Every week there are numerous headlines, opinion pieces or reports on the pandemic of gang-related youth violence and crime throughout the myriad of local and national print and broadcast media outlets. Consequently, all reported incidents of youth violence involving either a knife or gun that occur within any of England's poor multi-ethnic urban locations are automatically deemed to be caused by the menace of street gangs. This situation is further corroborated by police ‘intelligence’ and statistics as well as by a small but growing number of criminological studies. Moreover, the existence and unique problem of street gangs has been officially recognised by national policy makers via the implementation of a range of new legislative tools and powers. In June 2015 the Conservative government both widened and extended the scope of gang injunctions – which were first introduced under the New Labour administration – and also introduced an updated statutory definition of gangs to be used across all of the police and public services including health, education, children and youth services. The official definition of UK street gangs was originally arrived upon by the Conservative-Liberal coalition in 2011 as part of its ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ (EGYV) strategy. However, the refreshed and more flexible 2015 definition allows the police and local authorities to take pre-emptive action in order for them to more effectively tackle gang and drug-related violent crime.

The official government gang definition is extremely controversial, not least because of the long-standing and ongoing contested/heated academic and public debates about: (a) what a gang is and how to define it; (b) whether there is a growing gang problem; (c) whether there is a link between violent youth crime and gang membership; and (d) the demonisation and racialisation of gangs by the news media, which provides justification for the continued use of oppressive law enforcement tactics that disproportionately impact upon black and minority ethnic youth. The above questions abound both in the UK as well as in the US, the original home of the gang, and have yet to be resolved. If anything they have become sidelined by the more urgent and dominant neoliberal Conservative obsessions with cutting welfare and fighting urban crime.