From ‘filth’ and ‘insanity’ to ‘peaceful moral watchdogs’: Police,news media,and the gang label

Straight edge crews, subculture, and style

Growing out of the 1980s hardcore punk rock scene, straight edge is characterized by a militant politics that champions a ‘clean’ lifestyle, rejecting drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and extra-marital sex. ² Most point to the early Washington DC hardcore band Minor Threat, its singer Ian MacKaye, and the group’s 1981 song ‘Straight Edge’ as sparking the movement (Bartlett, 2006). As MacKaye explains, straight edge politics grew from a rejection of the excesses of punk rock and American culture more generally:

When all my friends got into drugs, I was not into it and I just got lots of shit for it … It’s not like some brand new philosophy. All I do is put it into words. The straight edge is obvious … Straight edge is just basically an anti-obsession, pro-positive-thinking idea. That’s all it is. Nothing more [sic]. (Washington Post, 1983)

At a glance, a youth subculture organized around ‘clean living’ may seem quite positive, especially when compared to other youth subcultures (e.g. early rock and roll, the ‘hippie’ and ‘yippie’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and early English and American punk) said to embrace and celebrate drug and alcohol use. Yet straight edge groups such as FSU, which are known to enforce conformity with their politics and lifestyle with intimidation, quickly earned the movement a reputation for violence and revealed a fundamental contradiction. As Ross Haenfler, one of the most active writers on straight edge, put it: ‘Is sXe [straight edge] a cool, hip version of the DARE program, or is it a middle class street gang that preys upon fraternity brothers, as some law enforcement officials suggest?’ (Haenfler, 2006: 6).

In the intervening decades since MacKaye’s initial expression of straight edge, the movement has grown, waned, grown again, and shifted, always existing primarily within the broader social context of American and American-influenced punk and hardcore music scenes. While the central themes and logics of straight edge—‘clean living’ (Steinhauer, 1995), taken to mean abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco—are defining characteristics present in all straight edge communities, some straight edge groups and communities have extended or contracted the various mandates of the movement. Extensions of the ethos may include a commitment to vegetarianism/veganism, animal rights, anti-racist or anti-fascist politics, nonparticipation in capitalist consumerism, and a rejection of other staples of youth culture such as swearing, while contractions of the straight edge ethos may sometimes include an abandonment of MacKaye’s initial rejection of sex or other modifications. Straight edge, then, is most usefully understood not as a movement defined by a monolithic set of beliefs and signifiers running consistently across social and geographic boundaries, but rather as a loose set of beliefs informing countless groups of youth and young adult cultural movements, who in turn express and communicate those beliefs in countless ways. The many ways straight edge has been expressed—and the many ways it has been conversely linked to both negative and positive elements of the landscape of youth culture—is made evident by Thomas Bartlett:

Over the years, Straight Edge has been embraced, co-opted, and occasionally perverted by evangelical Christians, Mormons, Satanists, skinheads, followers of Hare Krishna, militant vegans, and more. It has been lauded for keeping teenagers clean and sober, blamed for fight and murders (even though its philosophy opposes violence), discussed and dissected, endlessly redefined, and generally misunderstood. (Bartlett, 2006) ³

Straight edge’s most recognizable signifier, a black X drawn in marker on tops of hands is derived from the Xs used to mark underage concert goers at all-ages punk shows. Proudly displayed on hands, tattoos, and clothing, X and XXX quickly became the marker of ‘drug free’ youth within punk and hardcore music scenes. Like its progenitors punk rock and hardcore, straight edge is generally comprised of middle class white American men and women (Atkinson, 2003), ranging in age from mid-teens to late-20s, though it is not altogether uncommon in the contemporary landscape of independent rock, punk, and hardcore for the iconic Xs to mark the hands of concert goers in their late 30s and 40s (Haenfler, 2006). Other signifiers of adherence to straight edge include a preference for the fast and aggressive sound of American hardcore music, which emerged in the 1980s with bands like California’s Black Flag and Washington, DC’s Bad Brains, who rejected the relative melodicism of earlier punk in favor of a more direct and combative sound. Straight edge adherents also frequently reject both the unkempt and confrontational fashion and aesthetics of punk and the traditional and working class-influenced aesthetics favored by the skinhead subculture, opting instead to adopt a style that borrows equally from athletics, military dress, hip hop, and American ‘prep’ culture. Still going strong, today straight edge is a global phenomenon (Kuhn, 2010: 132) some 34 years after MacKaye and Minor Threat gave a name to their lifestyle politics.

Not unlike ‘soccer hooligans’ said to organize into firms along regional or team lines, hardcore and straight edge collectives often describe themselves as ‘crews’ (Redhead, 1991). Following ethnographer Jeff Purchla (2011), we use the term crews, as do straight edge and hardcore participants themselves. For Purchla, hardcore crews are an enclave group organized around a particular neighborhood, city, band, and/or the hardcore scene in general. Here, crews are comprised mostly of young men, are organized and produced through enforcement of hyper-masculine norms, and ultimately ‘share properties similar to those of gangs’ (Purchla, 2011: 198, emphasis added). Crews have unique names and identifying tattoos and symbols worn on clothing, often support a particular affiliated band or bands, may have a hierarchal organizational structure, and claim neighborhoods and venues as ‘territory’ (Purchla, 2011: 202–203). Some crews have codes of conduct that are strictly enforced. For instance, the aforementioned FSU and Ohio’s Courage Crew each require that recruits serve a probationary term before full membership. Similar to that of ‘outlaw motorcycle gangs,’ ⁴ the probationary period serves as a hazing ritual and allows crews to vet probates before including them in the group’s interworkings. Some hardcore crews are not straight edge to the member, but may count straight edgers among their ranks. For instance, the long-standing New York City crew, DMS (Doc Marten Skins/Demonstrate My Style/Droppin’ Many Suckas), formed around foundational hardcore bands Agnostic Front and Madball and the underground hip-hop and graffiti scenes and counts many straight edge adherents among its members. Courage Crew, Friends Stand United, and other crews such as North Carolina’s Southern Empire, Virginia’s Guerilla Crew, and Ohio’s Swing on Sight Family foreground straight edge as the raison d’etre. While we are unaware of a particular accounting of the number of crews and members nationally and would be skeptical if presented with such, the absence of an accounting is a telling and important point to which we will return later.

In some cities, crews are mythologized to the point where they become a central governing figure and often what the local hardcore scene is known for first (Haenfler, 2006). In this way, it is perhaps easy to understand how collective behavior and the term ‘crew’ could lead groups like DMS—rising from New York’s Lower East Side and many of its working class neighborhoods— to be hastily, and perhaps inappropriately, labeled a ‘gang’ by the popular media and even equated with organized crime groups which also use the term crew. ⁵ Popular culture representations such as The History Channel program Gangland elaborate the gang label, but as two self-identified members of FSU argue, the issue is more complicated than the media would have it. From Gangland:

As ‘Lolo’ and ‘Joe Hardcore’ warn, we should be skeptical of labels, particularly those with the power to criminalize and imprison. Yet the ongoing interest of police and academic criminologists in gangs ensures the continued power of the label. From its earliest days, American criminology has been concerned with the delinquency of inner city youth and the criminogenics of slums and ghettos. As such, criminology’s delinquency fetish is no doubt largely responsible for the contemporary social reality of ‘gangs’ both in terms of official state definitions and the broader social and political imaginary as well. As Jack Katz and Curtis Jackson-Jacobs (2004) suggest, academics and state agents are entwined in a relationship that, while problematic and dysfunctional, nevertheless shapes the ontology of ‘the criminologist’s gang.’ In the following section, we explore the gang label; how it is constructed, applied, and—perhaps most importantly—communicated by media, cultural observers, academic criminology, and powerful police actors and agencies.

Gang talk, gang talkers, and the power to police

In their survey of the state of gang research, Scott Decker and his colleagues note that from the early Chicago school ethnographies, later neighborhood studies, to strain, ‘risk’, life-course theories, and much in between, the major methods of study in criminology have been innovated and refined in the study of gangs. While admitting that it has ‘some catching up to do in the areas of group processes and macro-level comparisons,’ gang research, and hence the gang, lies at the heart of contemporary criminology (Decker et al., 2013: 394). Despite its centrality to criminology, as Dwight Conquergood warned, ‘the gang’ is perhaps best read as a symptom of more timeless concerns.

The term gang powerfully cathects and conjures middle class fears and anxieties about social disorder, disintegration and chaos, that are made palpable in these demonized figures of inscrutable, unproductive, predatory, pathological alien Others lurking in urban shadows and margins, outside the community of decent people. (Conquergood, 1991: 4)

Following Slavoj Žižek (2009), we might also say that for both criminology and the broader social order, ‘the gang’ is a fetish that prevents an encounter with the real. For the social, the gang reflects the intractable inequalities of late-capitalism, while criminology’s focus upon the pathologies of the individual and disavowal of the group and ‘macro-level’ betrays recognition of its inability to intervene in the problems of crime and disorder in a lasting and meaningful fashion. Nevertheless, despite its fetishization, as an object of criminological inquiry, ‘gang’ remains as fleeting and illusory as the ‘broad twilight zone’ that Frederic Thrasher’s ‘gang boys’ haunted nearly a century ago (Thrasher and Short, 1963: 3). Criminologists contribute to and reify the ontology of the gang, conjuring it from standard police reports and documents borne of policing’s everyday activities, not necessarily intended for such (Sullivan, 2005). Jonathan Ilan (2015: 76–81) interrogates the complicity of criminology in the construction and reification of the powerful ‘gang’ discourse, concluding that the haphazard application of the gang label by criminologists—and, we would add, police agencies and news media discourse—reveals it to be a discursive device that ‘arguably no longer retains sufficient academic utility’ (Ilan, 2015: 77). Even in those explicit efforts to measure the gang and its attendant transgressions, researchers, often working in conjunction with police, apply categories and criteria of definition haphazardly and mistake local cultural meaning and ethnoracial diversity for homogeneous criminality. And though the US Federal code ⁶ defines ‘criminal street gangs’ rather plainly as any ‘ongoing groups, clubs, organizations, or associations of five or more individuals that have as one of their primary purposes the commission of one or more criminal offenses,’ reporting on or even locating gang activity remains a problematic endeavor. For instance, the primary official sources of information about gangs in the United States, the National Gang Center (NGC), the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), and the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC), have yet to settle on the nature or extent of the gang problem. Whereas the NGC’s estimates have approached, but not exceeded, 800,000, the NGIC currently estimates ‘approximately 1.4 million active street, prison, and OMG gang members’ (NGIC, 2011a). As Jeff Ferrell puts it,

In this way, the OJJDP’s methodology generates official criminological knowledge of a critical crime issue—gangs, gang members, and gang activities—that can perhaps best be summarized as follows: ‘That which is not to be studied directly can nonetheless be surveyed definitively, based on the records, or perhaps the personal perceptions, of those whose job it is to eradicate that which they cannot define accurately’. (Ferrell, 2009: 9)

From the view of the state and its police, gangs exist, as Jack Katz and Curtis Jackson-Jacobs put it, ‘only to the extent their existence is problematic’ (Katz and Jackson-Jacobs, 2004: 93). This problematizing discourse, the language and grammar that state agents and academic criminologists use to talk about ‘street collectives’ with the aim of controlling them, is what Simon Hallsworth calls gang talk (Hallsworth, 2013; Hallsworth and Young, 2008). As Hallsworth (2013) argues, gang talkers in the mass media no doubt help to keep ‘the gang’ on police and public registers. Here, the words ‘urban,’ ‘violence,’ and ‘youth’ are almost always uttered in the same breath as ‘gang.’ This habitual practice helps reify the faulty assumption that gangs cause violence, animating youth groups and youth culture as a wellspring of violence in the social imaginary. Just as gang talk—and its attendant power to generate labels, others, and crime—is not limited to those talkers with intimate knowledge of their subjects, it is also not limited to those with social and political power. Here, it is useful to elaborate upon and expand the types of gang talk and gang talkers set out by Hallsworth (2013). In the context of the perpetual 24-hour news cycle, the most pervasive and visible form of gang talk seems to emanate from the news media. The media’s gang talkers include a variety of on-screen personalities who engage in long-form ‘investigative’ reporting on gangs, as well as the relatively unamplified anchors of local news programs. Similarly, immensely popular and long running cable television expose programs such Gangland (History Channel), Lockup (MSNBC), and Lockdown (National Geographic Channel) are another source of mediated gang talk.

Of course, the most potent gang talkers are often police themselves. While they do not often have the visibility of regular news broadcasts, police gang talk is more materially powerful, owing to the wide range of police powers to classify, identify, hunt and kill, or incarcerate (Chamayou, 2012; Neocleous, 2014a). The third readily identifiable form and site of gang talk is found in the academic realm, with the aforementioned ‘criminologist’s gang’ (Katz and Jackson-Jacobs, 2004). This form of gang talk is problematic and insidious in unique ways, in that it adds a veneer of scientific legitimacy, implied empiricism, and learned authority to gang talk, and that authority is then coopted by gang talkers in media and law enforcement (Young, 2011).

While academics, police agencies, and reporters certainly engage in their share of gang talk and while their brand of talk and the venues that broadcast their voices are constitutive of a measure of power and social authority, the rise of the internet as a relatively accessible tool of discursive dissemination means that significant work in the construction of the ‘gang’ and its attendant terror and violence is performed by frequently anonymous gang talkers, speaking from either the centers or sidelines of observation. Internet forums, the de-facto public media of late-modern Western subcultures, are awash with mentions of various straight edge crews and arguments over violence, the ‘gang’ label, and the meaning and meaningfulness of contemporary straight edge. Simple internet searches for relevant terms reveal that straight edge crews and affiliated groups are often discussed in the language of gangs in these forums, as the following quotations illustrate:

Sosf [Swing on Sight Family, an Ohio Straight Edge crew] does a years fest called ‘summer of hate’. This year it is at the Grog Shop. I wonder if the owner is prepared to deal with gang warfare? (Healey, 2014)

This sounds like you’re describing gangs. Are crews really like this?

Yes.

Fucking gangs. For people who circle jerk about being so strong-minded they probably wouldn’t be shit if they didn’t have a fucking mob mentality backing them up. I like getting ignorant at shows but full on gang brawls are just fucking stupid. (Anonymous, 2014, emphasis added)

It’s basically just a gang of violent sxes [Straight Edge adherents] who beat the shit out of people during shows if they drink, smoke, etc. or if they just insult somebody in cxc [Courage Crew]. I have no idea how to get in it, though. Probly [sic] a tat and initiation? (Anonymous, 2007, emphasis added)

The problem I have and have always had with crews is that they’re always about violence, act like a gang and then get pissed when you call them a gang. (Anonymous, 2007, emphasis added)

[It’s] a gang mentality. It’s creating a syndicate. (Anonymous, 2007, emphasis added)

In this brief heuristic, we find that the power of gang talk is not limited to gang talkers that hold some semblance or form of authority. Instead, the power to discursively construct the ‘gang’ flows from talker to listener, with the listener then becoming the repeater, parroting the initial gang talk to the next listener and so on. Here again, we find that gang talkers without the force of law, visibility of the news media, or the authority of scientific positivism have substantial power to construct the gang as a category and then apply the label to groups through the discursive power of mythologizing speech; if anonymous voices have the ability to construct narratives of gang crime, surely the authoritative speech of criminology and criminologists has the same power. And, following that, the assumed knowledge and authority of law enforcement agencies have not only the power to discursively establish the gang classification, but to extend that power by deploying the entire continuum of police power. The power of the gang talker, then—a power that establishes, reifies, and nurtures the fundamental power of police—is in its ability to craft a digestible and repeatable classification, and then communicate that classification socially until it is finally made real by the police power, in the moments of confrontation, hunt, capture, or death (Chamayou, 2012; Neocleous, 2014a). Through this lens, the continuum of police power starts with classification—while the craftwork of gang talk, for example, begins the process of classification by constructing a category—making classification the initial and therefore an essential police power.

While it is clear that straight edge crews and street collectives share properties similar to those that the media and police typically associate with street gangs, to date straight edge crews have escaped this official definition and hence the scrutiny of law enforcement and gang criminologists. Viewing the popular news media and federal law enforcement as the two highest profile and perhaps most important gang talkers, moving forward we explore how the question ‘to gang or not to gang’ is answered.

Gang intelligence, threat assessments, Juggalos, and the FBI

Since its inception in 2005, the NGIC has published its National Gang Threat Assessment (NGTA) three times, most recently in 2011. The ‘threat assessment’ purports ‘to examine emerging gang trends and threats posed by criminal gangs to communities throughout the United States’ (NGIC, 2011a: 5). In short, this document is a summary of the ‘gang threats’ prioritized by police and the US government. The 2011 assessment report estimates 1.4 million active gang members comprising more than 33,000 gangs stretching across all 50 US states and a ‘40 percent increase from just two years prior’ (NGIC, 2011a: 11). Like Ferrell’s (2009) concerns regarding the methodology of the National Youth Gang Survey, the threat assessment arrives at its numerous conclusions about gang life and its myriad crime control recommendations by consulting only police agents. Here, the ‘threat’ is derived solely from local law enforcement and data collected by the National Drug Threat Survey, Bureau of Prisons, and State Correctional Facilities.

The first thing that becomes obvious to critical readers of the NGTA is the numerous ways the FBI defines gangs. Of five basic definitions, a few are rather obvious. For instance, street gangs are ‘criminal organizations formed on the street’ while prison gangs those that ‘originated within the penal system.’ Differences between other types of gangs are more difficult to apprehend. For instance, the FBI recognizes Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMGs) as those ‘whose members use their motorcycle clubs as conduits for criminal enterprises.’ Yet OMGs are not be confused with One Percenter OMGs, which includes:

any group of motorcyclists who have voluntarily made a commitment to band together to abide by their organization’s rules enforced by violence and who engage in activities that bring them and their club into repeated and serious conflict with society and the law. (NGIC, 2011a: 7)

Following this byzantine logic, if your ‘gang activity’ does not take place on ‘the street’ or in ‘prison’ and you are not a motorcycle rider who commits crimes, or a motorcyclist who joined a motorcycle club in order to commit crimes more actively, but you are still involved in gang activity, you presumably fall into a final category, Neighborhood/Local Gangs. Unsurprisingly, these are gangs confined to ‘specific neighborhoods’ and are primarily concerned with ‘drug distribution and sales’ (NGIC, 2011a: 7). The report also describes the emergence of several ‘ethnic-based’ and ‘non-traditional hybrid gangs.’ According to the intelligence center, police across the United States have witnessed the proliferation of Asian, East African, and Caribbean gangs, which because of their ‘multiple affiliations, ethnicities, migratory nature, and nebulous structure … are difficult to track, identify, and target as they are transient and continuously evolving’ (NGIC, 2011a: 22). Given the dubious methods historically used by state and academic gang talkers to measure ‘nebulous’ gang structures, it is unclear precisely what constitutes ‘non-traditional hybrids’— a difficulty which, for that matter, reemerges when attempting to define and understand comparatively ‘traditional’ gang formations.

Despite media reports that have consistently described straight edge as a gang and the more recent scrutiny of FSU and other straight edge crews, the subculture is conspicuously absent from the National Gang Threat Assessment. Even though its working definitions fashion a category that ensnares some 33,000 gangs and 1.4 million members across all 50 US states, the NGTA does not count straight edge crews and street collectives among its gangs. In fact, of the 100 pages making up the 2011 NGTA, the words ‘straight edge’ appear only one time, generically listed in an appendix of 66 other gangs said to operate within the state of Indiana. Importantly, this is not FSU, DMS, or Courage Crew, but simply a gang named ‘Straight Edge’ likely offered up in a survey by a misinformed police agent.

In its narrative descriptions, the NGTA discusses at least two groups that appear to have much in common with straight edge. The report names the Detroit, Michigan hybrid gang ‘New World Order’, allegedly an affiliate of the [traditional] Almighty Latin King Nation. As evidence of the New World Order’s gang activities, the NGTA cites the following local news report:

[Reporter]:

A pair of sneakers hangs on a power line on Baldwin where this nearby wall is filled with gang-related graffiti including the words crack and the letters NWO, which stands for New World Order. Outside the federal courthouse a member of that group told Fox 2 he is not part of the gang.

[Reporter]:

The Government says that you’re the leader of the New World Order. What’s going on here?

Santos Del Valle [alleged gang member]: No I’m not. They just misunderstand that it’s just a rap label group.

[Reporter]:

So you guys are not involved in drugs at all?

Santos Del Valle: Hmm yeah, sometimes we is, but it’s not like what they think we is its just a little bit, ya know? It’s just how Pontiac is. They just involved with somebody but it’s not true how they think they is. (Oosting, 2010)

While the supposed ringleader of New World Order insists his ‘gang’ is simply a record label, it does not dissuade police and news media from applying the gang label. As Figure 1 illustrates, this case also details the reciprocal relationship between police and news media, as the FBI’s primary source seems to be a video and article published online by MyFoxdetroit.com. Important here is the contradiction that while police and members of the news media appear to be in concert with labeling this particular group a gang, despite volumes of similar reports describing straight edge crews as gangs, the FBI apparently declines to include the collectives in its assessment. This reluctance becomes even more curious if we consider how straight edge crews, New World Order, and another group included in the threat assessment are organized around music subcultures.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Description of hybrid gang New World Order provided by the NGTA.

Like Detroit’s New World Order, fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse, known as ‘Juggalos’ have also been deemed a ‘criminal non-traditional or hybrid gang’ by the National Gang Threat Assessment (Fudge, 2013). According to the FBI, Juggalos ‘pose a threat to communities due to the potential for violence, drug use/sales, and their general destructive and violent nature’ and are recognized as a gang by police in Arizona, California, Pennsylvania, and Utah (NGIC, 2011a: 23). Like other ‘hybrids’, Juggalos’ ‘disorganization and lack of structure within their groups, coupled with their transient nature, makes it difficult to classify them and identify their members and migration patterns’ (National Alliance of Gang Investigators Association, 2011):

Most crimes committed by Juggalos are sporadic, disorganized, individualistic, and often involve simple assault, personal drug use and possession, petty theft, and vandalism. However, open source reporting suggests that a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity, such as felony assaults, thefts, robberies, and drug sales. (NGIC, 2011a: 23)

That Juggalos apparently fail to meet commonsense gang criteria—as they are generally ‘disorganized,’ ‘sporadic,’ and ‘individualistic’— does not preclude the FBI from labeling the group a gang, making 31 discrete mentions and devoting an entire section of the 2011 threat assessment to the ‘group.’ Apparently so concerned is the FBI with the threat of Juggalos that it later published a 10-page supplemental document for local police agencies (NGIC, 2011b). And as with New World Order, it seems that media reports were central to the FBI’s designation. Farris Haddad, one of the attorneys representing Insane Clown Posse in their suit challenging the FBI’s classification, learned through Freedom of Information Act requests that the evidence of Juggalo gang activity originated, at least initially, with local news media reports. Haddad explains:

The first thing we received [from the FBI] which was the main thing that they gave us, was about 20 to 30 internet articles, it was almost as if you gave the assignment to like a high school student, and they just went online and googled and printed out a few articles as evidence. (Life of the Law, 2016)

It is rather troubling that the FBI, an organization with seemingly unlimited resources, would hang such a powerful designation on such flimsy evidence. This is perhaps even more so when considering the power of the label. As one of the two original ICP members, Joseph Bruce, explains:

The FBI’s gang designation has caused real lasting harm to the lives of the Juggalos, parents have lost custody of their kids, they’ve been fired from jobs, been denied housing, they’ve been subjected to illegal searches and sometimes added to a gang database simply for walking down the street in an ICP t-shirt. (Life of the Law, 2016)

Of course, it is not our wish that straight edge crews receive the same measure of punitive surveillance as the Juggalos. Rather, we aim to confront the troubling inconsistency of the gang label and thereby reveal the incoherence of the police power. Even the most superficial comparison of the Insane Clown Posse/Juggalo and straight edge subcultures will immediately reveal striking similarities. Each group came into being after participants and followers of a distinctly underground youth-led music scene came together under an umbrella of fandom. Both movements take an immediately oppositional stance to dominant groups, artists, and ideologies underpinning the original subculture from which the group emerged as ‘different.’ So for instance, while straight edge counters the often nihilistic and drug-taking popular image of the punk, Juggalo creators ICP sought to recast the narratives of black urban poverty established by rap with the faces of impoverished white youth. Both straight edge and Juggalos exist as scattered, incoherent collectives of mostly lower middle class white youth who identify with a national or global ‘scene’ of likeminded individuals. Both groups rely on moments of cultural and aesthetic signification—ways of dress, musical preference, and other outward expressions of identification or membership—to identify fellow members as part of a community. And most relevantly, each has been associated with fantastic and gruesome violence by the American media. The experience of the previously-mentioned Utah man who was assaulted by a group of straight edge men who carved the movement’s signature ‘X’ into his back finds an uncanny analogue in the 2010 case of a young woman, also in Utah, who was allegedly attacked and beaten unconscious by a group of Juggalos who then carved the initials ‘JK’—Juggalo Killers—into her chest (NGIC, 2011b: 4).

The eagerness of the FBI to classify Juggalos as gang members is made evident by the steadfastness of the agency’s position, which was legally challenged in two lawsuits (one in 2012, one in 2014) in which Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, owners of Psychopathic Records and original members of ICP, sued the FBI for the classification. The FBI defended against each lawsuit stridently, and each resulted in a judge’s dismissal. ⁷ Why, then, have police agencies like the FBI been seemingly reluctant to classify straight edge as a gang while at the same time eagerly applying the label and language of ‘gang’ to Juggalos? In the following, we will attempt to respond to the seeming incoherence of gang classification revealed in the above question through a critical examination of the police power and its relationship to gangs and organized criminality.

Police, gangs, and the ‘erotic intertwinements’ of cop and criminal

The answer to the questions raised by the disparate gang classification of straight edge crews and Juggalos, we contend, can be found in the cultural politics of each group and how these politics can be understood to constitute and communicate either an affirmation or rejection of traditional and puritanical American values generally and of police and state power more specifically. While Juggalos perhaps represent impoverished white youth gone mad, the violence and drug-taking mythologized in the music and culture is nothing new to white America, as the hysteria around early rock and roll, punk, rap, violent video games, and transgressive film and other media is so common in the recent history of the United States as to be cliché. Standing in sharp relief to the mythologized image of transgressive and intoxicated American youth cultures symbolized contemporarily by Juggalos and historically by rock and roll, punk and rap is straight edge. Straight edge, in the context of the punk scene that provided it with its gestational setting, is guilty primarily of the transgression of rejecting drug taking and other risky youthful behavior such as alcohol consumption, sexual promiscuity, and smoking in favor of the middle class bourgeois values of abstinence and sexual propriety. Elements of straight edge, though, did not eschew the transgressions of violence, as evidenced by countless official reports and discursive recollections. What seems to matter to police gang talkers then, is not that straight edge is a movement with a tendency towards violence, but that it upholds and promotes puritanical American values such as those most readily observed in America’s decades-long drug war. Underscoring straight edge’s ideological alignment with police is the tendency of adherents to think and act as police themselves. This tendency is made strikingly clear in the Rolling Stone expose on straight edge, where the movement is characterized as ‘policing shows’ and ‘policing the scene’, while Franklin, the FSU leader accused of killing Morrison, is referred to by an anonymous crew mate as a ‘good cop’ (Binelli, 2007). The alignment—between straight edge, police, and police affiliated gang talkers—of a cultural politics that rejects illegal drug consumption, while simultaneously cherishing violence and hypermasculinity, seems to be the distinction that matters most to the arbiters of classification working at the intersections of gang talkers and police.

The gang talk and subsequent criminal classification of Juggalos, then, is representative of an insidious moment of success for police, illustrating the power to go beyond the mediated condemnation used to respond to earlier transgressions (such as early rock and roll) and criminalize any group or movement that is seen to promote values or engage in behaviors that run counter to the puritanical logic and values of police. This power of classification and criminalization illustrates the power of authoritative gang talkers to employ their craft along the lines of cultural politics. Despite countless reports of straight edge violence and the work of unofficial gang talkers to establish straight edge as a gang, the FBI has, for the most part, failed to respond with an act of classification. This disparity effectively extends the continuum of police power in directions that are both ideologically advantageous to and congruent with broader prohibitionist and drug war politics. Here the police power is granted broader cultural terrain upon which to identify, hunt, and punish or pacify those, such as Juggalos, who do not adequately conform to the values and ideologies of police and bourgeois America.

There is another element beneath the surface of police gang classifications that is as yet unexplored—police as gangs. The notion that police themselves—and here we speak of the uniformed police, rather than the diffuse police power described by Neocleous (2014a)—operate as gangs is an idea widely held and frequently communicated among criminalized subcultures. For instance, a participant in the 2011 ‘Manchester riots’ affirmed the common understanding of police as gang: ‘I think police are probably the biggest gang in the world’ (Clifton, 2011). There are also innumerable musical commentaries following suit, from rapper Tupac Shakur, foundational Reggae singers Junior Murvin and Lee Perry, formative punk rock outfit The Clash, contemporary street punk band Leftover Crack, to the Rolling Stones, who in their era-defining and iconic 1968 hit Sympathy for The Devil, note the sameness of cop and criminal with verse: ‘Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners, saints.’

Echoed across numerous cultural fields, the antagonisms between and entwinements of police and gangs perhaps become most visible where these groups collide most forcefully. The 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton, which details the rise of the rap group NWA, most famous for their controversial song Fuck Tha Police, features a scene meant to show how the experiences of police subjectivity for black men in Los Angeles contributed to an intensely adversarial relationship with LAPD officers. In the scene, a young Ice Cube is thrown onto the hood of a police car and roughly searched as the officer snarls ‘This is LAPD. I’m the only gangster out here!’ This admission of intertwinement, although fictionalized, continues to echo in the everyday practices of actual Los Angeles police. As geographer David Correia has shown for decades, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—the largest such agency in the US with nearly 10,000 deputies—has organized into ‘secret clubs’ with such names as ‘Vikings, Jump Out Boys, Regulators, the Posse, and the Grim Reapers … comprised of mostly white deputies who patrol predominately Black and Hispanic neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County’ (Correia, 2016). One group in particular, the ‘Lynwood Vikings,’ was described by US District Judge Terry Hatter as a ‘neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang’, while a special investigation into police misconduct found that ‘some deputies at the Department’s Lynwood Station associate with the ‘Viking’ symbol, and appear at least in past times to have engaged in behavior that is brutal and intolerable and is typically associated with street gangs’ (Los Angeles Times, 1992). The more than 20-year history of allegations of gang-style activity within Los Angeles police agencies continues today with another group calling itself the ‘Banditos’ who among numerous misdeeds are said to have forced new members to wear a tattoo of their insignia and coerced subordinate female deputies into sex (Blankstein, 2014).

Critical criminologists have also elaborated upon the police-as-criminal/gang duality in a number of settings. For instance, the ethnographic work of criminologist Mitch Librett, a former police agent himself, draws similarities between ‘outlaw bikers’ and police, who in their off duty hours gather ‘in stylistically analogous motorcycle clubs’ and display hedonistic, transgressive behaviors he describes as ‘living large’ (Librett, 2008: 257). William Armaline and his colleagues’ work in Oakland, California reveals that the city’s heavily policed residents quite plainly view police as ‘the biggest gang in Oakland’ armed with a ‘license to kill’ (Armaline et al., 2014: 391–392). Of course the activist community has long made similar comparisons. Figure 2, taken from the website of Cop Block, a national American grassroots organization aimed at exposing police violence and corruption, dryly underscores the tensions linking police and gangs by turning the vagaries of gang classification back on the police power.

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Figure 2.

‘Beware! Violent Street Gangs.’

All of these visual, discursive, and empirical efforts to contextualize police as gangs find resonance with the work of Walter Benjamin, who observed that the police power juts forth and extends the power of law through violence in precisely those moments when the law fails to adequately affirm itself (Benjamin, 1978: 287). This is not to say that the police power is not governed by law, as evidenced by exceptional moments of corruption, but rather, as Mark Taussig explains, that criminal and the police power are always ‘erotically intertwined’, making police not ‘thieves’ but ‘cop-thieves’’ (Taussig, 2010: 178). Mark Neocleous (2014b: 8) underscores this point, detailing the monster in police, while also describing the case against Rafael Perez, a former LAPD anti-gang officer who was himself a member of LA’s notorious Bloods gang. Egon Bittner, an early police sociologist, suggested similarly that police always reflect that which they fight, or in his words, there is always a ‘dragon in the dragonslayer’ (Bittner, 1970: 7). Taussig again, drawing upon Nietzsche, highlights the argument that ‘the police are worse than the criminal because they do the same things, but in the name of Law’ (Taussig, 2010: 178). Here, we find that police—especially those police and police institutions charged with gang classification and anti-gang enforcement—are not so different from the street collectives they classify, identify, and target. Distrust of the police, we note, comes not from police doing the work that we citizens, in Bittner’s words, don’t ‘have the stomach for’, but rather from the undeniable entanglement of police with the monstrosity unleashed by bourgeois modernity (Neocleous 2014b: 18).

Perhaps, then, the reluctance of the police power to strongly identify straight edge crews as gangs—and the opposing readiness of those same agents of police power to apply the gang label to Juggalos—reveals a recognition by the police that they are, by their own metrics, a gang. Put simply, we contend that the police find a reflection of themselves in the traditional bourgeois and puritanical values of the straight edge movement and so to apply the gang label—and therefore call forth the waiting violence of the state so eagerly exercised in anti-gang enforcement measures—would be a betrayal of self, one that recognizes the erotic entanglement of police and gangs. Approached critically, then, the incoherence of the gang label proves classification to be primarily an exercise of cultural politics, one that perhaps leads us to accept the police at their word when they claim, display, or otherwise betray their status as ‘the biggest gangster[s] out here.’