Introduction

Since the late 1980s, there has been ongoing and ever-growing police-media-generated concern about the problem of violent crime in the inner cities. The issue of urban crime has a much longer history in Britain and can be traced back to the early 1970s when discussions about ‘coloured’ immigration collided with the problematisation of second generation black youth – most notably the mugging crisis. These themes of race and crime and the decaying inner city were reinforced and magnified within the nation's consciousness via decades of flashpoints and police–black youth conflicts, as exemplified by the 1976 Notting Hill disturbances and 1981 Brixton disorders. It is within this historical context that the current UK ‘gangs crisis’ needs to be located as it both replays, as well as extends, these now well-worn threads of race, violent crime and urban degeneration. However, where it signals a significant departure from these older narratives is in relation to the recent burgeoning academic interest and governmental concern with, and official recognition of, the ‘street gang’. The ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ programme launched by David Cameron's coalition government in 2011 (HM Government, 2011, 2012b) adopted the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) accepted ‘standard definition’: ‘Street Gangs – these are relatively durable, predominantly street-based groups [of young people] who are recognised as a discernible entity and for whom violence is intrinsic. Crime as well as violent crime in the gang is instrumental (to achieving an outcome) as well as expressive’ (ACPO, 207:22). Interestingly, as well as very controversially, the coalition government in arriving at its official ‘standard definition’ had figuratively speaking ‘put to bed’ the one issue that ‘gang experts’ in the US have not been able to find any sort of agreement about: ‘what a gang is’ and ‘how to define gangs’.

Whereas debates about ‘the gang’ are relatively new to the UK, for most of the post-war era in the US this issue has been viewed as a national law and order problem by a large and expanding industry of experts comprising policy makers, law enforcement professionals and gang scholars. ‘Just as gangs have proliferated across the nation’ – appearing in over 800 cities and towns – ‘so has gang literature’, and anti-gang policies and programmes (Klein, 1995:8).