An Introduction to Gangs and Serious Youth Violence in the United Kingdom
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225420902848 |
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| Author | Simon Harding,Ross Deuchar,James Densley |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
902848YJJ0010.1177/1473225420902848Youth JusticeDensley et al.
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Youth Justice
2020, Vol. 20(1-2) 3 –10
An Introduction to Gangs
© The Author(s) 2020
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and Serious Youth Violence
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1473225420902848
DOI: 10.1177/1473225420902848
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in the United Kingdom
James Densley , Ross Deuchar
and Simon Harding
Abstract
This article introduces the special issue on UK gangs and youth violence. Written to coincide with the
launch of the National Centre for Gang Research at the University of West London, this collection adds
the voices of academics who have spent years researching serious violence to a conversation dominated
by policymakers and media commentators. The authors examine trends in youth violence and offer a brief
history of UK gang research before previewing the contribution of the seven empirical articles dealing with
police gang databases, knife crime, county lines drug dealing, contextual safeguarding, offender mental health,
gang disengagement and criminal desistance.
Keywords
county lines, desistance, gangs, knife crime, violence
Work on this special issue began in 2018, which was a watershed year for serious violence
in the United Kingdom. After a decade of declines, homicide, knife and gun crime, and
robbery began rising in 2014 and in 2018 reached their highest point for more than 10 years
(HM Government, 2018). These increases were accompanied by a shift towards younger
victims and perpetrators. For homicide in particular, the rise was driven almost exclusively
by street homicide versus domestic violence and male-on-male cases rather than violence
against women and girls (HM Government, 2018). In London, killings linked to gang vio-
lence more than doubled from 17 in 2014 to 44 in 2018, and shooting deaths rose from four
to 15 in the same period, figures from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime show. As
LaFree (1999: 148) famously wrote in the context of shifting violent crime rates in the
United States, ‘the simple rapidity of the changes calls into question explanations based on
fixed biological characteristics, deep-seated psychological characteristics, or slow-moving
Corresponding author:
James Densley, Metropolitan State University, Brooklyn Park, MN 55445, USA.
Email: james.densley@metrostate.edu
4
Youth Justice 20(1-2)
social characteristics’. Hence, there is a need for a deeper dive into some of the more emer-
gent changes in the violence landscape.
While media attention is increasingly focused on knife crime in London, virtually
every police force area in Britain has been affected. The West Midlands, which includes
Birmingham, the second-most populous UK city after London, recorded the highest num-
ber of youth knife deaths in 40 years in 2018 (HM Government, 2018). Violence is a
national issue. And as violence rises, detection rates of those responsible have been fall-
ing, undermining public trust and confidence in police to provide victims and families
with the answers they deserve (FitzGerald, 2018). Hence why, in April 2018, the Home
Office published a new Serious Violence Strategy and ploughed £40 million into it (HM
Government, 2018).
This is not the first time HM Government has pledged to tackle serious youth violence
this decade. After the 2011 England riots were wrongly pinned on gangs (Densley and
Mason, 2011; Densley, 2013), Prime Minister David Cameron (2011) made tackling them
his ‘national priority’. A national Ending Gang and Youth Violence (see Disley and Liddle,
2016) strategy followed that was heavily criticised for failing to establish an evidence-
based operational definition of a gang, for ignoring the academic state of knowledge on
gangs and what works in gang intervention, and for wasting taxpayers’ money on initia-
tives that were neither clearly described nor comprehensively evaluated (Densley and
Jones, 2016; Fraser et al., 2018; Shute and Medina, 2014; Smithson and Ralphs, 2016).
Related interventions, such as civil gang injunctions, the application of ‘joint enterprise’
doctrine to gang members, and The Metropolitan Police’s database or ‘Matrix’ of gang
suspects, were similarly criticised for the collective punishment and criminalisation of
innocent young people (Amnesty International, 2018; Cottrell-Boyce, 2013; Williams and
Clark, 2016).
HM Government’s (2018: 14) latest strategy stresses that tackling gangs and youth
violence is ‘not a law enforcement issue alone and it requires a multiple strand approach
involving a range of partners across different sectors’. Prevention and early intervention
are at the heart of this new action plan. After London experienced more than 130 homi-
cides in 2018, for example, the city’s Mayor Sadiq Khan called for a new public health
approach predicated on multi-agency partnership working between police and social
and statutory services, to bring together knowledge of people involved in serious vio-
lence (BBC, 2018). Based on similar models in Boston, Cincinnati, and other US cities
(Braga et al., 2018), the Mayor sought to replicate Scotland’s Community Initiative to
Reduce Violence (CIRV), which cut Glasgow’s murder rate dramatically since 2008
(see Deuchar, 2013). However, repeated calls from senior politicians and police for a
return to robust...
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