CRIMINAL GANGS OF UK

Criminal Gangs of UK - Past and Present



Criminal Gangs of UK - Past and Present

Introduction

Each year, worldwide, an estimated 200,000 homicides, suicides or accidents associated with the use of arms. For over a decade, the number of acts of armed violence was increasing in the United Kingdom. The use of firearms has caused the deaths of many people and many more were wounded by gunfire. Youth gangs have existed throughout recorded history and, as far as we know, everywhere in the world. The proportion of homicides committed with firearms is growing, becoming, in alternation with the knives, the weapons used most often. After a resurgence of high-profile murders committed with firearms by rival gangs in London have been innocent victims, Peter Stelfox, a Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police conducted a research about gangs. He said that any group which uses violence or the threat or fear of violence to further a criminal purpose, but excluding footballs hooligans and terrorists (Klein 1969, 147).

Globalization

Peter Stelfox identified that majority of the gangs present in England were primarily adult led and largely white. A small percentage of members comprises of Black Caribbean and from other ethnic minority groups. The Metropolitan Police had identified 169 youth gangs in London alone, many using firearms in furtherance of their crimes and estimated to have been responsible for around 40 murders and 20% of the youth crime in the capital (Young 1992, 69). Clearly, in the intervening period, things had changed and this directs us back to the concerns of those earlier gang studies that endeavoured to discover the conditions for the emergence of urban youth gangs and the factors that sustained them. By the late 1990s, heroin, cocaine and crack were flooding into London.

Yardies

They are the members of International Jamaican criminals who sell drugs and violence. Yardies of the UK initially sold marijuana but after sometime they switched to manufacture and sales of Crack which is derived from South Africa. The Yardies attempts to impose themselves upon areas of Caribbean settlement were often resisted by Black/British residents and, as we have noted, they did not secure an operational foothold in Waltham Forest. However, several key informants suggest that their influence, in terms of gang culture, has been pervasive (Arlacchi 1998, 111).

Black Caribbean and Other Gangs

In the 1980s and 1990s, before the advent of estate-based crews and gangs, many areas in London developed Posses; large, loosely affiliated, groups of, initially, African-Caribbean and Mixed Heritage young people, but latterly White and Asian too. However, the term Posse was coined in the Kingston garrisons in the 1970s to describe politically affiliated, armed, drug-dealing, neighbourhood gangs. The word itself has its origins in Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Westerns, which achieved cult status in Jamaica in the 1970s (Bullock 2003, 81).

Youngers in Waltham Forest, and younger gang members who dispense violence on behalf of gangs across London, style themselves Soldiers. In the 1980s some Yardies were spirited away to Cuba for military training, while the CIA is said to ...