ViolenceNoun: Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill.HarmNoun: Physical injury, especially that which is deliberately inflicted.Abridged from Oxford English Dictionary
Primarily, this book is a culmination of three years of criminological ethnographic research. It explores several under-researched areas of the criminal underworld in Birmingham, England. Geographically, the journey of the book extends to the region of the West Midlands, England, and in addition provides case examples of organised crime and violent practice within national and international parameters. I would argue, that most of the research encounters in this book were of high-risk. So too, I had to keep myself in check, while reminding myself on a regular basis that I was dealing with some of the most difficult and distasteful people in our society. Sometimes it became challenging to work alongside these narcissistic and status-driven chancers, but let us leave the discussion about British academics for a chat over coffee.
On a serious note, I spent prolonged periods with people who were involved full-time, part-time, temporary, or permanently in serious crimes. These individuals were from various backgrounds, race, and ethnicity. I spent time with their family members, friends, and associates. In some cases, I attended celebrations, and sadly in other instances, I participated in traumatic processions like funerals and burials. Some of the individuals in this text are career-hardened offenders, who went to the extent of running background checks on me before allowing me to enter their world. Others operated enterprises that featured illegal activities, while some drifted in and out of illegal practice. Irrespective of criminal involvement, most men in this book were heavily connected in the British criminal landscape, and were not to be taken lightly.
Exploring Violent Practice: Focusing on Homicide and Organised Crime Within the West Midlands
This book stems from funded doctoral research that I conducted between 2014 and 2017. On a professional level, the foundations of the study were laid out a couple of years before. After successfully completing an MA Criminology degree, I was employed by Birmingham City University as a Research Assistant. The role was a perfect platform for me to advance my academic curiosity about crime, harm and crime control. It also enabled me to gauge an understanding of my position within criminological scholarship, namely in relation to violence. Violence has been omnipresent in society since the dawn of civilisation. Indeed, it is through violence and its judgement that one can see the heart of darkness in civilisation (Gilligan 2000). Over the years, academics have attempted to provide sustained accounts of violence, of which includes violence exerted by individuals, by states, and by imbalanced societal structures. My curiosity of violence stems from my own life experiences. On a personal standpoint, the reader should be mindful that I am the product of the culture that I attempt to describe in this book, although the distinction to be made is that academia in the past 10 years has served a much-needed distance from what is depicted in the forthcoming chapters.
Born and raised in the inner-city areas of Birmingham, I come from a small British-Bangladeshi working-class family. While my upbringing at home was somewhat harmonious, the communities that I called āthe endsā, were often volatile and chaotic. My socialising experiences throughout my adolescent years were like many of the participants in this book. It is hard to imagine that 16 years have passed since my first (and hopefully last) encounter of being a victim in hands of what I consider to be a criminal group. One day, I was walking home from school. The route that I took was routine, which meant that I would walk past several socially deprived neighbourhoods. I was a few hundred yards away from my street. As I was just about to cross a road, I felt a strong hand grabbing the back of my neck and pulling me back. Instantaneously, I attempted to turn around to find out who was manhandling me, however my left arm was twisted, and within a few seconds I was thrown into the back seat of a saloon car. Sat with me at the back of the car was the man who grabbed me. I knew him from the ends. His physique was muscular and he always looked intimidating. Sitting in the front passenger was a female, who made no eye contact with me. Sitting next to her in the driverās seat was Clive, an individual who was feared locally. Clive lived in a council estate that was adjacent to the road that I lived on for 10 years. Strangely, after seeing Clive in the car, I felt at ease, and the reason for me being in the car was because he needed my help:
Clive: Little man from across the street, I know youāre good with wires, screens, and computers. I need you to unlock a few laptops. Can you do that for me?
Clive was right, I knew a lot about computers from a young age, which transpired to completing a Forensic Computing undergraduate degree many years later. However, before I could give him a response, the man sat next to me placed two laptops on my lap, that had the logo of a local double glazing company. Immediately, I knew that they were stolen. Importantly, I knew not to ask any questions. What baffled me was that I was given an official copy of a CD that was much-needed to unlock the stolen devices. Without any hesitation, I got to work. I knew that each laptop would take 10ā15 minutes to process. During this time, what I could not get my head around was how the CD was obtained. Stupidly enough, I decided to ask. It was the only time I spoke, and I felt the physical consequences immediately:
Clive: Man, leave him alone. Let him do his fucking thing. Chill.
The above was Cliveās response, after my face got slammed on the headrest of the front passenger seat by the man who sat next to me. My eyes welled up because of the impact, however I contained my emotions and carried on working. I was angry, not because I was assaulted, but because I could do nothing about it. I kept thinking: āIf only I could smash his face right nowā. Once the laptops were unlocked, Clive gave me a scrunched up Ā£5 note for my troubles and I finished the rest of my journey home with a sore nose. For me, it was a keystone moment, which made me realise the dynamics of violence, a behaviour that I consider to be a viable commodity that is often used with other interactions to start, maintain and advance criminal identities and enterprises. Growing up, despite all the pandemonium, my ...