In his speech to the House of Commons on gang culture in Britain last Thursday, David Cameron spoke of the North American success with tamping down gang culture in Boston and other cities, and wondered whether the same techniques could be applied to gangs in Great Britain. Cameron plans to bring in William Bratton—who as chief of police in Los Angeles applied some of the strategies formulated in Boston to L.A.—as a consultant on gang violence in Britain. (Cameron’s first inclination, which was to make Bratton head of Scotland Yard, was scotched by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, because Bratton isn’t a British citizen.)
But will strategies that have proven effective in curbing gang-related violence in the U.S. work on gangs in Britain? David M. Kennedy, the architect of the Boston gang strategy (which has since been named the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence, or C.I.R.V.), whom I wrote about in the June 22, 2009, issue of the magazine, told me, “People always say, when we bring this to a new city, ‘We know our gangs, and our gangs are very different from the gangs in those other cities.’ And while they are right, they do know their gangs, they are wrong that their gangs are different. The fundamentals are always the same.”
In Glasgow, the only city in the U.K. to have tried Kennedy’s approach so far, the gangs appeared to be distinctly different from U.S. gangs: most members were white, and they were juveniles as young as thirteen, not young adults as in the U.S. Allegiances were wedded less to neighborhoods and more to soccer teams—Rangers vs. Celtic—which has a sectarian, Protestant vs. Catholic dimension to it. There are no larger nationwide criminal organizations like the Crips and Bloods in the U.K. And the Scots used blades, not guns, which is why Glasgow is the world’s leader in facial reconstruction surgery. Finally, fighting between gangs tends to be much more formal, almost medieval—gangs agree to meet on the lawn outside a housing project and have pitched battles. (Being of Scottish heritage himself, Kennedy said, “I can relate to that.”) But all these differences turned out to be superficial. The underlying reasons for violence in Glasgow were pretty much the same as in American cities: beefs, vendettas, and other issues of respect between rival gangs. The community wanted to take back control of the streets; they used Kennedy’s methods to gain a kind of moral leverage on the gang members, and the violence diminished. Violent offenses in Glasgow have dropped by more than fifty per cent among gang members who took part in the initiative since the program began, in 2008.
Kennedy, who is the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College, has talked with Scotland Yard over the years about trying his strategy in other cities in the U.K., and he hopes that with Bratton’s influence he will now get a chance. He cautioned that one of the difficulties in implementing new and unorthodox policing strategies in the U.K. is that their police are much more centralized than our police—there are fewer than sixty different forces in the U.K. as compared to more than ten thousand in the U.S. “Individual forces still have the autonomy to try this, but in addition, if there’s central direction to do it, the innovation is much more likely to go to most or all forces,” he said. But with Bratton backing Kennedy’s plan, it might.
Photograph of Bratton by Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire.
