culture 37 – 8, 41 poverty in global context 5, 17, 18, 19 – 21, 230 – 1 Central America 35 – 6 USA 41 – 2 youth experiences 21, 23 see also inequality and disadvantage practitioner views 188 – 92, 196 –9 prison crisis in USA 206 prison population 136, 205, 235 private sector 218 psychoanalytical approach 77 – 8 public expenditure cuts 2, 218 – 21, 227 impact on policing 165 – 6 and targeted funding 8 – 9, 140, 150 – 4, 209

R race and ethnicity of 2011 riot arrestees 54, 55 African Americans 40 – 3, 44 – 5, 204 crime, law enforcement and 119 – 23, 135 – 7, 208, 235 – 6 ethnic street gangs of Manchester 88 – 9 in gang definitions 15 moral panics about crime, youth and 3 – 4, 6, 64 – 74, 118 – 19, 232 – 3 under-theorisation of 7 – 8, 124 – 8, 137 see also black youth Race On The Agenda (ROTA) 105 – 6 race relations

276

Index between police and black youth 61 – 3, 66, 68, 156 – 9, 167 – 8, 236 in historical context 64 – 9 racial oppression 40 – 1 racial segregation 40, 41 racism 64 – 5, 121, 162 – 3 radicalisation 74 Rascal, Dizzee 131 – 2 religious difference 69 – 74 Reluctant Gangsters (Pitts) 98 – 9, 125, 142 – 5 research see academic research residential outdoor activity centres 182 – 4 residents 165, 166 – 8, 184 – 8 Respect Action Plan 212 responsibility 213, 218, 219 riots (England) 1980s disturbances 66 – 9 1990s disturbances 70, 71 2011 disturbances 5 – 6 events and data on 52 – 5 government responses 6, 48 – 9, 74 – 5, 209 in historical context 64 – 74, 75 impact of 3, 47, 231 judicial responses 56 – 9 media reporting of 57 police responses 57 – 9 representations of 52 – 3 research on causes of 59 – 64, 75 risky behaviour 224 – 5 Road culture 9, 171 – 2, 237 and authority figures 181 – 4 leisure and pleasure 172 – 5 risk and danger 175 – 80 Roberts, Julian 56 Rushdie, Salman 69, 73

S safeguarding 223 Safer Neighbourhood Teams (SNTs) 51, 161 – 8 Sanders, Bill 188 Scarman Report 67 – 8 schools 178 – 9, 181 – 2, 214 Scott, Peter 83 – 4 security strategies 33 – 4 sentencing 55, 56, 236 Sewell, Tony 129 – 30 sexual violence 104 – 7 Sharp, Clare 95 – 6

Shelden, Randall 14 – 15 Shootings, Gangs and Violent Incidents in Manchester (Bullock and Tilley) 90 – 2 Shute, John 123 – 4 slums 19 – 20 Smithson, H. 128 – 9 social businesses 218 social class 80 – 1, 125, 172 social context of youth violence 44, 195 – 201, 227 – 8, 230 – 1 see also inequality and disadvantage Social Exclusion Unit 210 – 11 social inclusion 22 social panics see moral and social panics social policy criticism of 227 effectiveness in USA 223 – 4 and law and order 2, 117 – 18, 211 – 12, 217 – 18, 222 – 3, 227 in practice see gang prevention programme research base of 123 – 4, 204 in response to youth violence 6, 48 – 9, 74 – 5, 114 – 18, 209 shifts in UK 1, 2 – 3, 10, 226 – 7, 237 coalition approach 218 – 21 Conservative approach 221 – 3 New Labour approach 117 – 18, 210 – 18 and UK gangs crisis 208 – 10 US war on drugs 205 – 7 see also public expenditure cuts Starkey, David 129 Stelfox, Peter 86 stop and search powers 52, 120, 157 – 61, 167 – 8 Street Casino, The (Harding) 101 – 2, 126 street children 34 – 5 street crime 3 Street Gang (Pitts’ definition of) 144 street logic 178 structured gangs 83 Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Communities (Cohen) 80 – 1, 233 subcultures see youth subcultures Sullivan, Mercer L. 16 Sveinsson, K.P. 118 – 19

277

Race, gangs and youth violence swagger 175

in Jamaican context 36 – 9 political 31 prevalence 29 – 31 role of drugs trade 30 – 1, 32 young victims of 39 see also youth violence

T targeted funding 8 – 9, 140, 150 – 6, 209 Targeted Policing Initiative (Manchester) 90 – 1 Teeside Studies of Youth Transitions and Social Exclusion 50 terminology v-vii Territorial Support Group (TSG) 156 – 7 territoriality 190 third sector 218 Thrasher, Frederic 79, 201 Tienda, Marta 21 – 2 Tilley, N. 90 – 2 Together campaign 211 Tottenham, Broadwater Farm disturbances 68 – 9 Trident (later Trident Gang Command) 119 – 20 Troubled Families programme 48, 209 – 10 Turley, Caroline 165

U UN-HABITAT 19, 20, 22 – 4 unemployment 42, 68 United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 32 urban contexts of youth violence global comparisons 5 Central America 32 – 6 Jamaica 38 – 9 prevalence 26 – 8 USA 43 see also London Borough of Waltham Forest urban marginalisation 21 – 4 urban music 41, 131 – 4, 181 urban regeneration 212, 215 – 17 urbanisation 17 – 21 USA African Americans in 39 – 43, 44 – 5, 204 gang definitions in 14 – 15, 87 gangs crisis in 203 – 4 policy approach in 10, 205 – 7, 223 – 4

V victimisation 39 violence

W Wacquant, Loic 25, 204 Waddington, P.A.J. 163 Waltham Forest see London Borough of Waltham Forest Wannabee Gangsters 144 war on drugs (USA) 205 – 7 welfare reforms 2, 209, 219 see also public expenditure cuts white supremacy 40 Wilson, William Julius 21 – 2 women/girls and gangs 97, 107 – 8 and Road culture 174 – 5, 179 – 80 violence against 104 – 7 Wood, Rebecca 199 ‘Working Class Street Gangs in Manchester’ (Mares) 88 – 90 working class subculture 80 – 1, 172 World of Gangs, A (Hagedorn) 15, 130

Y Yardie gangs 3 young people identifying at-risk and ganginvolved 135 – 6, 148 – 9, 154 – 6, 207, 234 – 5 impact of social policy on 2 – 3 marginalised 21 – 4 moral panics about 6, 49 – 50, 64 – 74, 75 – 6, 84, 118 – 19, 231 – 3 rising population of 21 as victims of violence 39 views on gangs 9, 171 – 2, 193 –5 views on law enforcement 156, 157 – 9 views on youth violence 199 – 201 see also Asian youth; black youth; Road culture Young, Tara 108 – 10 youth clubs 174, 192, 199 278

Index Youth Crime Action Plan (YCAP) 218 Youth Crime Prevention Board (YCPB) 145 Youth Crime Prevention Practice and Neighbourhood Policing (Gunter) 50 – 2, 139 – 40, 171 Youth Crime and Youth Culture (Sanders) 188 youth culture black youth cultures 129 – 34 terminology v-vii and urban music 131 – 4 see also ‘gangsta’ culture; Road culture; youth subcultures youth development model 224 – 6 ‘Youth Gangs and Delinquency in Edinburgh’ (Bradshaw) 96 Youth Matters Green Paper 213 youth services, funding 150 – 4, 220 – 1 youth subcultures moral panics about 84 research on 7, 77, 78 – 82, 233 see also Road culture youth violence contextualising 13 – 17 global context 5, 25 – 31, 43 – 5 Central America 32 – 6 Jamaica 36 – 9 USA 39 – 40, 43 effectiveness of US approach 223 –4 government responses to 6, 48 – 9, 74 – 5, 114 – 18 see also social policy link with gangs 1, 16, 33, 44, 229 – 30, 234 media reports of 28 – 9, 47, 57 policy focus on 221 – 2 practitioners’ views on 190 – 2, 196 – 9 prevalence of 225 – 6 research on gang-related 98 – 107 and Road culture 171 – 2 Road culture and threat of 176 – 80 social context 44, 195 – 201, 227 – 8, 230 – 1 and UK gangs 85, 90 – 2 youth development approach to 224 – 6 youth workers’ views 188 – 92, 196 – 9 279

“A colossus of a book… should become the handbook for anyone attempting to address issues around young people and violence.” Charlie Parker, Hiphology Ltd This book aims to challenge current thinking about serious youth violence and gangs, and their racialisation by the media and the police. Written by an expert with over 14 years’ experience in the field, it brings together research, theory and practice to influence policy. Placing gangs and urban violence in a broader social and political economic context, it argues that government-led policy and associated funding for anti-gangs work is counter-productive. It highlights how the street gang label is unfairly linked by both the news-media and police to black (and urban) youth street-based lifestyles/cultures and friendship groups, leading to the further criminalisation of innocent black youth via police targeting. The book is primarily aimed at practitioners, policy makers and academics, as well as those community-minded individuals concerned about youth violence and social justice. Anthony Gunter is a Principal Lecturer in Criminology and Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Criminology and Law degree programme at the University of East London. Prior to his career in academia Anthony worked for over 14 years in both South and East London, within a variety of community settings, as a detached community and youth worker and Project/Area Manager.

CRIMINOLOGY / SOCIAL POLICY ISBN 978-1-4473-2287-0

www.policypress.co.uk PolicyPress

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Race, gangs and youth violence Anthony Gunter

“A much needed and valuable addition to the literature on youth ‘gangs’, written in a sensitive manner informed by the author’s extensive and close up research… A must read for anyone interested in youth crime or in youth issues more generally.” Tracy Shildrick, University of Leeds

RACE, GANGS AND YOUTH VIOLENCE Policy, prevention and policing ANTHONY GUNTER 1/13/2017 9:35:54 AM