Image: Inside New Zealand: The Gangs; nzfilmtv.wordpress.com
Fatma Khaldi remembers her son’s description of the bind he was in: “I am trapped in this world. The only way out is prison or death.” Three months later his remains were found in a burnt-out car, another victim of gang wars in Marseille.
In this piece on homicide, I consider street gangs. Gangs provide solidarity for dangerous people. They also encourage violence through ruthless competition with other gangs.
Gangs or raiding parties?
Are gangs a feature of urbanisation? They are found in all US cities of more than 100,000.
Or are they a human universal – with raiding bands of young males typical of pre-state societies? Jared Diamond describes a raid by a group of Papua New Guinean villagers on an adjacent village. They murdered all that didn’t get away fast enough. Except for a baby, left behind by a mother, hanging from a branch in a bilum (woven shoulder bag). The baby was taken back to the raiders' village. Diamond's story ends with the village headman pointing to the son he brought back and adopted.
In their 2019 review of homicide across the world the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) provided a topical review of the impact of gangs on murder. In the Americas (especially Central America) many gangs are involved in the drug trade. This is a serious, extremely profitable business. Especially if it is well organised. Organised crime means efficient logistics, the corruption of law enforcement that might otherwise obstruct the just-in-time delivery of consignments, and good financial management – paying who needs to be paid. Violence gets in the way of this complex business. In their review, the UNODC show that where organised criminal groups are well established that homicide is relatively low. Disruption of that organisation results in violence.
Researchers Frans de Waal (chimpanzees) and Robert Sapolsky (baboons) have been watching primates for decades. In both species, males form a dominance hierarchy. All is stable and relatively peaceful until the alpha male is deposed. Then it gets messy. It's not just the battle for the top job, it’s the trouble the deposed alpha causes with other males and females, and the tussles between those lower down the hierarchy as they test their chance to move up in the shifting dynamics of the new hierarchy.
Similarly, when law enforcement takes out top officials in drug cartels or eliminates leading gangs in the organised crime network, there is a spike in conflict and in homicides as gangs and individuals fight to improve their position and maximise their opportunities.
In contrast to this alternation of stability and chaos in the organised crime scene, violence is integral to how street gangs operate. A remarkable study of gang homicide in both Boston and Chicago by Andrew Papachristos and colleagues found, as might be expected, that homicide results from turf conflict at gang boundaries. There is also a dynamic in the violence between gangs. Attacks result from ongoing ‘tit-for-tat’ paybacks. Beyond that is a long-term pattern of inter-group attacks which becomes baked into the identity of gangs. As Papachristos notes gangs identify themselves with labels such as ‘Cobra-killers’.
This aspect of defining the group in antagonism with others appears to be part of belonging to human groups. It's not just belonging to a particular gang, it's identifying other groups as enemies that need to be beaten. Looking at long-term conflict in Corsica in the 19th century (via court records) Roger V. Gould found that inter-group feuds were not the result of individual conflicts pulling in others but the product of the escalation of contention between groups. The threat to the group is what mobilises violence against the other group.
Who would want to join a gang?
There are pushes and pulls. For most people, the risks – violence, death and imprisonment do not look great. Terence Thornbury located 57 of 99 US gang members some years after first contact. Nineteen were dead, two were in prison, and four were in wheelchairs.
But what if the alternative is terrible? Gang members often come from a world of social exclusion, unemployment, lack of education and exposure to racism and violent discrimination. These young people might not see any opportunity to find status through legitimate means.
If that is the pull factor, there is also the push of self-protection. One aspect of the world where gangs prevail is that there are few areas where you can hang out which are not the patch of a particular gang. Some stores, schools or community centres might be ok – but you might not be welcome there. ‘If you’re not for us you are against us’ is the paradox you face. As Jill Leovy writes in her remarkable book Ghettoside: “Boys and men tend to group for protection.”
Do gangs drive up homicide?
In a diligent seven-year follow-up of over 1,100 US gang members Julia Dmitrieva and fellow researchers found that younger gang members had low self-esteem (for example agreeing ‘I often feel inferior to others’). Gang leaders had high self-esteem and also reported higher manipulativeness. Over time both gang members and gang leaders showed increases in self-reported psychopathy (manipulativeness, callousness and impulsivity).
Gangs provide an opportunity, especially for young males, to earn respect. Through often violent rivalry, gangs enhance the ‘psychopathy’ of their members. The antagonism toward competitors becomes part of the identity of the gang and its members. Violent competition can become lethal, and that in turn reinforces the gang members' identification with the group they belong to and hatred towards the enemy gang or gangs.
Gangs are more than a collection of bad actors – more than groups for those who can’t find another club to join. In technical language, “there is something uniquely criminogenic about gang membership.” Longitudinal studies show that violence and other criminal behaviour increase during time in the gang. In the gang, status is achieved according to the ‘code of the street’, particularly the willingness to fight when disrespected. US gang members are very likely to have guns and use them. Escalating disputes are likely to be fatal.
What is the evidence that gangs increase homicide through this escalation of violence? The dramatic reduction in homicide in Ecuador after 2010 is a positive indication. Homicide rates dropped from 15.35 per 100,000 in 2011 to around 5 in 2017 (for comparison – the US homicide rate was around 5.3 in 2020, Japan was 0.2 and New Zealand was 0.7 in 2022).
Ecuador legalised the gangs and provided them with the opportunity to win government funding to develop educational initiatives, leading to a significant change to the culture of the gangs.
Approaches to tackle gangs need to recognise that gang membership is not an either-or proposition – some are embedded in the gang, some have peripheral contact, hanging out with gang members, some of the time. Targeted efforts to peel off these less involved individuals would be more effective than trying to adopt a one-size fits all approach.
There is a risk that generic ‘anti-gang’ approaches could be counter-productive. Instead of destroying the gang, such interventions could provide an external source of cohesion by triggering the universal human defensive reaction to a perceived threat to the group.
Thanks for including so many factors about gangs as it's a tough subject to grapple with. The statistics from Ecuador are really interesting & I wonder if legalisation has helped elsewhere. All the best!