Gangs and Society

Abstract

Not long after the 2011 UK riots, I co-wrote a paper for Policing Today questioning the role of gangs in urban disorder (Densley and Mason, 2011). I argued that by attributing the riots to gangs, the government had conflated the actions of gang members as individuals (‘gang member’ activity) with the actions of gangs as organizations (‘gang-related’ activity); a subject to which I shall return in Chapter 3. Gangs were present at the riots but not controlling them, I said, in part because gang identities ceased to be relevant in such a context. If anything, the riots actually disrupted conventional gang activity because gangs lost control of their markets. The perceived suspension of normal rules instead presented gang members with an unprecedented opportunity to acquire consumer products for ‘free’. In the words of Philip Zimbardo (2008, p. 8), author of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, ‘You are not the same person working alone as you are in a group.’