Reluctant Gangsters - London Borough of Hillingdon

dimension, the gangs in the new gang cities were overwhelmingly
Black and Hispanic. In the USA, as in Europe, it was non-white,
non-indigenous and migrant youth, who bore the brunt of deindustrialisation
and who came to populate the burgeoning street
gangs.
Defining the Gang
As the number of street gangs grew and their activities changed, so
too did the numbers of people studying gangs and the nature of
these studies. Whereas earlier studies were ‘appreciative’, the new
gang studies were decidedly ‘correctional’ (Matza, 1969) and,
unsurprisingly the definitions they generated emphasised the
‘criminality’ of the gang. Critics, like veteran gang academic James
Short (1965, 1997), have argued that the central place accorded to
crime in these definitions projects too narrow and simplistic a
picture of the gang and the motivations of gang members.
However, the tide had turned and now, scholarly research was part
of the fight against the gangs, which was, in turn, a key element in
Ronald Reagan’s War On Drugs
Thus, Walter B. Miller’s (1982) influential, scholarly definition of the
gang:
A group of recurrently associating individuals with identifiable
leadership and internal organisation, identifying with or
claiming control over territory in the community, and
engaging either individually or collectively in violent or other
forms of illegal behaviour.
… has strong echoes of the Chicago Municipal Criminal Code
definition which describes the gang as:
Any ongoing organisation, association in fact or group of three
or more persons, whether formal or informal, having as one of
its substantial activities the commission of criminal gang
activity, and whose … members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang
activity.’
Currently influential definitions in the UK place a similar emphasis
upon criminality, durability, territoriality and structure (see fig. 1.1
below). The US/European/UK Eurogang network, for example,
having wrestled with the concept of the ‘gang’ for a number of
years, eventually plumped for the term Delinquent Youth Group
(Home Office, 2006).
Young people spend time in groups of three or more. The
group spends a lot of time in public places. The group has
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