How Gangs Work: An Ethnography of Youth Violence

How Gangs Work

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How Gangs Work

An Ethnography of Youth Violence

James A. Densley

Assistant Professor, Metropolitan State University, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota

James A. Densley © 2013

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For Alex In search of a world free from gang violence

Contents

About the Author

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Gangs and Society

2 Gang Evolution

3 Gang Organization

4 Gangs, Media, and Technology

5 Gang Recruitment

6 Gang Desistance

7 Gang Prevention and Intervention

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Sample Demographics

Appendix 2: Glossary of Terms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

James A. Densley is Assistant Professor in the School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. His teaching and research interests include street gangs, organized crime, violence, and theoretical criminology. Densley is trustee and director of Growing Against Gangs and Violence, an educational partnership with London’s Metropolitan Police Service. He earned the D.Phil. and M.Sc. in Sociology from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College), the M.S. in Teaching from Pace University, and the B.A. (Hons) in Sociology with American Studies from the University of Northampton. He has published studies in the European Journal of Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, Global Crime, Social Problems, and other leading social science journals. Densley’s articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines, including the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Police Review, Policing Today, and The Sun. This is his first book.

Preface

From 2005 to 2007 I taught special education in the New York City public schools. I was a 22 year old Englishman in New York who needed to stay on the right side of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement while paying down a sizable student loan. Teaching was never my planned destination. A little lost in the throngs of people riding the Brooklyn-bound A train one afternoon, I caught a glimpse of a simple black and white advertisement posted around where the transit map should be, that read: ‘You remember your first-grade teacher’s name. Who will remember yours?’ And those eleven words forever changed my direction of travel. The subway ad promised a one-time tax-free stipend during training, a competitive starting salary plus health insurance and retirement plan, even tuition assistance toward earning a graduate degree. All I had to do was teach.

It was almost too good to be true. With barely a second thought, I signed up to the NYC Teaching Fellows, an alternative teacher certification program that took earnest graduates like me and, in an effort to plug the teacher shortage and bridge the achievement gap, provided a quick on-ramp to needy inner city schools. I reported for duty at a middle school in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, a neighborhood that 30 years ago seemed to exemplify the bleakness of poor urban places and today still lies in the poorest congressional district in the United States. The principal handed me the keys to the classroom and told me to teach. I did. Then reality set in. Youth half my age but twice my size looked right through me. I was not the center of attention.

My students were distracted. The source of their distraction was gangs. The symbolism of the graffiti on their desks and in their notebooks, the tattoos on their necks, and the clothing on their backs was visible even to the untrained eye. The airport-style metal detectors and small army of police officers that greeted me that morning suddenly made sense. In the weeks that followed, I separated fights, mediated conflicts, and learned about children dealing drugs out of backpacks and carrying weapons in playgrounds. I witnessed first hand how events outside the school disrupted the learning process inside the school. During a routine exercise of ‘Where do you see yourself in ten years?’, for example, one of my students, a self-proclaimed ‘blood for life’, answered he would either be dead or in prison for killing his estranged father. It was an education.

When I later taught in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the idea of gangs distracted my students more than gangs themselves. It was here, coincidentally a few blocks from the Five Points district vividly portrayed in the movie Gangs of New York, that youths divorced from gangs would spend their Halloweens warning me not to drive home at night, lest I be violently victimized by gang members. As my students had it, All Saints Day was annual gang initiation day and prospective gang members would be out in force, driving on busy roads at night with their headlights switched off or on high beam. Any motorist who responded by blinking their headlights to warn oncoming traffic would be purposefully followed home by the gang, attacked for perceived disrespect, and, in most versions, murdered in cold blood. Hence the subway was safer than the expressway.

The ‘lights out’ gang initiation is in fact an urban myth. The tale originated in California in the early 1980s and spread throughout the United States during the Clinton years with the help of fax machines and the Internet (for a discussion, see Best and Hutchinson, 1996). That I first heard the story from a cohort of streetwise and otherwise savvy teenagers a decade after police and municipal leaders very publicly denied it, demonstrates the pervasiveness of gang mythology. Indeed, I heard it again at least three more times during the fieldwork for this book, only then gang members were allegedly cruising the streets of London, England.

My old students inspired this research and remind me always of why it matters. After all, gangs cause damage beyond that which is measured by traditional law enforcement and criminal justice indices—damage measured in the lost productivity of otherwise capable young people, the deterioration of once stable social institutions, and the loss of precious public resources expended in efforts to repair the damage caused. My students taught me that gangs exist as both real and imaginary threats. But they also taught me how to spot the difference between the two. With so much misinformation out there about gangs, this book sets out to make sense of them in straightforward, rational terms. The implication is that lessons learned in New York carry over to London and vice versa. And to understand ‘how gangs work’ you must take the road less travelled and work with gangs.

Acknowledgments

Many people contributed to this research and book. First and foremost, my sincere thanks to the nearly 200 individuals who agreed to be interviewed and observed during the fieldwork, but cannot be named because of my promise to preserve their anonymity. This would be a bound volume of blank pages were it not for their courage, dedication, honesty, and insight. For this, I am forever grateful.

This book grows out of the research I did as a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. I owe a great debt of gratitude to many great minds at Oxford, especially Heather Hamill, Diego Gambetta, and Federico Varese, who modeled a profound sense of academic integrity and challenged me to look at my data in new and exciting ways. Thanks also to Gabriella Elgenius, Christina Furr, Thomas Grund, Declan Hill, Lindsey Richardson, Andrew Shipley, Alex Sutherland, and Valeria Pizzini-Gambetta for fun and feedback along the way.

Formal and informal discussion at numerous conferences—notably, the National Gang Crime Research Center’s 15th International Gang Specialist Training; the 2011 Inter-Ivy and Sorensen Memorial Sociology Conference at Harvard University; the Second Annual Postgraduate Criminology Conference at the University of Cambridge; the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association; and the Workshop on Recruitment into Extra-Legal Organizations at Nuffield College, Oxford—helped the ideas in this book to mature. I am grateful to all those who participated.

I am greatly indebted to Ian Buchanan, Wolfgang Deicke, and others at the University of Northampton who encouraged me to apply for Oxford in the first place. I am also grateful to Alex Stevens for examining the work upon which this book is based and later collaborating with me to improve upon it. Many of the ideas for Chapter 1 developed under his tutelage. Special thanks go to Scott Decker for sage advice, my colleagues at Metropolitan State University for their vast reserve of patience and knowledge, Rebecca Diederichs citation assistance, David Squier Jones for indexing assistance, Paul Iovino for great ideas, and my teammates at Growing Against Gangs and Violence, especially Allen Davis and Nick Mason, for translating theory into practice.

For understanding forgotten emails, missed birthdays, and long nights at the computer, I’d like to thank my family and friends. Without their contributions and support this book would not have been written. My parents Jan and Andrew and my sister Jo were a constant source of strength and deserve extra credit for their vigilant collecting of secondary sources. My in-laws Jo and Jim, moreover, made me a home away from home during the writing stage and celebrated every word I committed to print. But words cannot express my gratitude to my wife, Emily, for sharing in the agony and ecstasy of every aspect of this project. I wish I could say that this research was supported by fellowships and grants from wealthy donors. Alas, Emily sustained this research almost entirely, working 70-hour weeks or more while I hung around on street corners. God only knows what I’d be without her.

Finally, my sincere thanks go to the editors of the St Antony’s Series, Jan Zielonka and Othon Anastasakis, the anonymous reviewers, Mritunjai Sahai and the MPS Production Team, MPS Limited, Chennai; and the team at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Julia Willan and Harriet Barker, for their professional advice and assistance in polishing and publishing this manuscript.

I published a shorter version of Chapter 2 as ‘It’s Gang Life But Not as we Know it: The Evolution of Gang Business’ in Crime & Delinquency (Sage, 2012); parts of Chapter 3 as ‘The Organisation of London’s Street Gangs’ in Global Crime (Taylor & Francis, 2012); an earlier version of Chapter 5 as ‘Street Gang Recruitment: Signaling, Screening and Selection’ in Social Problems (University of California Press, 2012); and odd phrases here and there in ‘Ganging up on Gangs: Why the Gang Intervention Industry Needs an Intervention’ in the British Journal of Forensic Practice (Emerald, 2011). As usual, responsibility for the contents of this book lies solely with the author. All mistakes are mine.

Introduction

In August 2011, the eyes of the world were set on thousands of young people as they took to Britain’s city streets and engaged in unprecedented scenes of civil disorder. A peaceful demonstration over the fatal police shooting of a young black man in Tottenham, north London, spiraled into four days of riots and looting, five deaths, untold economic damage, and nearly 4000 arrests. Via rolling news feed and grainy home video, Britons perused the charcoaled remains of local landmarks and public vehicles. They navigated a sea of broken glass and thrown projectiles. They relived exuberant raids upon steel-shuttered retail stores. They bore witness to indiscriminate acts of violence, mostly concentrated within eyeshot of a depressed post-war council estate. Less than one year away from hosting the Games of the XXX Olympiad, London was burning.

Those five days in August put gangs firmly back in the headlines and on the political agenda. Gangs were scrutinized six months prior when five-year-old Thusha Kamaleswaran was paralyzed after being shot in the chest by gang members pursuing who they thought was a member of a rival gang cowering in her uncle’s convenience store (Laville and Taylor, 2012). Public outcry over this incident spurred the demand that police and public officials acknowledge and begin to seriously address London’s growing gang problem. But it never came to fruition because the wider public was largely insulated from the internecine violence of gangs. That is until the riots.

If the Kamaleswaran shooting was the spark, the riots were the fire. In response to allegations that gangs had suspended territorial rivalries to coordinate the disorders over smart phones and social media, Prime Minister David Cameron (2011) made tackling gangs his ‘new national priority’ and launched a ‘concerted, all out war on gangs and gang culture’. It was the kind of rhetoric the public has come to expect from ‘tough on crime’ law and order politicians who favor individualized explanations for aberrant behavior over critiques of social structure (Blair, 1993, p. 28). Had the government blamed the riots on social exclusion and social deprivation it would have implicated itself. By blaming gangs, the coalition instead implicated others. And it worked because the media thrives on simplicity and sweeping generalizations, and most Britons have little or no direct experience of gangs but remain frightened and fascinated by them in equal measure.

According to Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) intelligence (2012a, 2012b), there are an estimated 250 active criminal gangs in London, comprising of about 4800 people. Of these gangs, 62 are considered as ‘high harm’ and commit two thirds of all ‘gang-related’ crime; that is, ‘any offence committed where the victim or suspect is identified through MPS indices as being a member of a gang’.¹ The gangs range from organized criminal networks involved in Class A drugs supply and firearms to street-based gangs involved in violence and personal robbery. Based upon ‘daily scanning processes’ and ‘dip sampling’ of only 100 cases from the small proportion of crimes that leads to detection of the offender, the MPS concludes that this relatively small number of people is responsible for approximately 22 percent of serious violence, 17 percent of robbery, 50 percent of shootings and 14 percent of rape in London (Metropolitan Police Service, 2012a, 2012b).

Aside from the obvious problems of definition, which I shall address later, when the flames eventually subsided and more sober inquiry ensued, we learned that less than 20 percent of those responsible for the riots came from gang backgrounds, and even where gang members were involved, they did not play a central role (Home Office, 2011). Journalists on the Right reported this as, ‘one in five Londoners arrested during the riots was in a gang!’ Journalists on the Left led with, ‘only one in five Londoners arrested during the riots was in a gang’. Either way, the government had conflated youths dressed in hooded sportswear with ‘criminality, pure and simple’. Worse still, the government seemed intent upon developing populist policy around gangs without first developing proficiency with the issues.

The riots and their aftermath invite questions that have intrigued gang scholars for decades: what is a gang and how does it differ from organized crime or crime committed alongside groups of friends (a category into which a substantial amount of all juvenile delinquency falls)? Are ‘gang’ activity and ‘gang member’ activity conceptually distinct? What is the nature and extent of gang organization? What is the role of media and technology in gangs? Why and how do young people join gangs? Once they join, can they ever leave? What works in gang prevention and intervention? Such questions are at the heart of this book.

In answering them my aim is to challenge popular misconceptions about gangs as amorphous collectives of hoodies and hoodlums, ‘unhappy, unloved, and out of control’, perpetrating wanton acts of crime and violence (Mayer, 2008). This book demonstrates that gang members are to large extent rational agents who optimize under the constraints of their harsh life conditions. Gangs, in turn, are rational organizations that evolve to punish fraud and fault but reward industry and ingenuity. Like mafias, some gangs are ‘a species of a broader genus, organized crime’ (Varese, 2001, p. 4). I appreciate, in the words of the late astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1980), such ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. The rest of this chapter thus is structured first to ensure we are speaking the same language when it comes to gangs; and second to describe the data sources and methods upon which such claims are built.

Gang, defined

Gangs—and the hysteria surrounding them—are not new to Britain (Pearson, 1983; Davies, 1998). If Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men is ‘an archetypical, early Nottingham gang’, then British gang history dates back to the Middle Ages at least (Schneider and Tilley, 2004, p. xv). But as Stacy Peralta’s (2009) documentary about the rise of the notorious Bloods and Crips implies, gang life as we know it is ‘Made in America’. So too is our knowledge about it. Since David Downes (1966) famously declared British gangs nonexistent, attempts to understand gangs in the British context have been curtailed by the ‘Eurogang paradox’—the denial that there are ‘American-style’ gangs in Europe, based on a ‘typical’ American gang with functional role division and chain of command; a model that is not actually typical of gangs in America (Klein, 2001, p. 10).

Only in recent years have gangs in Britain received any scholarly attention (see Batchelor, 2009; Centre for Social Justice, 2009; Deuchar, 2009; Hallsworth and Silverstone, 2009; McVie, 2010; Young, 2009), but studies have been marked by rhetorical debate as to whether gangs in British cities are shapeless gatherings of peers (Aldridge and Medina, 2008; Bannister et al., 2010; Bennett and Holloway, 2004; Bradshaw, 2005; Mares, 2001), or are more structured groups that coerce ‘reluctant gangsters’ into their ranks (Pitts, 2008), or are even exaggerated and—at least partly—imaginary productions of the predilection for ‘gang talk’ among the academics, police officers, and policy makers who ‘need’ gangs in order to justify their very existence (Hallsworth and Young, 2008). Barry Goldson’s (2011) recent edited volume further enables the central protagonists to reprise and intensify the debate about ‘gangland’ and ‘gang talk’, with John Pitts (2011) and Simon Hallsworth (2011) talking past each other again—Pitts insisting that gangs exist and Hallsworth responding that the problem of street violence is not reducible to the gang—when in fact both propositions can be true. Unsurprisingly, gang processes have until now been largely ignored.

Gangs still go against the grain of British criminology, which has traditionally focused on oppositional rather than subordinate youth formations that lack a criminal raison d’être, such as the neighborhood- and style-based subculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s (see Campbell and Muncer, 1989). British criminologists struggle with or challenge the term ‘gang’ because no precise or parsimonious definition exists and gangs have a tendency to bring out the worst in criminal justice policy and practice (Alexander, 2008; Hallsworth and Young, 2008; Sharp, Aldridge, and Medina, 2006; White, 2008). As an example, the Insane Clown Posse hip-hop group is currently suing the US Department of Justice for classifying their fan base, or ‘Juggalos’, as a gang (Michaels, 2012). Closer to home, the Evening Standard once published the names of 257 London gangs as obtained from documents ‘leaked’ by analysts at Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime Directorate, only to retract the list when it discovered that parts of it were incorrectly copied from an open source website and benign groups ‘posturing’ on the Internet were included (Davenport, 2007).

To paraphrase the author David Frum (2009), if the gang is a mirage then interventions based on that mirage can only lead us deeper into the desert. But ‘action sets’ (Sullivan, 2005), ‘troublesome youth groups’ (Decker and Weerman, 2005), and other euphemistic gang alternatives are no less ambiguous or ill defined. According to ‘rap’s poet laureate’ (Hagedorn, 2008, p. 142), Tupac Shakur, for example, one is ‘troublesome’ if they’re ‘young’, ‘strapped’—that is, carrying a firearm—and ‘don’t give a fuck’. Which just so happens to be the same ‘thug life’ stereotype that those embroiled in debates over the utility of the word gang wish to avoid.

Since entering common parlance, the gang epithet has become convenient shorthand for social commentators to describe a range of collective behaviors, from ‘crime that is organized’ to ‘organized crime’. But as the economist Thomas Schelling (1971) explains, the two are conceptually distinct. The former encompasses crime that involves cooperation, functional role division, planning, and specialization. The latter involves monopolistic control exerted by one criminal group over ‘the production and distribution of a given commodity or service’ (Varese, 2010, p. 14). The mafia as industry of private protection thus represents the quintessential ‘organized crime’ (Chin, 1996; Chu, 2000; Gambetta, 1993; Hill, 2003; Varese, 2001).

Very few gangs meet the essential criteria for classification as organized crime (Decker, Bynum, and Weisel, 1998; Howell, 2007; Weisel, 2002). The drug-selling gang famously described by ‘rogue’ scholars Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh (Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000) does so because it offers a variety of tangible illegal goods and services to its patrons and aspires to be the sole suppliers of them in a given domain (see Varese, 2010). As Mac Klein (2004, p. 57) observes, however, the gang concept ‘implies a level of structure and organization for criminal conspiracy that is simply beyond the capacity of most street gangs’. He adds, ‘most street gangs are only loosely structured, with transient leadership and membership, easily transcended codes of loyalty, and informal rather than formal roles for the members’ (p. 59). Gangs are limited in their efforts to organize, Klein argues, because they are susceptible to random violence and their members are developmentally too young and too conspicuous to engage in organized criminal activity.

For comparison purposes, Klein’s ‘consensus Eurogang definition’ (durable and street-oriented youth groups whose involvement in illegal activity is part of their group identity; see Klein and Maxson, 2006, p. 4) is sufficiently general to capture the essence of gangs described in this book. The notion that crime is integral to the group’s reason for being, for instance, lends support to my argument that gangs have evolved from ‘associations of criminals’ to ‘criminal associations’ (see also Morselli, 2009). Nevertheless, Klein’s treatment of outcomes such as ‘durability’ and strategies such as ‘street orientation’ as invariable features is problematic. Being ‘street-oriented’, for instance, may simply be a variable attribute that depends upon the business of the gang (street-level drug-dealing, for instance) or, indeed, the weather. The consensus Eurogang definition thus is a lot like water, ‘it takes on the shape of whatever contains it’ but ‘slips through your fingers when you try to hold it’ (Tsang, 1998, pp. 209–10).

That no two gangs are exactly alike in form and function—the dictum of seminal gang researcher, Frederick Thrasher—holds as true today as it did when it was first said in 1927. But the gangs in this study do share some prevalent descriptive features, which is where I get off the definition merry-go-round. First, they are all self-formed associations of peers that have adopted a common name and other discernible ‘conventional’ or ‘symbolic’ signals of membership (see Gambetta, 2009b, p. xix). Second, they are comprised of individuals who recognize themselves (and are recognized by others) as being ‘members’ of a ‘gang’ who individually or collectively engage in or have engaged in a pattern of criminal activity. Third, they are not fully open to the public