Are You Anxious About Gangs In Your Town?
Gangs are back on the agenda with the government's star American adviser, Bill Bratton, arriving for a tour of Britain's inner cities and an international conference. But just how bad is the problem in britain?But for many Britons, a "gang" means a group of young people linked to petty crime, or graduating to selling drugs, thieving cell phones and even stabbing various other young people coming from competing gang areas. Gang has become a catch-all word.
What is a gang?
- Street-based young people who see themselves as a group
- Has an identifying feature
- Usually in conflict with other gangs
There are other reasons why reliable data is thin on the ground. A significant proportion of gang-related crime and violence is never reported and young criminals do not identify themselves as gang members when they appear in court. The Home Office cannot even provide a definition of what a gang is. And this lack of an agreed definition is another reason why collecting data is so difficult.
Where does a gang start and a group of friends wearing sportswear finish? John Heale, author of One Blood, a study of British street gangs, defines a gang as such: "It's a group of about 10 or more individuals who have a name and who claim an allegiance to a geographic area but the reality is that it's a lot more messy." He says five years ago, youths may have merely associated themselves with being members of a group or representing their estate but the idea of a gang has been amplified in young people's minds and those of the public. "Every group is perceived to be a gang when in fact they are just kids hanging around street corners because they have nothing to do," says Heale.
One study for the Home Office found that up to 6% of 10-19-year-olds belonged to a gang in England and Wales.
Gang expert Prof John Pitts estimates some 600 to 700 young adults are part of gangs in the London borough of Waltham Forest alone.
The majority of Britons will have little or no direct experience of gangs but they are still frightened and fascinated by them in equal measure. Generally, the risk of becoming a crime victim in Britain today is at a 30-year low. There has been a long-term downward trend in crime, including violent offences, since the mid-1990s.
There are periodic outbreaks of alarm over gangs. The last large-scale wave of concern came in 2007 with several high-profile murders, including that of 11-year-old Rhys Jones who was shot in the neck as he walked home from football practice in Liverpool.
In a speech on Wednesday night, Bratton said the gang problem in the united kingdom was in its "gestation" period and could be stopped before it takes a "multi-generational hold". "It's easier to stop because you are not dealing with a multi-generational problem like we had in the United States where we had grandfathers and grandsons in the same gang." When Bratton was appointed some senior police figures attacked the decision, saying that cities like Los Angeles, which has 400 gangs, had little to teach the UK.
It is true that Britain has a different kind of problem to many other countries where gangs are more about organised crime and less about postcode loyalty. In Mexico, the situation is as much a drug war between the state and drug cartels, rather than street gangs. Hardly a day goes by without another gruesome killing, and 40,000 people have died in the violence over the past five years.
Of course, the UK has a long history of gangs, from the Scuttlers in Manchester in Victorian times to the Teddy Boy gangs of the 1950s. And Gwenton Sloley, a former gang member who now works with young people in the London borough of Hackney, says they are not going anywhere. "Gangs have been around for centuries, they're a part of youth culture. You're not going to eradicate them."