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LL
U L AN DE
PA
k i ng
Thin usly
S e r i o u t
Ab o
a ngs
G rds
ritical
a C roach
Tow list App
a
Rea
Thinking Seriously About Gangs
Paul Andell
Thinking Seriously
About Gangs
Towards a Critical Realist Approach
Paul Andell
University of Suffolk
Ipswich, Suffolk, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my fam: Julie you are more wonderful than you know or let on; Shola
and Reuben keep fighting the power in what ever way you see fit; Val and
Kevin, keep living the dream and avoiding nightmares; Danielle and
Dominique I hope your productivity and creativity pays off; Dad your
stories from the coal face were and are an inspiration, you are always a
steadying hand when things wobble too much: Jeff and Mam, RIP.
Foreword
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.
vii
viii Foreword
The origins of this apparent callous disregard for the victims of gang
crime are best understood as a consequence of the idea that in an une-
qual society the socially aware criminologist should be a partisan. This
idea is articulated most notably by Howard Becker in his seminal essay
Whose Side Are We On? (1967) where he observes that in any system
of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the high-
est group have the right to define the way things really are. This being so,
Becker argues, social scientists should recognise their moral obliga-
tion to ‘tell it like it is’ from the perspective of the powerless and the
oppressed. Amongst liberal social scientists, Becker’s injunction was
taken to mean that they should align themselves with the hapless vic-
tims of demonisation and labelling by ‘the state’ and its operatives.
But this preoccupation with social control rather than crime meant
that the harm caused to the victims of burglary, robbery, assault and
murder, the bulk of whom were concentrated down at the lower end of
the social structure, was at least minimised and at worst wholly ignored
(Lea and Young 1984; Matthews and Young 1992a, b). Perversely, as
Elliott Currie (1992) observed, this minimisation of the impact of
crime found its corollary in an idealisation of the criminal as a kind
of ‘proto-revolutionary hero’. Unfortunately, one of the consequences
of such dogmatic partisanship was to render these radical social scien-
tists politically irrelevant by:
victims who, unsurprisingly, often wanted the police, the hated ‘agents’
of the ‘oppressive state apparatus’, to do something about it (Wilson
1975; Lea and Young 1984).
The symmetry of victims and offenders was graphically illustrated in
a study of shootings in South Manchester undertaken by Karen Bullock
and Nick Tilley in 2001 (Bullock and Tilley 2002). This study revealed
that in one year in the Moss Side area, gangs were responsible for 11
fatal shootings; 84 serious woundings and 639 other incidents involving
firearms. It also showed that a large number of those responsible for the
shooting had themselves been shot. This important, but seldom cited,
study is notable for being one of the few that has ventured into the ide-
ologically precarious terrain in which poor, often Black, young people
are committing appalling crimes of violence against each other.
Many political progressives find this reality deeply problematic. How
can it be, they wonder, that socially disadvantaged young people, liv-
ing on the social margins and denied access to all that makes life worth
living, far from expressing class and ethnic solidarity with their simi-
larly oppressed brothers and sisters, are prepared to inflict such vicious,
sometimes lethal, violence upon them? And how, if we reject the brute
determinism of traditional positivism and acknowledge the subject’s
capacity for agency and self-invention, can we sidestep the conclusion
that this renders them responsible for their actions. And how, given all
this, can we decide whose side we are on? These are problems that cannot
be wished away by trite faux sociological generalisations like ‘the legacy
of racial oppression’ or ‘the embodied consequence of capitalist exploita-
tion’, to which unreflective radicals are particularly prone. Ultimately, to
paraphrase E. M. Forster, in their fervent desire to see life steadily, they
studiously avoid seeing it whole.
The introduction of a socially disadvantaged victim, into the
oppressed/oppressor binary creates a profound cognitive dissonance
for those who need a clear-cut side to join (Festinger 1957). Cognitive
dissonance occurs when an individual is confronted with contradictory
beliefs, ideas or values.
The real world seldom throws up such simple binary choices between
the good guys and the bad, the labelled and the labellers. If we are on
the side of young men labelled as ‘gangsters’, who will be on the side of
xii Foreword
the young men they have shot and killed, and their families? Probably
not left-liberal criminologists, because to be on their side would mean
acknowledging that the idea of the violent youth gang might have some
substance.
But, none of this ‘high-falutin’ criminological thinking had perco-
lated down to the Department for Communities Troubled Families
Team, brought into being in the wake of the August 2011 riots, and
headed by erstwhile Anti-Social Behaviour Tsar, Louise Casey. The
Team was charged with identifying and intervening with the 120,000
troubled families whose children are most likely to become rioters and
gangsters.
As Jurgen Habermas (1981) has observed:
But why this focus upon ‘troubled families’? Because, in the wake of the
2011 riots, David Cameron, in thrall to Iain Duncan Smith’s re-working
of Charles Murray’s ‘underclass thesis’ (1984), had pledged that by the
end of his first term he would ‘turn around’ the 120,000 troubled fami-
lies in Britain who were at the root of the nation’s social problems.
This assault upon the poor and unpartnered suggested that poverty was
a by-product of an overweening welfare state that rewarded fecklessness,
undermined individual responsibility and discouraged parental propriety;
producing a culture of dependency and entitlement wherein sexual prof-
ligacy and criminality become the norm. Thus, the ‘broken’ (risk- factor
rich) ‘family’ becomes the progenitor of the ‘broken society’. However, far
from generating their own poverty through fecklessness, most single par-
ents: there are around 2,000,000 in England and Wales, and over 50%
of single parents with children under 12 and 71% with children over 12,
are in work (a higher proportion than for ‘couple’ families). This suggests
that single parenthood per se, does not have an ‘independent effect’ upon
the involvement of children and young people in violent youth gangs and
that, therefore, something more complex must be at work.
Paul Andell’s Thinking Seriously About Gangs enters the fray in the
wake of these debates and controversies and endeavours, successfully, to
Foreword xiii
separate fact from fantasy. This is because, whereas much of the debate
about gangs has been confined to academia, Paul Andell brings exten-
sive experience from a career, which began in probation and youth jus-
tice, proceeded to his becoming a community safety manager for the
Greater London Authority and led to him assuming the roles of Head
of Criminal Justice Initiatives for the Criminal Defence Service and as
a Strategic Advisor to several Local Criminal Justice Boards on behalf of
the Ministry of Justice.
When he entered academia, Paul undertook studies of gangs, gang
culture and the involvement of young people in ‘County Lines’ drug
trafficking in West Yorkshire, South London and East Anglia. This was
applied research. Its purpose was to underpin multi-agency gang strate-
gies designed, first and foremost, to minimise the violence experienced
by vulnerable children and young people on the front lines of gang
conflict.
The book takes us through the period when both academics and pol-
iticians were in denial about the gang phenomenon and, following the
2011 riots, as a result of lobbying by the erstwhile Anti-Social Behaviour
Tsar, Louise Casey, the causes of gang crime were laid at the door of
120,000 single parent families and the, now discredited, Troubled
Families initiative was launched. It also shines a fascinating light on how
social and criminal justice policy is developed in a neo-liberal era; where
tabloid journalists, and leading figures from right wing think tanks min-
gle with policy makers, over prosecco, and canapés.
His discussion of the sometimes bitter academic debate about gangs
at the end of the first decade of the twenty first century succeeds in giv-
ing an even-handed account of the positions adopted by the protago-
nists and reformulating the debate from a Critical Realist perspective.
Eschewing the conspiratorial Left Bank thesis of one side and the econ-
omism of the other he proceeds from the assumption that there is a real,
knowable, world ‘out there’; not just a random collection of correlates,
subjective personal experiences, ‘imaginaries’, discourses. He rejects a
position which sees only criminalisation, demonisation and the dep-
redations of the ‘apparatus of social control’, as the problem, recognis-
ing that any criminology that denies or equivocates about the reality of
xiv Foreword
References
Aldridge et al. (2011). Illegal leisure revisited: Changing patterns of alcohol and
drug use in adolescence and young adults. London: Routledge.
Alexander et al. (2008). (Re)thinking the gang. Runneymede Trust.
Bentham, J. (2014). The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (P. Schofield, K.
Pease-Watkin, & M. Quinne, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bullock, K., & Tilley, N. (2002). Shootings gangs and violent incidents in
Manchester: Developing a crime reduction strategy (Crime Reduction
Research Series Paper 13). London, UK: Home Office.
Currie, E. (1992). Realist criminology crime control and policing in the 90’s.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Downes, D. (1966). The delinquent solution. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Farrington, D. (2006). Explaining and preventing crime: The globalization of
knowledge—The American Society of Criminology presidential address 1999.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2000.
tb00881.x.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Habermas, J. (1981). The theory of communicative action. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Foreword xv
xvii
Contents
xix
xx Contents
Index 251
Introduction
xxi
xxii Introduction
…can be understood as the migration of gangs from their home area into a
new geographical setting, with the objective of establishing a new physical
and organisational base, from which to transplant the values and business
models of their gang. (Hallworth, MA, Dissertation Applied Criminology
and Police Management, Cambridge University, p. 16)
There is no doubt that the media can amplify deviance and evoke deep
emotions (Young 2009) but as Jock Young often argued there has to
be deviance in order for it to be amplified. The analysis offered in this
monograph offers explanations of how ideas and policies about gangs
have changed from an over cautious de facto denial of gangs to argua-
bly an unreflexive and atheoretical acceptance of gangs as part of cul-
tural life in some neighbourhoods. The book builds on the assertion
that crime should be taken seriously, not at least because of its dispro-
portionate impact on socially excluded populations who are also cul-
turally over-included in consumer life (Young in Morgan and Reiner
eds. 1997). It is in this spirit of “realism” that the book rejects notions
that concerns about gangs are minimal or superficial. Minimal accounts
Introduction xxiii
main gangs, the Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys had formed
criminal enterprises which laid claim to large swathes of Birmingham
as drug dealing turf and these gangs were in fierce competition with
each other (Rahman 2016). Similarly this seems to have been the case
in many English towns and cities which was later evidenced by local-
ised empirical studies (Andell and Pitts 2009, 2013, 2017) but at this
time there were few scholarly sources to analyse these emerging crimi-
nal fraternities and an emerging criminological reluctance to accept the
existence of gangs (Pitts 2012). The early literature was mainly in the
form of ‘true crime’ books that provide descriptive accounts of gangs
(for Birmingham see Bassey, 2005; for Manchester see Walsh 2005; for
London see Prichard 2008). These early accounts as Hayward Ferrel
and Young (2008) have argued could potentially have led to a deeper
analysis of the chains of causation underlying the problems experienced
(Matthews 2013) but instead were quickly dismissed because young
peoples accounts were viewed as exaggerations brought about through
inescapable boredom (Hallsworth and Young 2004). Aldridge et al.
(2008) provide a dismissal of these types of accounts and argue that
some data analysis is unreflexive and may over-emphasise the involve-
ment of Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities. In
other words the analysis employed does not separate accounts of experi-
ence from theories of reality (Vandenbergh 2016).
Despite academic minimisation media reports continued to draw
our attention to increasing youth violence in English cities. In February
2007 three teenagers were shot and killed in south London, an 11 year
old boy was killed in Liverpool and two 16 year olds were killed in
London and Sheffield. It was argued that the increases in lethal violence
observed was due in part to the conflations of official statistics (Squires
2009) or media moral panics (Halsworth and Young 2008). Despite the
rise in serious youth violence in some of our most relatively deprived
neighbourhoods academics mainly offered libertarian cultural explana-
tions of “street life” (Hallsworth and Silverstone 2009) or concerned
themselves with disorganised, messy autonomous hyper masculinity
(Aldridge et al. 2007). These accounts largely ignored or underplayed
the emerging street gang structures which was increasingly networked
and enmeshed in the alternative economy of drugs (Densley 2013).
Introduction xxv
1A relatively durable, predominantly street based group of young people who (1) see themselves
(and are seen by others) as a discernable group, (2) engage in a range of criminal activity and
violence, (3) identify with or lay claim over territory, (4) have some form of identifiable structural
feature, and (5) are in conflict with other similar gangs.
Introduction xxxi