Making Up Gangs: Looping,Labelling and the New Politics of Intelligence-led Policing

Introduction

In the aftermath of England’s ‘summer of violent disorder’ in 2011 – a series of events that also impacted upon young people north of the border in Scotland (BBC News, 2011a, 2011b) – Prime Minister David Cameron was unequivocal in apportioning blame. Informed by briefings from senior police officers, Cameron postulated that street gangs were ‘at the heart’ of the violence. However, as the dust settled, uncertainty about the nature and extent of gang involvement in the riots began to emerge. After initially claiming that as many as 28 per cent of those arrested in London were gang members, the Metropolitan Police revised this figure downwards to 19 per cent, a figure that dropped to 13 per cent countrywide (The Guardian and LSE, 2012: 21). By the time the United Kingdom (UK) Government’s policy document was published in response, the role of gangs in the riots was considerably downplayed. ¹ This process of equivocation, revision and uncertainty casts a new spotlight on the policing and political response to the ‘gang fever’ (Hallsworth and Young, 2008) that has recently gripped the UK, in particular the role of police intelligence in attributing gang membership and estimating the extent of the ‘problem’. ² Given the potentially corrosive effects of labelling (McAra and McVie, 2012; Ralphs et al., 2009), there is a need for critical scrutiny of the processes through which individuals become labelled as gang members, and the consequences of such labelling.

Based on original research undertaken in Glasgow, Scotland, this article aims to explore the complex chain of interactions through which individuals become labelled as gang members, and the consequences of these often uncertain and unpredictable processes. Specifically, the article illuminates the increasingly active role of civilian intelligence workers – who are employed in the police service but are not sworn police officers – in the new politics of gang policing. Civilian intelligence workers play a pivotal role in the identification of gang members and the construction of gangs ‘in the system’, exercising a level of power and discretion previously only attributed to police officers. The role of civilian policing staff, however, remains relatively unexplored in the academic literature, and little is known of their subcultural role within the broader field of policing, which is still dominated by a persistent and hegemonic ‘cop culture’. Drawing on first-hand accounts of police actors ³ – both civilian intelligence workers and police officers in a range of roles – and young people themselves, we analyse the contingent meanings of gangs in the varying contexts of ‘policing’ and ‘street’. In both fields, there is a struggle for recognition, status and distinction – and for young people, a great deal of posturing, experimentation and fluidity – making the attribution of gang membership a highly fraught and contingent process, with clear potential for error and ‘misrecognition’.

The article is divided into three parts. In the first, we give an overview of the rapid expansion of the policing of gangs in the UK, highlighting the increasingly critical role of civilian intelligence workers in these processes. Drawing on the vocabularies of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we argue for the need to appreciate the divergent understandings of gangs between the fields of policing and the street, as well as the potential pitfalls involved in ‘making up people’ (Hacking, 2004) – particularly when carried out by police actors obscured from public debate and academic scrutiny. In the second, we introduce the field site and methods of the research, framing the argument as a dialogue between researchers embedded in distinct but related fields. In the third, we explore the separate but overlapping nature of gang meanings and definitions between these fields, demonstrating the role of subjectivity and contingency in labelling processes, and the impact of these at-times arbitrary processes on the lives of children and young people.

Policing Gangs in the UK: Power, Politics and Policy Transfer

Prime Minister Cameron’s declaration of a ‘concerted, all-out war on gangs and gang culture’ (HM Government, 2011a) marked a significant amplification of government rhetoric toward gangs in the UK, and was followed by a corresponding acceleration of gang-specific policy responses (HM Government, 2011b); many of which have a distinctly American flavour. ⁴ Summarizing the impact of such developments in England, Smithson et al. (2013: 114) recognize the importance of policy transfer from the United States (US), noting that many English cities have developed dedicated police gang/firearm units, such as Trident in London, Matrix in Liverpool, Xcalibre in Manchester and Stealth in Nottingham. ⁵ These developments signal a clear shift towards US-style understanding of gangs and the methods by which they should be policed. While there is a growing critical mass of knowledge on the landscape of gang meanings and motivations in the UK (Densley, 2013; Goldson, 2011; Hallsworth, 2013; Pitts, 2008), this has not as yet been matched by critical discourse on emergent criminal justice interventions.

As the confusion relating to the nature and extent of gang involvement in the riots makes clear, the definition of gangs and attribution of gang membership is far from clear-cut. Indeed, the history of academic gang research is beset with debate as to the correct classification and definition of the term ‘gang’. The most comprehensive effort at classification (Miller, 1975) – involving a wide range of youth workers, criminal justice agents and self-identifying gang members – had some 1400 features suggested (Ball and Curry, 1995: 228). ⁶ As a result, Katz and Jackson-Jacobs have described academic debate over gang definitions as ‘essentially an argument over the correct description of a ghost’ (Katz and Jackson-Jacobs, 2004: 106) – an argument over an invisible symbol, on to which our worst fears and prejudices are projected. As Hobbs notes, moreover, these definitional debates are often overlaid with political considerations and the need to attract funding in difficult financial times: ‘the harder researchers look, the bigger the gang problem becomes’ (Hobbs, 1997; see also Hagedorn, 2008). Crucially, therefore, the logic of gang definition may vary widely between street-based understandings, definitions used in policing contexts, and those developed within academic discourse. ⁷

In this landscape of power, language, and contested meaning, the conceptual vocabulary of Pierre Bourdieu offers a helpful point of entry, in particular through the concept of field, which forms part of Bourdieu’s celebrated triumvirate of habitus, field and capital. For Bourdieu, the social world is composed of several overlapping fields of play, which can be understood, in simple terms, as the spheres of activity that we enter into in our daily life. Examples from Bourdieu’s writing include the academic, scientific, economic, and educational fields, as well as the field of cultural production (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Each sphere of activity is composed of its own independent logic, rules, linguistic practices, hierarchy and system of social relations that structure the experience of actors within it (Jenkins, 2002: 85). In this sense, field also functions as a metaphor for the force of these relations of power; a gravitational ‘field’ similar to that exerted by planets. Crucially, too, each field may have further ‘sub-fields’ nested within, like Russian dolls. These sub-fields may remain umbilically linked to – and maintain some characteristics of – the broader field, whilst retaining elements of distinctiveness. Both the field of ‘policing’ and the ‘street’ can be usefully understood through Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus.

Individuals are socialized into the rules, logics, and hierarchies of these separate but overlapping fields in a process of habituation, whereby codes and rules are deeply internalized and normalized; becoming experienced as a ‘second skin’ of recognition and feel. This preconscious embodiment of field logic is what Bourdieu refers to as habitus – the hinterland of history, biography and culture imprinted on the body through processes of socialization. Individuals with common field positions and experiences will also, therefore, share key traits, values and cultural dispositions, as well as a common language. If ‘policing’ and ‘street’ can be conceptualized as overlapping but largely independent fields of play – each operating with their separate logics, rules, patterns and discourses – then the actors within these worlds can be envisaged as socialized into different dispositions, characteristics and shared understandings. In these divergent contexts, the term ‘gang’ brings with it a set of cultural meanings that are also separate but overlapping. As White (2008) argues:

A major reason why ‘gangs’ as such cannot be easily profiled is because of the complexities of social belonging and social identity pertaining to how young people live their lives […] young people have multiple identifications, and can be simultaneously gang members and non-gang members […] It is the multilayered nature and dynamics of youth associations and affiliations that make a gang-targeting exercise difficult and problematic. (White 2008: 149)

For young people on the street, the ‘gang’ might represent the territorial belonging, community and identity of a group of friends. For police officers the ‘gang’ may represent the risk, harm and violence of criminals. For civilian intelligence analysts, embedded in the sub-field of police intelligence work, the ‘gang’ may represent an abstract entity, comprised of records from a database understood through the lens of a given definition. The points of connection between these divergent understandings are indicative of the fragile and tensile interactions that compose contemporary gang labelling practices, yet one that can have real and lasting consequences for young people. As Jacobs notes:

Recording gang affiliation in an intelligence database is controversial because intelligence databases are constructed by police agencies on the basis of what might be limited, ambiguous, or even mistaken information. But even gang databases created by prosecutors and by jail and prisons officials are vulnerable to error, because a decision about whether a particular individual is a gang member (and whether a particular group of individuals constitutes a gang) often requires discretionary judgment. Moreover, even if a person is accurately identified as a ‘gang member’, the meaning and significance of such membership varies greatly from individual to individual. (Jacobs 2009: 706). ⁸

In the US, one of the architects of the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence lists the potential consequences of labelling young people as gang members: ‘undeserved law-enforcement attention … statutory sentencing enhancements … segregation in jail and prison, as well as causing a host of other consequences’ (Kennedy, 2009: 711). In the UK, Ralphs et al. have argued that similar systems have ‘slipped unquestioned into mainstream policy and practice’, with important consequences for gang labelling processes (Ralphs et al., 2009: 485). They continue:

Being labelled as a gang member or associate created a greater vulnerability to police attention and surveillance. Armed police raids on family homes in search for firearms were common and brought stigma, stress and feelings of violation to the families involved. Young people living in these areas and labelled as ‘gang associates’ were often subjected to police checks and exclusion from community events including carnivals and family fun days. (Ralphs et al., 2009: 491)

In this climate, the attribution of gang membership is fraught with complexity and holds the potential for corrosive consequences to the life chances of young people. Such efforts are, moreover, indicative of the pivotal role of civilian intelligence analysts – hitherto a largely unexplored subculture of contemporary policing (Cope, 2004) – in processes of identifying gangs and gang members. The research that informs this article seeks to uncover both the complex processes of attribution of gang membership in policing – the official construction of gangs – and how these labels are actively interpreted and contested by young people. This was achieved by developing an innovative research methodology that brought together two researchers and field sites – between policing and the street – to provide an understanding of people and ‘gangs’ in Glasgow, Scotland.

Methodology: Between Policing and the Street

The city of Glasgow has a long-standing reputation for violence, youth disorder, and gang behaviour. Territorial groups of violent young people – referred to as gangs – have been reported in Glasgow since the 1880s (Patrick, 1973: 123), and have been a recurring feature of media reportage, popular fiction, television documentaries, and film-making in and on the city since this time. ⁹ At varying points in this history, these groups have become the targeted focus of law-enforcement. Most famous in this context, perhaps, is the inter-war period when the Chief Constable of the City of Glasgow Police, Percy Sillitoe, developed his reputation as the ‘hammer of the gangs’ following his crackdown on street gangs (see Davies, 2013; Sillitoe, 1956: 139−152;). However, the late 1960s also saw a formidable policing response to gangs in the peripheral housing estate of Easterhouse (Bartie, 2010), leading to a well-publicized visit to the area by the then-popular entertainer Frankie Vaughan. More recently, the gang initiative piloted in Glasgow by Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit has achieved international recognition, and has formed a key strut in UK Government policy responses.

This article draws on two separate but overlapping ethnographic studies conducted over a similar time frame in an urban community in Glasgow, called Langview (a pseudonym); a deindustrialized working-class community in the inner-city of Glasgow. As Glasgow’s economy has reconfigured around the service sector, so the former manufacturing bases in Langview have been reconstituted. The factories have been converted into chic artists’ spaces or outsourced call-centres, or flattened to make way for gentrified flat developments. Nonetheless, the area remains defined by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation as being within the 5 per cent ‘most deprived’ areas in Scotland, having rates of unemployment and benefit claimants well above the national average. Langview also has an established reputation, in the city, its media and its police service, as being an area with a ‘gang problem’. The first study (2006−2009) explored the understandings, experiences, and meanings of ‘gang’ behaviour for children and young people in Langview (Fraser, 2010a). The data in this article is drawn principally from a series of discussion groups with different groups of young people in the area, and field notes from periods of participant-observation.

The second of these studies (2008−2013) explored cultural reproduction, persistence and change in Scottish policing, with a specific focus on the practices of intelligence-led policing (Atkinson, 2013). During the early stages of this research (in 2009, concurrent with the first study), a period of qualitative research was undertaken on the intelligence-led policing of young people and gangs in Langview. The study consisted of a six-week period of participant observation with a range of police personnel responsible for tackling gang violence in the police division incorporating Langview, and deepened through the undertaking of 16 semi-structured interviews with both police officers and civilian police staff engaged in the policing of young people in the area. One interviewee in this police study identified Langview as an area with levels of deprivation, alcohol abuse, and violent crime involving youth that were greater than those recorded in other neighbourhoods in Glasgow. Another interviewee recalled that whilst Langview had ‘good people’ it was also ‘rough as fuck’, where ‘junkies would shout at you’ and ‘you wouldn’y feel safe’. Uniquely, this study uncovered how civilian intelligence analysts – as office-based, young, predominantly female and embodying a new ‘academic’ knowledge that is divorced from experience – have become increasingly essential to the effective functioning of intelligence-led policing of young people and ‘gangs’. ¹⁰

Gangs on the Street, Gangs in the System

During the period of fieldwork, Strathclyde Police was piloting the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), ¹¹ in which gang members – as identified through police intelligence – were invited to participate in a series of ‘call-ins’ at the High Court in Glasgow. ¹² These sessions consist of a programme of motivational talks and emotional entreaties from ex-gang members, facial trauma surgeons, family members of victims, and police representatives. At these sessions individuals are offered a ‘no-violence’ contract in return for access to the CIRV team – composed of a range of police, health, social work, and education workers offering professional advice and support. ¹³ The criterion for access to this range of services was, during this pilot period, that the individual has an intelligence marker in the police database for gang membership. If an individual wished access to these services and did not have this marker, they had to make a declaration to a police officer that they were a member of a gang. ¹⁴ In these early stages, therefore, the project was almost entirely reliant on the accuracy, rigour and consistency of police intelligence markers for gang membership. Street-based fieldwork disclosed, however, that the ‘gang lists’ composed by the police were often inaccurate, inconsistent and out-of-date. One community worker, who had been privy to the ‘gang lists’ for their area, noted that the list included a range of individuals who had never been involved in any form of territorial violence, while missing many more who had.

This disjuncture between community-based and policing-oriented definitions of gang membership casts a spotlight on the hitherto ‘hidden’ role of civilian intelligence analysts in the new politics of gang policing. In the following section, we analyse the complex and contingent processes through which attribution of gang membership is achieved, looking particularly at the subcultural dynamics involved in the construction of gangs ‘in the system’.

Conclusion

It is clear that the traditional understanding of conflict between the police and young people, at the micro-level, over-emphasizes the discretion – and power – of the individual police officer. Additionally, at the macro-level, existing accounts fail to both uncover and disaggregate the complex chain of interactions in the field of policing, and the diverse range of actors involved. Whilst some police officers will invariably engage young people on the street, in many ways their decision to engage was already predetermined in other fields; through an intelligence system that categorizes, groups, and targets – and consequently labels – young people based on a range of information flows that fail to capture the fluidity of young people’s own identities. Policing youth in Glasgow relies upon bridging the gap between two fields – system and street – that operate with unique logics and divergent speeds, and are comprised by different actors with exclusive habitus – or world views – that can limit the extent of mutual understanding. Our analysis has demonstrated the need for new vocabularies and conceptual lenses with which to articulate these contemporary processes – to reconfigure traditional conceptualisations of ‘labelling’ in an increasingly data-driven social world, in which individuals are abstracted, virtualized, looped and ‘reassembled’ as ‘data-doubles’ (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). It has also demonstrated the need to refresh our methodological lenses, emphasizing the need to understand the connections between apparently separate – but in reality closely inter-related – fields of knowledge and understanding.

As we have argued in this article, there is a pressing need to open up these technicist and bureaucratic processes to critical and empirical scrutiny: on a practical level, to prevent the mislabelling and ‘misrecognition’ of youth with a pejorative term with unforeseeable consequences; on a political level, to demonstrate the deleterious future consequences of ‘governing through gangs’, when the meaning of the term is so fluid, context-specific and laden with potentially corrosive labelling effects; and on a conceptual level, to demonstrate the impact of both the technology and discourse of ‘intelligence-led’ policing on the dispositions of police actors, and the need to hone new theoretical lenses to comprehend these new co-dependency of agency, networks and systemic knowledge (Latour, 2005). As Ferrell et al. note:

… the everyday actions of criminals, police officers, and judges offer not just insights into criminal justice, but important glimpses into the very process by which social life is constructed and reconstructed… this subject matter in turn reveals the complex, contested dynamic between cultures of control (control agencies’ downwards symbolic constructions) and cultures of deviance (rule breakers’ upwards counter-constructions). (Ferrell et al., 2008: 5)

In a post-Snowden era characterized by a critical backlash toward surveillance practices and technologies – and the serious implications for personal data and the consequences for those surveilled – this form of cultural knowledge and critique is evermore necessary.