Black Young People and Gang Involvement in London
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225420912331 |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Author | John Pitts |
| Subject Matter | Bonus Content |
912331YJJ0010.1177/1473225420912331Youth JusticePitts
research-article2020
Bonus Content
Youth Justice
2020, Vol. 20(1-2) 146 –158
Black Young People and Gang
© The Author(s) 2020
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Involvement in London
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1473225420912331
DOI: 10.1177/1473225420912331
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John Pitts
Abstract
Drawing upon research undertaken by the present author in East, North West and South London and the
work of other UK social scientists, this article considers the evidence concerning the involvement of young
people of African-Caribbean origin and Mixed Heritage in street gangs and gang crime in London (For the
sake of brevity, I will simply refer to these young people as Black, not least because this is how they usually
define themselves). It outlines the sometimes acrimonious debate about the relationship between race,
crime and street gangs in the United Kingdom in the past three decades, concluding that while many of
the claims made about this relationship may be exaggerated or simply untrue, the evidence for the over-
representation of Black young people in street gangs in London is compelling. The article then turns to the
changing social and economic predicament of some Black young people in the capital since the 1980s and
its relationship with their involvement in gang crime. Finally, it considers the role of drugs business in the
proliferation of the gang form and ‘gangsta’ culture and the involvement of growing numbers of younger
Black people in County Lines drug dealing.
Keywords
African-Caribbean youth, drugs, gangs, London, over-representation, street crime
Introduction
This article focuses on the relationship between crime and gang involvement among a
small minority of Black young people in London. This is not because young people of
different ethnicities or from different regions are not involved in gang crime. Indeed, if we
venture beyond the M25 motorway which circles the capital, it quickly becomes apparent
that gang involvement in England is determined, as much by historical, religious, social,
demographic and economic factors as skin colour or ethnicity (see, for example, Andell
and Pitts, 2010; Bullock and Tilley, 2003; Coomber, 2015; Coomber and Moyle, 2018;
Daly, 2017; Mulvenna, 2016; Qasim, 2018). Nonetheless, almost 45 per cent of London’s
population (over 3.5 million people) is made up of non-White ethnic minorities and this
Corresponding author:
John Pitts, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, University of Bedfordshire, Park Square, Luton LU1 3JU, UK.
Email: john.pitts4@btopenworld.com
Pitts
147
is, by far, the largest concentration in the United Kingdom (Office of National Statistics,
2017). Moreover, in some parts of south and east London where street gangs are preva-
lent, Black young people constitute over 50 per cent of the school age population.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, their gang involvement has been the subject of much of the
gang research undertaken in the United Kingdom (see, for example, Andell, 2019; Densley,
2014; Harding, 2014; Pitts, 2008).
Race and Crime: The Academic Debate
In the United Kingdom, the fractious debate about the relationship between race and
crime, and latterly, the involvement of Black young people in street gangs, re-emerged
recently in the controversy surrounding the purposes and uses of the Metropolitan Police
Gangs Matrix.
London boroughs with a Gangs Task Force utilise the MPS Gangs Matrix for the iden-
tification of ‘gang nominals’. These are the people the police believe to be active gang
members, others who are more loosely affiliated and some who are potential victims.
However, identifying gang nominals is not a precise art and the Matrix system has a ten-
dency to ‘round-up’ frequent associates and siblings who may not be involved in any
criminality (MOPAC, 2018).
But the controversy does not concern whether or not the police should gather intelli-
gence about potentially dangerous people. It is that, in London, 89 per cent of the 3362
individuals on the MPS Matrix in May 2018 were from a Black or minority ethnic social
group. A total of 78 per cent were Black African Caribbean and 11 per cent were from
other ethnic minority groups. This is similar to the proportions in Manchester (MOPAC,
2018).
In its 2018 report, Amnesty International UK describes the MPS Gangs Matrix as
. . . part of a racialised war on gangs, triggered by the Conservative government after the riots
in 2011, that stigmatised Black youngsters and violated human rights.
This somewhat tendentious observation, notwithstanding, the remarkable over-represen-
tation of BME young people clearly required some explanation. And so, unsurprisingly,
the controversy about the Gangs Matrix reignited the race and crime debate which began
in earnest in parliament, the media and the academy in the 1970s (Hall et al., 1978; Pitts,
1988, 1993) and has been trundling on ever since. Williams and Clarke (2018), for exam-
ple, contend that
. . . the ‘gang’ has been appropriated by the state as an ideological device that drives the
hypercriminalisation of Black, mixed, Asian, and other minority ethnic (BLACK) communities
. . . With particular reference to collective punishments, we suggest that ‘gang-branding’ is
critical to the development of guilt-producing associations that facilitate the arrest, charging,
and prosecution of countless numbers of BLACK people for offences they did not commit.
These claims have strong echoes of the debate between Lea and Young (1993) on the one
hand and Paul Gilroy (1987) and Stuart Hall et al. (1978) on the other hand. Gilroy argued
148
Youth Justice 20(1-2)
that the idea of ‘Black criminality’ was a product of racist stereotypes and that Black
young people were no more criminal than any others. Rather, it was because they were
policed more intensively and sentenced more harshly, that they loomed so large in the
criminal statistics. This claim had an empirical basis in contemporaneous research con-
ducted by Stevens and Willis (1979) which showed that Black young people were over-
represented in only two crime categories, Street Crime (‘Mugging’) and Being a Suspected
Person (‘Sus’). This latter category was itself highly contentious and fiercely contested by
representatives of the Black community because it often appeared to be used by the police
as a means of randomly criminalising Black young people:
I got a criminal record when I was 15 for something I did not do . . . I got loitering with intent
to commit an arrestable offence in places unknown with persons unknown yeah? That was the
charge, that’s called SUS . . . in fact; I could go as far as to say I’ve got 14 convictions for SUS.
And that was all by the time I was 18.
(Steve, cited in Palmer and Pitts, 2006)
In most other categories, like shop-lifting, burglary and fraud, the representation of Black
young people was the same or somewhat lower than that of their White counterparts
(Pitts, 1988).
Hall et al. (1978) attributed this criminalisation to a media driven moral panic about an
allegedly ‘new’ kind of crime, ‘mugging’, committed primarily by Black youths. In real-
ity, they argued, there was no evidence of a significant increase. Rather, the stereotype of
the ‘Black mugger’ serves as a device to distract attention from the true cause of society’s
problems, the crisis of capitalism, which had led to widespread youth unemployment.
They cited Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 speech in which she had spoken of ‘. . . our country
being swamped’ and
‘. . . the threat posed by young Black men to White families’, claiming that ‘. . . our culture
(was) being swamped’ and pledging to ‘. . . turn the clock back . . .’ in order to . . . ‘make the
streets of Britain safe once more, for law abiding citizens’.(Pitts, 2001: 5)
This type of rhetoric appeared to embolden some sections of the Metropolitan Police to
adopt a more robust and intrusive policing style. Thus, the notorious Special Patrol Group,
the ‘Gladiators’ as they came to be known, unencumbered by any identifying names or
numbers, ‘swamped’ areas of Black residence and stopped and searched Black citizens,
apparently at random (Cashmore and McLaughlin, 1991; Lea and Young, 1984; Pitts,
1988).
This was the strategy which culminated in the first Brixton Riot in 1981 (Hall et al.,
1978; Pitts, 1988). Prime Minister Thatcher dismissed the riots as unjustified acts of crim-
inal violence, rejecting any suggestion that predatory policing may have been a precipitat-
ing factor. This account of events stood in marked contrast with the findings of the
Scarman Inquiry (Scarman, 1981) which pointed to the combined effects of negative
socio-economic pressures, racial prejudice and the ‘irrational’ beliefs and attitudes of both
the police and the public.
Pitts
149
Hall et al. (1978) argue that the moral panic around ‘mugging’ served to divide the
working class on racial ground and generate popular support for more authoritarian forms
of government. Nonetheless, they also acknowledged that the ‘crisis of capitalism’,
because it had pushed Black youth to the social and economic margins, had driven some
into petty crime. Paul Gilroy (1987) took this argument a step further, suggesting that
...
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