3.1 Gang agenda
In terms of the gang agenda, Gunter has voiced his scepticism about the tenuous causal links being made between gangs and gun and knife crime, whereby any events which occur in poor, urban environments are regarded as a consequence of gangs:
Since the mid 2000s the UK has witnessed a worrying and increasing number of anti gang laws and policies including: gang injunctions for 14–17 year olds, joint enterprise, specialist gang policing units, gang profiling databases/matrices, and minimum mandatory sentence for possession of a knife or offensive weapon by a 16 or 17 year old in public or on school premises.
For Gunter, this focus on gangs is not a race neutral one and constitutes a ‘racialised gang crisis’, with youth policy clearly contributing to this set of processes. This is evident via the over representation of certain ethnic groups in stop and search figures, the media fascination with gangs and the police’s over-zealous interventions including the MPS Gangs Violence Matrix. This is a means of categorising and labelling gang members, many of whom do not know they are on the database. As noted by Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke:
It is clear that the gang label is disproportionately attributed to BAME people, when compared to both the size of the BAME populations within each of the cities presented and the numbers of white British people flagged or registered as involved with gangs…Yet, the gang databases created by such police units have a policy and operational significance that develops over time, potentially failing to respond to the changing nature of the defined problem.
One of the biggest concerns about such databases then is the racial disproportionality of those being recorded as gang members with the breakdown as follows: (Met Police, 2021)
- White European: 242
- Dark European: 66
- African Caribbean: 1943
- Asian: 125
- Arabian/Egyptian: 56
- Not recorded: 12
According to these figures four out of five gang members have an African Caribbean background which is extremely disproportional compared to population figures for this group. This also correlates with the high numbers of African Caribbean children who are routinely excluded from schools. As noted by Gunter (2017), in the UK there are more African Caribbean young men in prison and young offenders’ institutions than at university.
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