How Gangs Work

An Ethnography of Youth Violence

J. Densley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137271518
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios infantiles en sociología

Drawing on extensive interviews with gang members, this book provides a vivid portrayal of gang life. Topics include the profiles and motivations of gang members; the processes of gang evolution, organization, and recruitment; gang members' uses of violence, media, and technology and the role of gangs in the drugs trade and organized crime

1

Gangs and Society

Not long after the 2011 UK riots, I co-wrote a paper for Policing Today questioning the role of gangs in urban disorder (Densley and Mason, 2011). I argued that by attributing the riots to gangs, the government had conflated the actions of gang members as individuals (‘gang member’ activity) with the actions of gangs as organizations (‘gang-related’ activity); a subject to which I shall return in Chapter 3. Gangs were present at the riots but not controlling them, I said, in part because gang identities ceased to be relevant in such a context. If anything, the riots actually disrupted conventional gang activity because gangs lost control of their markets. The perceived suspension of normal rules instead presented gang members with an unprecedented opportunity to acquire consumer products for ‘free’. In the words of Philip Zimbardo (2008, p. 8), author of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, ‘You are not the same person working alone as you are in a group.’

My thinking about the riots was informed not only by my training as a sociologist, but also via an experience I had as a secondary school student when I was a face in a crowd out to avenge one Year 11 classmate who had been assaulted by a group of boys from a rival school because he was judged to be wearing the wrong colors on a bus that crossed catchment areas. Dressed in school uniform and apoplectic with rage, we descended upon the bus stop brandishing skipping ropes, field hockey sticks, rounders bats, Bunsen burners, utility clamps, workplace utility knives, and whatever else we could salvage as weapons from school classrooms. Thankfully this never amounted to anything—the boys got wind of us lying in wait and stayed home. But I was clearly not myself. The group context diluted responsibility and created anonymity. I followed the crowd and let other people do the hard work of making decisions for me. Like the middle-aged and middle-class women who went ‘shopping’ off-the-rack at abandoned department stores during the 2011 riots, I got carried away with the moment and with my peers. I had no real grievance. I was only partially committed to countercultural norms. As David Matza (1964) said, I was able to ‘drift’ into delinquency and drift back out again.

Admittedly, my assessment of the riots was largely speculative because at the time there was very little substantive evidence available. But a comprehensive ‘reading’ of the riots, which encompassed interviews with 270 rioters and was published some months later by the Guardian and London School of Economics, agreed that the government had mistaken the role of gangs in the summer disturbances (Lewis et al., 2011). The riots were instead precipitated by hostility toward police, particularly over the use of stop and search, and a deep sense of injustice. A ‘citizens’ inquiry’ into the riots likewise concluded they were caused by a combination of high youth unemployment and basic police incivility (Citizen’s UK, 2012). Other studies cited as contributing factors the growing divide between rich and poor and concern over a lack of decent affordable housing.¹

The riots began when a protest about the police shooting of Tottenham resident Mark Duggan turned violent. After initially claiming that approximately 30 percent of those arrested in London were gang members, the Home Office (2011) revised the figure to 19 percent, a figure that dropped to 13 percent countrywide. But rioters and gang members do share similar profiles. Like gang members, many of the rioters were existing criminals. The Ministry of Justice (2012) reported that 76 percent had a previous caution or conviction, 26 percent had more than ten previous offences, and 26 percent had been in prison before. Like gang members, the rioters were also predominantly young and male. Just under half were aged 18 to 24, with 26 percent aged between 10 and 17 years old—children, in the eyes of the law (Home Office, 2011). A third of them had been excluded from school and the majority had educational difficulties. The racial profile of the rioters also closely resembled the ethnic make-up of the local population. The majority of rioters in London were black or of mixed race, for example, while in Manchester or Liverpool, they were overwhelmingly white; ditto gang members (Metropolitan Police Service, 2007).

Many of themes associated with the riots also overlap with the themes that came out of my research with gangs. This is perhaps to be expected given that the London boroughs most affected by the riots (Croydon, Hackney, Haringey, Lambeth, Lewisham, and Southwark) are the same boroughs in which my fieldwork took place. Rioters identified the same economic (that is, the absence of money, jobs, opportunity) and social (that is, disproportionate treatment, the search for respect and so on) motivations for joining the riots as my interviewees did for joining gangs. Rioters, like my interviewees, described being repeatedly stopped and searched by police. Some rioters, like my interviewees, came from ‘troubled families’ and ‘dysfunctional homes’ (Cameron, 2011). But where the rioters and my interviewees differed is that despite what the government first claimed, the rioters on the whole were not as committed to ‘criminality’ as my interviewees were. My interviewees did not ‘drift’ between conventional and criminal behavior as I once did (Matza, 1964). The question is, why not?

This chapter explores some of the aforementioned themes in detail, with the aim of better understanding the purpose of gangs and the motivations of gang members. I begin by exploring interviewees’ lived experiences of violence within the fieldwork sites.

Welcome to the neighborhood

Compared to most large American cities, London is relatively safe. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling famously made the mistake of implying otherwise, conflating the estates of London with the street corners of Baltimore, the city portrayed in gritty US television drama The Wire—a curious analogy given that the annual murder rate in London is two deaths per 100,000, compared with a staggering 35 per 100,000 in Baltimore (Watt and Oliver, 2009). One criminological axiom, however, is that crime is local and crime rates vary dramatically among neighborhoods in close geographical proximity (Sampson, 2006). Crime continues to trend downward nationally—homicide in particular is at a 30-year low—but for interviewees living in areas with no infrastructure and lots of gang activity, it felt like crime was going up. Approximately 40 percent of the 145 teenage homicides in London occurring between January 2005 and December 2012 were perpetrated within the six fieldwork boroughs (Citizen’s Report, 2012). For total homicides overall, Lambeth ranks first, Southwark ranks third, Hackney ranks fourth, Haringey ranks sixth, Croydon ranks eighth, and Croydon ranks tenth out of London’s 32 boroughs (Wikipedia, 2012a).

Under-protected

When I first proposed this study in 2007, the teenage homicide rate in London increased nearly 70 percent from a steady decade average of 16 to 27. When Billy Cox, 15, was gunned down in his bedroom on Valentine’s Day that year, he became the third teenage boy shot dead in south London in just 11 days. He followed James Smartt-Ford, 16, killed in front of hundreds of people attending a disco at Streatham ice arena on February 3, and Michael Dosunmu, 15, shot in the early hours of February 6, as he lay in bed at home in Peckham. Such murders had a significant impact upon the community. Said one key informant:

The game has changed. Gangs will now kill you in public with your family and friends watching. They will run up in a man’s house and assassinate him while he’s asleep. The home used to be a sanctuary but now nothing is off limits. Kids are sleeping in body armor for fear of being shot in their beds. They feel like they can never be alone. They must always watch their back because someone’s out there waiting for them to slip.

The proximate presence of these threats, both real and perceived, increased support for gangs and enabled them to successfully persuade others that they belonged to and protected the community. Protection was indeed one of the primary reasons why interviewees joined gangs—gang membership was described as rational adaptation to the perennial threat of violence that was present in the neighborhood.

Many interviewees expected to die not from old age and natural causes but from interpersonal violence. Every day they were forced to negotiate environments in which the young were viewed as prey by various predators. Member 42 said, ‘I live in a certain area where gangs are having fights on that main road. Daily. I live off that main road. I’m caught up in it.’ Member 26 elaborated:

Drug-dealers trying to sell, crack fiends looking to steal or score, and gang members out to make a name for themselves. Fuck Afghanistan, we need troops out here. Every time man be leaving his yard he walks into the Gladiators’ arena. Sometimes it’s kill or be killed.

Interviewees regularly made lifestyle changes to manage everyday threats associated with perceived risk of violent victimization, including, in some cases, making alternative travel plans because of safety concerns on their way to and from school. They were almost preoccupied with studying the environment for possible threats and often so attuned to the harassment they faced on the streets—the threats, groping, suggestive gestures, and lewd comments—they had developed a repertoire of physical and verbal gymnastics to help defuse it. To project an image that they are ‘not to be fucked with’ and best ‘left the fuck alone’, said Member 11, youths walked with a ‘kind of bop’— that is, a confident and typically arrogant or aggressive gait—and practiced their ‘screw face’, which can only be ‘described at best as a blank expression’ and at worst as ‘hostile’ scowl or look of distaste (Gunter, 2008, p. 353). As Member 22 said, ‘[y]ou’ve gotta look tough, scary, not like one of them Chris Brown niggers, all sweet and shit’.²

For some interviewees, violence had become a part of everyday life. They viewed fighting as the best or only way to resolve conflicts and gain respect. When Member 31 was in Year 7 at school, for instance, he got into a fight with a boy who ‘wanted to be the badder man [with] more respect’. Member 31 recalled:

He pulled out a knife. He was brandishing it. I didn’t think he’d do it but he actually stabbed me. … He went for my chest, my neck, but I moved my hand to block it and it hit my wrist. He ran off. I was wearing a black tracksuit … I lifted up my hand, I saw blood pouring out of my sleeve. … He’d cut completely through the artery and the tendon in my wrist.

I pick up the relationship between violence and respect in Chapter 3, suffice it to say here that fighting was almost a daily occurrence for interviewees—in some cases they fought so often that it was impossible for them to even quantify. Member 17’s best estimate:

I felt like it was every day. I just wanted to be with my friends but I couldn’t because I would see a girl on the bus and she’ll come up behind us, she might have a bat in her hand, metal baseball bat, and I mean I have to fight her.

Riding to his friend’s house one afternoon, for instance, Member 32 was ‘stabbed twice in [the] leg’ for refusing to submit his mobile phone and bicycle to ‘the group of boys [who] came around to rob anyone in that area’. He explained,

Someone ran from behind me and pulled my hood over my face … we was just fighting and I remember, like, someone going for me with a knife. … I’d been stabbed in the leg. But, [because of] the adrenaline, I didn’t realize [until later].

Member 7, a female, recalled an equally gruesome experience:

I was beaten up … with a bottle nine times in the back of my head. … Bottled nine times before it bust on my head, there was a great crack on my head. Nine times … because it wasn’t cracking on my head that’s the only reason why she carried on, do you see what I’m trying to say? She bottled me nine times and I actually felt it nine times. I will never forget it.

Incidents such as these often occurred before interviewees ever associated with gangs. Interviews with young people not affiliated with gangs but living in the same areas, moreover, confirmed that they too grappled with similar issues and shared similar experiences, regardless of membership status. A consistent theme in the gang literature, however, is that youths involved in gangs are disproportionately victimized compared to youths who are not (Peterson, Taylor, and Esbensen, 2004; Taylor et al., 2007). The data do not allow me to make general comparisons, but I can report that 19 of the 69 gang member and associate interviewees had previously been threatened with guns, nine had been shot at and three actually had been shot; 55 had previously been threatened with knives and other weapons, 28 had been stabbed, and nine had been injured with other weapons; 41 had been robbed; and one had been kidnapped. All 69 interviewees also reported that they had family or friends who had been shot, stabbed, or beaten by gangs, and at least seven reported that they had family or friends who had died as a result of gang violence. Member 3 told me, ‘I’ve had one proper deep, like friend killed and two school friends that I used to go school with killed. So altogether three school friends dead.’

Only a relatively small number of people are actually involved in the most serious violence. Trevor Bennett and Katy Holloway (2004, p. 313) extrapolate, for instance, there are approximately 20,000 active gang members in Britain, with a confidence level of plus or minus 5000. This is likely an underestimate given the data is based only on those gang members aged 17 and above in the arrestee population from 1999 to 2002, but even 50,000 is a drop in the ocean of 62 million people. A neighborhood can feel very violent even when the actual perpetrators are comparatively few in number, however, not least because the community often knows the fantastically active offenders by name. The police also often know them by name, my fieldwork suggests, but in communities historically ‘over-policed and to a large extent under-protected’ (Macpherson, 1999, p. 312), confidence of residents in police to properly intervene is low:

Police is all about numbers. They’re not about anything else. If there’s like a 10 percent decrease in crime on the streets, then they’re all right with that regardless of whether things are actually any safer or not. Out here you’re not living under police protection. No matter how many times the police said they’ll protect you, they’re not going to protect you. So we find our own protection. We protect our own … ’cus the police ain’t doing shit for us, we police ourselves. We equip ourselves with tools to protect ourselves, you understand? We’re a phone call away. Where the police? Police just tell you to go file a report.

Member 25

As gatekeepers into the criminal justice system, police provoked the ire of interviewees most, but their frustration certainly extended to the system at large. Member 37 observed:

That’s t...