Reluctant Gangsters - London Borough of Hillingdon

For five or six years a group of 16 to 18 years olds was
terrorising John Walsh and Fredwig Towers. They would wait
at the bottom of the lift and take money, mobile phones,
clothes that they fancied, even a dog, from the residents. A
younger sister also had these terrible parties in the foyer but
nobody complained. The Police had been trying to prosecute
for years but because of witness intimidation, residents
stayed quiet. These kids came to believe they were
untouchable. Eventually we achieved an ASBO and a
committal to Court, which resulted in a prison sentence, but
the residents needed enormous support from the Police and
ourselves.
(KI.25)
A Better Neighbourhoods officer said:
The XXXX Estate is a neutral space and neutral spaces are
colonised by gangs because nothing and nobody seems to be
able to stop them. So neutral territory becomes gang territory
by default. Since the summer, the gang from the YYYY Estate,
some of them as young as 12, meet here before they go down
to the Beaumont estate. They intimidate the local children and
young people. They put messages on My Space saying ‘we
are coming to get you’. They beat them up on the way back
from school and they even try to break into their houses to
get at them. (KI.32)
This raises the question of whether this apparent desire on the part
of gang members, to dominate the lives of those around them,
flows from the erosion of informal social control and its effects on
certain poorly socialised individuals or, more ominously, whether it
has become a defining characteristic of youth gang culture in
Waltham Forest.
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