Reluctant Gangsters

The Changing Face of Youth Crime

John Pitts

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843923664
• eBook ISBN: 9781134022267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides an account of the emergence, nature and impact of armed youth gangs in an East London Borough over the last decade. It describes the challenges these armed young men and women pose to their communities, those charged with preventing crime and those struggling to vouchsafe 'community safety'. While the focus of the book is 'local', the processes it outlines and the effects it chronicles have both a national and international relevance.

It argues that the main reason behind the emergence of the armed youth gang has been the coalesence of two previously discreet socially deviant groups; the rowdy, episodically criminal, adolescent peer group on the one hand and the locally-based organized criminal network on the other.

The book analyses the impact of the globalisation of the drugs trade and the consequent shift in the focus of local organized crime from the 'blag' to the 'business'. It also discusses how socio-economic and cultural factors, as well as family and neighbourhood histories and loyalties and localized racial antagonisms all play their part in the emergence of the armed youth gang.

Chapter 1

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Things have changed

Many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues – and in terms of the problems of history making. Know that the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles – and to the problems of the individual life. Know that the problems of social science, when adequately formulated, must include both troubles and issues, both biography and history, and the range of their intricate relations. Within that range the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that range the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time.

C. Wright Mills (1959)

Introduction

C. Wright Mills says that the job of sociology is to turn private troubles into public issues, and that is the purpose of this book. The private troubles are, primarily, those of young people affected by violent youth gangs. The public issue is the progressive estrangement of the neighbourhoods in which they and their families live from the social, economic and political mainstream.

Gangs? What gangs?

The media and ‘social commentators’ have been mistakenly identifying American-style, violent, youth gangs in Britain for the last 50 years at least. Not so social scientists, however. David Downes, in his classic study of young people and crime in east London, The Delinquent Solution (1966), found no evidence of American-style ‘youth gangs’ and, over the next 30 years or so, nor did anyone else. In the mid 1990s, Peter Stelfox (1998) embarked upon a national survey for the Home Office to see if he could track them down. Although he elicited a remarkable 91.45 per cent response rate to his questionnaire, only 16 police services were able to identify gangs in their area, yielding a national total of 72. The majority of the UK gangs identified by Stelfox were composed of adult males aged between 25 and 29. Some gangs spanned a broader age range with a few gang members below the age of 16. These gangs were predominantly white, only 25 per cent had members described as ‘Black Caribbean’, and only 7 per cent had members who were predominantly from ethnic minority groups. This led Stelfox to conclude that:

These figures challenge the perception that violent gangs are primarily either a youth problem or one which occurs mainly within ethnic communities. Organisationally the majority of gangs tended towards a loose structure.

This being so, we approached our study of ‘violent youth gangs’ in a London borough, in 2006, with a degree of scepticism and we asked our 54 interviewees these three questions:

1What do you mean by a ‘youth gang’?

2Are there youth gangs in this area?

And if the answer to this was yes:

3How long have they been here?

The groups our respondents described certainly sounded like violent youth gangs and they had, it seemed, been active in the area for between five and eight years. Things, our respondents believed, had changed.

Things have changed

Three ‘Muslim Boys’ jailed after shooting at family home

Three more members of the notorious Muslim Boys gang have been locked up after being caught with loaded guns. Stefon Thomas 23, Marlon Stubbs 25, and Sanjit Webster 20, were arrested during an investigation into a shooting outside a family home. Gunmen fired a hail of bullets at Marlon Crooks, his eight-year-old daughter, mum, grandmother, sister and brother on October 10 last year. Miraculously, they all escaped injury. Thomas and Stubbs were picked out by an eyewitness but were cleared of attempted murder by an Old Bailey jury. But a week after the shooting, Thomas was caught with a D-32 Derringer pistol and on November 3, Webster and Stubbs were arrested with a .44 calibre weapon. All three were convicted of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. Stubbs who has a previous conviction for raping two schoolgirls, had been cleared at the Old Bailey in September 2005 of conspiracy to murder a rival, Adrian Marriott. It was claimed Mr Marriott had been shot in the head with a machine gun in Brixton by members of the Muslim Boys gang. Stubbs and Thomas will serve at least four years before being considered for parole while Webster will serve at least three-and-a-half years. Thomas was also sentenced to six years concurrent for possession of a prohibited weapon and four years concurrent on two charges of possession of prohibited ammunition. The Old Bailey heard Marlon Crooks was attacked by a gang wearing Muslim-style head-scarves while showing his family a new BMW convertible in Condell Road, Battersea. Thomas was caught with a loaded D-32 double Derringer pistol when police spotted him in his black Mercedes on October 16 last year. Stubbs and Webster were caught in the back of a taxi while travelling from Brixton to Stratford to collect the .44 pistol on November 3 last year, the last day of the Muslim festival of Ramadan. They were overheard saying, ‘When Ramadan ends the snake is going to strike,’ the court heard. Thomas, of no fixed address, and Stubbs, of Ward Point, Kennington, were cleared of two charges of attempted murder and one count of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life in relation to the shooting. (http://icsouthlondon.co.uk, 28 November 2006)

In 2002/2003 the police in England and Wales recorded a 36 per cent increase in gun crime, with a further 2 per cent rise recorded in 2003/2004 (Home Office/RDS 2004). In 2007, a survey by the Metropolitan Police (MPS) identified 172 youth gangs in London alone, many using firearms in furtherance of their crimes, and estimated to be responsible for 20 per cent of the youth crime in the capital and 28 knife and gun murders.

As gun crime rose, the ages of perpetrators fell. Whereas in 2003, young people under 20 constituted 16 per cent of victims of the ‘black-on-black’ gun crime, investigated by Operation Trident, by 2006 this had risen to 31 per cent. Bullock and Tilley (2003) found that the ages of the predominantly African-Caribbean and mixed heritage gang members involved in gun crime in south Manchester were evenly spread from their early teens to twenties: two to four at every age between 15 and 23.

In London in 2007 28 young people under the age of 20 were killed in ‘gang-related’ murders. Moreover, between April and November 1,237 young people were injured in gun and knife attacks: 321 were shot, 39 ‘seriously’; 952 were stabbed, 188 ‘seriously’. There were 12 armed rapes and 88 ‘gun-enabled’ muggings (MPS 2007).

Of course, these figures are generated by the police and the Home Office and, over the period, there have been important changes in policing policy, policing practice and crime recording techniques. Nonetheless, these shifts are no mere statistical quirk and, if anything, significantly understate the problem.

Things have changed, and despite a steady decline in adult and youth crime in Britain in the past 15 years, in certain parts of our towns and cities and among certain social groups, life has become far more dangerous for children and young people. And the immediate reason for this is the proliferation of violent youth gangs and the culture that they ferment.

The research

Chapters 4 to 9 of this book are based on studies undertaken in three high-crime London boroughs, Red, White and Blue, between 2005 and 2008. In Red borough we mapped the number, nature, seriousness and social impact of youth gangs, interviewing over 50 respondents and interrogating the available statistical data. In White borough we evaluated a gang desistance programme, interviewed participants and peer mentors, and took evidence from professionals and volunteers working in gang-affected neighbourhoods. In Blue borough we evaluated a gang diversion programme and undertook research into street crime. Here, we interviewed young people, their parents and the professionals who worked with them. Chapter 9 also draws on a study of projects, undertaken in Anderlecht in Brussels, Belgium, Den Helder in Holland, and Palermo in Italy in 2005, that successfully reintroduced ethnic and cultural minority children and young people to education, training and employment.

Over the period, we talked to over 300 respondents: young people who were involved in gangs and others who were adversely affected by them, parents, local residents; and professionals in education, housing, criminal justice, community safety, welfare and healthcare.

Although, in Red, White and Blue boroughs, the majority of ganginvolved young people were of Black, African-Caribbean, or mixed heritage, a substantial minority of white and South Asian young people were also involved. However, although ethnicity was a shaping force in local street cultures, it is clear that the violent youth gang phenomenon is not reducible to a question of race.

Glasgow has a legacy of inter-gang violence, perpetrated by White young people, that stretches back over a century. In certain parts of that city, men in their seventies and eighties still claim an affiliation to local gangs. Similarly, the violent gang conflict in Liverpool, which hit the headlines with the murder of eleven-year-old Rhys Jones in 2007, involves mainly white adolescents and young adults. Indeed, in seeking an explanation of the gang phenomenon, we have found that social class offers a more salient explanatory schema than race.

Describing gangs

We speak of describing rather than defining gangs because, while description can always be augmented by new knowledge and fresh insights, definition, by demarcating a field of study too narrowly, often restricts the scope of enquiry and lacks the flexibility to accommodate changes in the phenomenon it endeavours to illuminate. As John Hagedorn notes:

The definition issue is hopelessly muddled, and I think misplaced. In fact, gangs, militias, ‘organised crime’ and other sorts of groups of armed young men are fairly transient. They are flexible forms that can take on many different shadings and usually do over their life course. (2006, personal communication)

Data gathered in Red, White and Blue boroughs suggests the following working descriptions of gangs, what we have called ‘gang cultures’ and ‘gangland’.

When we use the term ‘gang’ we mean children and young people who see themselves, and are seen by others, as affiliates of a discrete, named, group with a discernible structure and a recognised territory. Affiliates seldom describe these groups as a ‘gang’, using terms like crew, family, massive, posse, brerrs, man dem, cousins or boys. Most young affiliates appear to be preoccupied with ‘respect’, usually achieved through the illicit acquisition of wealth, control over residential, drugdealing or street-robbery territory, and the intimidation and coercion of the people who live in that territory. They are almost always in conflict with rival gangs, who wish to take over their territory and their wealth, and the police who wish to capture them. Yet, if anything, these struggles appear to strengthen the gang's identity, thus sustaining its existence.

We use the term ‘gang cultures’ to mean the distinctive beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviours and rituals of the gang and its affiliates, and the passive, defensive or aggressive responses elicited from unaffiliated or reluctantly affiliated young people and adults as a result of the realities of life in ‘gangland’.

By ‘gangland’ we mean a geographical and psychological territory where the gang exerts control over the lives of both its affiliates and the unaffiliated young people and adults who reside there. This control determines what they can and cannot say, to whom they can say it, what can be done, and with whom, and in some instances who can live there and who cannot. This is territory that once belonged in the public sphere but, because it can no longer be defended, has been effectively ceded to the gangs.

The structure of this book

This book is about gangs although, as we have observed, ‘gang’ is a slippery term. For this reason we devote Chapter 2 to a discussion of the unresolved, and possibly irresolvable, definitional issue. In particular, we consider the contribution of mainstream American gang scholarship to gang definition because, despite its failure to make much of a dent on the youth gang problem in the USA over the past half century, its definitions of and approaches to the ‘gang problem’ are increasingly influential in Europe.

In Chapter 3 we consider the two main ways in which gangs, and their social and political significance, are conceptualised within contemporary British criminology. We characterise these as the youth governance thesis and the risk factor paradigm. The youth governance thesis endeavours to persuade us that contemporary anxieties about youth violence are fostered by government, the police and the media, that youth crime itself is, more or less, as it has always been, and that if we believe differently, we are in the thrall of some kind of ‘catastrophist discourse’. The risk factor paradigm, by contrast, tells us that we confront a serious problem: one that is, in large part, a product of the deficiencies of individuals and their dysfunctional families. However, it fails to tell us why so few dysfunctional individuals are gang members and why a significant minority of gang affiliates suffer from few, if any, of these deficits. We therefore posit a third perspective, which we describe as a ‘political economy’ of gangland, one which, because it is rooted in the day-to-day realities of ‘gangland’, could suggest new directions for intervention with gangs.

In Chapter 4 we argue that ‘gangland’ is, in large part, a product of the responses of a succession of neo-liberal governments to what is sometimes described as economic and cultural globalisation. It is their decisions, in the spheres of housing, employment, social security, education, and crime and justice, we argue, that have pushed some poor young...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• About the author
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Things have changed
• 2 The obscure object of investigation
• 3 Thinking about gangs
• 4 Why here? Why now?
• 5 From a blag to a business
• 6 We are family: gang cultures
• 7 Reluctant gangsters
• 8 Living in neo-liberal gangland
• 9 If every child mattered
• References
• Index