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Studies of gang violence typically use police reports to investigate the structure of gang conflict, but overreliance on a singular data source could impede crime control efforts. Extending networked criminology, this study aims to explore what court records reveal about the directionality of gang conflicts.

Controlling for the presence of a civil gang injunction (CGI), the authors use multivariate quadratic assignment procedure regression models to disentangle factors thought to account for structural patterns of gang violence mapped from 933 prosecutions involving 307 gangs associated with violent conflict affecting the City of Los Angeles (1998–2013). Specifically, the authors compare competitive advantage to the explanatory power of turf proximity.

One measure of turf proximity outperforms all other explanatory factors – gangs with turf centrally positioned in a turf adjacency matrix are significantly more likely to launch attacks, be victimized and exhibit the highest levels of imbalance in their violent involvements. Regarding competitive advantage, the number of cliques and level of internal conflict are significant. Finally, being subject to a CGI is associated with initiating violence.

Court cases offer a feasible alternative to police data when investigating patterns of intergroup street gang violence.

At a time when youth gangs and gang policy feature significantly in the discourse on UK youth, it is judicious to critique the framework and evidence upon which these policy developments have originated. The political focus on gangs was heightened, in part, by the English riots in 2011. The reaction to the riots was a “concerted all-out war on gangs” and led to the development of the national Ending Gangs and Youth Violence (EGYV) strategy. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors use Manchester as a case study to illustrate what the they argue to be the misplaced focus of the current EGYV strategy and provide a detailed critique of the strategy to date.

The paper suggests that government funded gang interventions are currently bereft of a “what works” approach and should only be implemented when the authors have significantly developed the knowledge and understanding of gangs in a local context.

The paper calls for a stronger evidence based policy approach to tackling gangs.

The purpose of this paper is to critically appraise how the coalition government intends to respond to the riots and disorder that took place in England in 2011, with particular reference to conduct regulation legislation and policy.

Coalition government policies announced post‐riots have been reflected upon and considered alongside flagship policies from the previous New Labour government (1997‐2010), as well as coalition policies introduced when they came to power in May, 2010.

Coalition policy post‐riots appears to have shifted from a localism agenda, to be replaced by a default reliance upon conduct regulation directed by central government. Furthermore, a number of these rhetoric laden policies are perceived to lack the focus and detail required to provide an effective policy response.

Post‐riot policy announcements are placed in the wider criminal justice context, highlighting some of the practical issues that may require consideration upon policy implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the temporary disbandment of a gang unit on collecting gang intelligence and arresting gang members in one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Policing Areas.

An interrupted time series methodology (ARIMA) is utilised to examine 1,429 field interview cards and 1,174 arrests of gang members that occurred from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2011 within one police division.

Results indicated that the dismantling of the gang unit negatively impacted the collection of intelligence on gang members by officers, regardless of whether the officers were officially serving in the gang unit. Suppression efforts by gang unit officers also resulted in a sustained decline.

Given that many urban centres have specialised gang units, this study demonstrates how organisational turnover or disbandment of a gang unit negatively impacts a department’s ability to deal with local gang issues. Furthermore, these finding suggest that police organisations should consider such ramifications on intelligence-based policing activities.

In 1987, the City of Los Angeles instituted the first gang injunction in the country. Gang injunctions are pursued through the civil courts to seriously restrict the activities and movement of suspected gang members and affiliates. People who have been served with a gang injunction are often prohibited from everyday activities, such as wearing sports jerseys, talking to other gang members, and being out in public past curfew, regardless of age. Though often justified by law enforcement as a necessary tool to fight gang violence, we argue that gang injunctions are similar to Slave Codes, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws, which established a separate system of justice based on race. As such, gang injunctions serve as an extension of an apartheid-like system of justice that seriously limits the life opportunities of people of color within gang injunction territories.

This chapter draws upon the oral histories of people targeted by gang injunction laws within California, paying particular attention to how gang-identified individuals are surveiled, controlled, and confined.

Gang injunctions operate on an apartheid-like justice system that punishes perceived gang members harsher than non-gang members. These laws affirm the legal tactics that maintain racial boundaries and promote a system of justice that mirrors the Black Codes following the end of slavery. The evidence suggests that gang injunctions solely target low-income youth of color, who have been identified as gang members and served with injunctions.

Despite the ubiquity of gang injunctions within California, there is little research on gang injunctions, and even less literature on how these injunctions shape the life course of suspected gang members. We attempt to address this gap in the literature by showing how gang injunctions are not simply about fighting crime, but rather they are a tool used to control and corral communities of color.

This paper is designed to critically review and analyze the body of research on a popular gang reduction strategy, implemented widely in the United States and a number of other countries, to: (1) assess whether researchers designed their evaluations to align with the theorized causal mechanisms that bring about reductions in violence; and (2) discuss how evidence on gang programs is generated and consumed. That review and assessment is then used to frame a research agenda for studying gang interventions.

A case study design is used to generate a multi-faceted understanding of the possible avenues for evaluation research on the law enforcement-based strategy known as the Group Violence Intervention. The paper discusses questions that remain to be answered about the strategy, such as “what type of deterrence is operating?” and if the model actually works by the threat of deterrence, and not by removing high-risk offenders and shootings from the street, what activities are needed to maintain the effect?

Across roughly two dozen impact evaluations of GVI, none have examined the likely cause and effect components of this multi-partner strategy in reducing the violence. Furthermore, there are many issues related to the production and generation of criminal justice evaluation research that have adversely pushed the balance of evidence on what works in gang reduction toward law enforcement programming. However, there are many strategies that researchers can use to think broadly about appropriate and holistic research and evaluation on gangs and gang programming.

The recommendations for research, if implemented, can help build a body of knowledge to move toward community-based and restorative models of gang violence reduction.

This original piece is one of the first essays to contextualize and discuss how aspects of the production of social science research on gangs may directly impact what programs and strategies are implemented on the ground.

The purpose of this paper is to compare gang member identification methods across regions in the United States as reported by law enforcement.

The data were collected through surveys with various law enforcement jurisdictions in both urban and rural communities across the United States. Methods of gang member identification were compared across the United States. Region through the use of Ordinal Logistic Regression and Multiple Imputation.

The results reveal that there are systematic variations in methods of gang member identification across regions in the United States. Specifically, the West is significantly more likely to identify gang members through associations or arrests with known gang members, symbols and self-nomination compared to other regions. The South, Northeast and Midwest regions are significantly more likely to identify gang members through a reliable informant compared to the West.

Research has not compared gang member identification methods across region in the United States or examined how variations in gang member identification methods potentially impact the accuracy of reported gang problems and prevalence.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolution of HM government’s gang strategy from 2011 to the present. It considers why an initial emphasis upon the “troubled family” as the progenitor of gang violence has given way to more tightly focussed modes of intervention in which concerns about gang violence are conflated with other policy concerns.

The paper draws on a range of policy documents over the relevant period to demonstrate a shift in rhetoric and focus and assesses this trajectory against the evidence base suggested by other relevant literature.

The argument contained in the paper attributes this shift in focus to a combination of the insights provided by new research, dwindling budgets and the reformulation of the original policy objectives in terms of recent policy priorities.

It is suggested that in times of austerity, policy initiatives are reformulated to fit available resources but changes are presented as an improvement on what went before.

The paper uses secondary sources to develop and original analysis and argument.