Introduction

This book has so far examined and/or discussed much of the academic research evidence, as well as the key role played by the news media, with regard to the UK gangs crisis. However, there are two important areas concerning this latest moral panic that have yet to be addressed, first, the various national and local government policy responses and second, and perhaps more significantly, the role of the police as the chief architects of this national crisis. The way the police are able to shape and then control the gangs agenda is through the construction of crime statistics that are then leaked to the media. The London Evening Standard ran a front page (Bentham, 2014) headline proclaiming that according to Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) statistics ‘3,484 London gang members commit 6600 crimes including 24 murders in three years’. This new moral panic and fixation with the youth gang menace is then clearly not restricted to politicians and the media.

With regard to the empirical evidence that has helped to sustain this latest social panic concerning problem youth, it would be inaccurate to claim that gang research has taken root within the UK academy, as in truth this has not been the case. Nevertheless, there has been increasing interest in this area by a relatively small number of academics working within the area of criminology. Among this relatively small number of UK gang academics, there is a much smaller number of them who, it can be said, are part of a burgeoning (as regards policy, policing and practice) ‘gang industry’, which is on hand to intellectually respond to this latest ‘youth crisis’ of violent urban crime and disorder – much of it distorted, London centric and police constructed (Shute et al, 2012).

This chapter will look to further examine current academic discourses about the UK gang situation, and argue that much of it has unwittingly helped to fuel the racialisation and exaggeration of this issue by the media and the police; with ‘gangsta rap’ culture seen as the driving force behind black youth's disproportionate involvement in violent criminality. Secondly, it will argue that this gang thinking has resulted in the formulation of misguided policy, practice and policing that centres around the existence of the problematic catchall street gang label that criminalises, via police targeting practices, black (and urban) youth and their street-based lifestyles and friendship networks.