Towards a natural history of London gangs?
Whose heart does not sink when they hear of another teenage stabbing in London? I know mine does. Behind the stabbings (a proof to “get in”) are the gangs. Thinking widely, I searched under academic study london gangs stabbings and found a colloquium on a new book called On Gangs. One of the authors is James A. Densley, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Metro State University Minnesota. I ordered his earlier book: How Gangs Work: An Ethnography of Youth Violence which treated London. Gang members and associates speak,
“… knives don’t jam or run out of bullets. you actually feel the knife go in. You’re there. You have to look into man’s eyes. feel him as he falls to the floor… … it’s real. No doubt about it”
Within the gang there are shades. There are those exalted ones who have accepted death, who from dark anti-matter have created their own light for as long as it lasts,
“… some people are just mentally lost…. they’ll tell you: I don’t care about money, I don’t care about my life. I’m only here to take souls like the rest. I’m gonna keep on it until I die. I’m only here to take souls — How can you work with that?”
Densley spent two years 2008–2010 on London turfs and collected from around seventy gang members or associates. His prose is open and accessible and, as it were, soaked thru with common decency. His teaching experience in New York gave him status on the roads as being a touch of Americana. His key assertion appears to be that gangs develop in states or stages from the recreational to crime to enterprise to governance. He introduces signalling theory1 to analyse the way in which prospective gang members must display difficult to mimic evidence (involving personal risk) in order to be accepted. He finds that there is a strong bias towards lineage (as there is in traditional London criminal families). Closeness, trust, is expressed by saying that (to paraphrase) you could take him, or her home to sit across the table from your mum. No one else must know where you live. He looks at what he calls “desistance” — the mechanics that allow gang members to retire safely, sometimes by getting religion in prison. He gives an authoritative, wry account of some contemporary gravy-train interventions whose opportunistic pitches rarely include enough in the budget for evaluation. He also describes an innovative intelligence-based police initiative disbanded in 2009 with whose leader Inspector Allen Davis and Nick Mason of Lambeth Summer Projects Trust, Densley built Growing against Gangs and Violence currently widely active.
To have by proxy shared time with intelligent gang members and the author was a privilege and it got me thinking. How about it goes like this:
Communities make what they need. The relations between the troubled, anxious mass, the smoother tongued spokespersons and the active gang members are all of a piece. The gang itself lives on the acceptance of death by young (mostly) men. What society at war does not? People seem to think that Darwinian selection is something you read about in an encyclopaedia. Not so. You only have to look at the causes of death of young men,
“…World Health Organisation: Young men’s mortality UK in ranking order from the top: car-crash, self-harm, overdose, violence, cancer…”
In other words external edges out internal. Selection, with its dread echo of the camps, is happening now and gangs can be imagined as natural human selection mechanisms arising/emerging or crystallising out from a more or less segregated society (no dogs no blacks). Because of blockages, due originally to racial chauvinism, the inventory of talent and energy becomes compressed and the particular community (its architectural rat-box crucible not helping) becomes super-saturated with stymied individuals. The logical extension would be a state within a state perhaps like the coming South Africa or Israel. Out of this super-saturation comes the business (described by Densley as a sequence of morphings) of making a form that is visible beyond the host community a form capable of transmitting signals. Curiously enough, in nature there exist organisms called slime-molds which,
“… spend most of their lives as individual unicellular protists, but when a chemical signal is secreted, they assemble into a cluster that acts as one organism…”2
At a certain stage of their development they aggregate and form a phallus which acts as an independent entity. Just so the community induces a form or an erection to treat on more equal terms with the host society, with the police, the educators, the council. This active form can also treat with its likes, with Colombian coke persons, Lithuanian gunsmiths, Essex skunk gardeners, Albanian murderers and so on.
Mycetozoa from Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature)
I am still as troubled, vicariously, by stabbings as I was but now, in my head I have a counter balance, an image of a chunk of territory inventing its future even if its strong dose of americanisation repels me. But then, I am privileged — I have never wanted for status and can live with my quantum of self dis-respect which, naturally, I cravenly allow to others.
— —
1I was onto this in my 2016 ebook: Tap once if Human
The objection to crime was that it was a form of taxation without representation — nothing against its money circulation properties, the necessary greasy skids. Dr Obo in his office knew full well that at some point in the century, the Tipover, it would become practical to build prison into society at large, electronically and then the ones behind old fashioned walls were those who didn’t want to see the misery. He’d tell close friends, sitting around with no shoes on — we go back to the Castle and Wilderness system. It makes sense, after all there will always be fewer of us than there are of them — they need the space, we need the comfort…
“Take me for example…” Stevens explained to the newcomer, “… I took signal identity theory, SIT, into the flux. I stirred the cross-plays between the gangs who counterfeit status items and monitored the way street items popped up into the high fashion world. I worked like an anthropologist but with input, influence — allowed to play.” He remembered going out with stylists as they combed the back of town haunts seeing what was trending. Crowded five into a taxi and, laughing, watched the dark streets of Wellington flash by, sat across from the Maori wunderkind, Takko, who reverse smuggled stuff into the street and had it emerge (and him with the manufactory chain ready) six months later.
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold
1. I was onto this in my 2016 ebook: Tap once if Human
The objection to crime was that it was a form of taxation without representation — nothing against its money circulation properties, the necessary greasy skids. Dr Obo in his office knew full well that at some point in the century, the Tipover, it would become practical to build prison into society at large, electronically and then the ones behind old fashioned walls were those who didn’t want to see the misery. He’d tell close friends, sitting around with no shoes on — we go back to the Castle and Wilderness system. It makes sense, after all there will always be fewer of us than there are of them — they need the space, we need the comfort…
“Take me for example…” Stevens explained to the newcomer, “… I took signal identity theory, SIT, into the flux. I stirred the cross-plays between the gangs who counterfeit status items and monitored the way street items popped up into the high fashion world. I worked like an anthropologist but with input, influence — allowed to play.” He remembered going out with stylists as they combed the back of town haunts seeing what was trending. Crowded five into a taxi and, laughing, watched the dark streets of Wellington flash by, sat across from the Maori wunderkind, Takko, who reverse smuggled stuff into the street and had it emerge (and him with the manufactory chain ready) six months later.
