Gangs in the United Kingdom


Gang-related organised crime in the United Kingdom is concentrated around the cities of London, Manchester and Liverpool and regionally across the West Midlands region, south coast and northern England, according to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. With regard to street gangs the cities identified as having the most serious gang problems, which accounted for 65% of firearm homicides in England and Wales, were London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. Glasgow in Scotland also has a historical gang culture with the city having as many teenage gangs as London, which had six times the population, in 2008.
In the early part of the 20th century, the cities of Leeds, Bristol, Bradford, and more prominently Keighley, and Nottingham all commanded headlines pertaining to street gangs and suffered their share of high-profile firearms murders. Sheffield, which has a long history of gangs traced back to the 1920s in the book "The Sheffield Gang Wars", along with Leicester is one of numerous urban centres seen to have an emerging or re-emerging gang problem.
In November 2007, a major offensive against gun crime committed by gangs in Birmingham, Liverpool, London and Manchester led to 118 arrests. More than 1,000 police officers were involved in the raids. Not all of the 118 arrests were gun related. Others were linked to drugs, prostitution and other crimes. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said it showed the police could "fight back against gangs".
In the 2000s, Britain's street gangs in certain inner city areas such as London and Manchester became influenced by America's Crips and Bloods. This was evidenced by identification with colours, hand signs, graffiti tags and in some cases gang names, for example Old Trafford Cripz and Moss Side Bloods or 031 Bloods gang and ABM Crips. This phenomenon has since declined during the 2010s.
Debate persists over the extent and nature of gang activity in the UK,
As a result of austerity reforms, there are fewer public spaces set aside as of 2018 for the purpose of keeping young people off the street, such as youth centres. As a result, some children as young as 9 begin to carry weapons and turn to gang activities for safety, or to provide for their families through drug trafficking.

"Scuttlers" and rise of gang culture

The Factory Act 1833 regulated child labour in the UK: children could no longer work in factories. Children were now spending more time on the streets while the rest of their families went to work all day. The lack of an extra stable source of income for families led to an increase in petty crimes among working-class youths in the late 19th century. As children spent more time with siblings and neighbours on the street, pranks became commonplace and were viewed as devious attempts to outsmart authority. Along with pranking, petty crime among older teenagers was also on the rise.
Because older teenagers could not earn enough money to support their families, especially in the absence of one parent—which was common—many resorted to stealing. Food and cigarettes were the most common forms of property that were stolen in the late 19th century. These small crimes and this culture of pranks added to the underlying resistance to authority that existed among working-class youths who had no other outlets to control their environment.
The early groups in the 1840s were family oriented and were typically composed of brothers, sisters, and neighbours. While petty crime rose everywhere during the 19th century in England, individual crimes differed from city-to-city and even persisted in rural areas. Gangs were not unique to deprived areas, and many arose in many working-class towns that were flourishing from trade. Early forms of gangs were based upon territory and locality rather than certain ethnic or religious affiliations, which tended to be the defining characteristics of gangs in the early 20th century.
Many of the names of early British gangs included titles of local areas and streets, such as the Bengal Tigers who originated from Bengal Street in Manchester. The idea of “hooliganism” was used to describe these types of crimes committed by working-class youth, and drew great concern from the press and middle class during this time. "Scuttlers" was the specific term given to the perpetuators of these early, petty crimes.  These factions were not highly organised, and most people drifted in and out of membership. The early development of petty crime with groups forming an identity for themselves through names and clothes helped create the framework for more organised crime groups that gained great notoriety throughout the early 20th century.

Gangs in major urban centres

Belfast

had over 150 active criminal gangs in 2014. In Belfast, there were estimated to be approximately 80 gangs in 2003, most nominally sectarian, engaged in racketeering across the city.
An investigation in 2014 found that some gangs in Belfast were particularly hostile towards non-white residents of the city, with numerous cases of racially motivated violence, intimidation and extortion having been reported.
Gangs in Belfast have been involved in people smuggling and human trafficking. Although the vice industry was previously mostly on the street, in recent years it has moved indoors to residential homes and hotels and formed closer links to organised crime networks. Trafficking gangs in Belfast, as in the rest of Northern Ireland, tend to be of Chinese or Eastern European origin, utilising local people as facilitators in their network.
In 2014, three nights of violence in East Belfast led to the Police Federation for Northern Ireland stating: "The gang culture has to be broken up so that people can go about their business without fear of being struck by a missile or intimidated."

Birmingham

The Peaky Blinders were a criminal gang based in Birmingham, England, in the late 19th century and, to a lesser extent, in the early 20th century. Philip Gooderson, author of The Gangs of Birmingham, states that the Peaky Blinders originated as a specific gang, but the term later became a generic label. An earlier gang known as the Cheapside Sloggers had evolved in the 1870s, and the term "Sloggers" had already become a generic local label for street gangs when the Peaky Blinders emerged at the end of the century in Adderley Street, in the Bordesley and Small Heath areas, which was an extremely deprived slum section of Birmingham at the time. The Peaky Blinders were distinguished by their sartorial style, unlike earlier gangs. Notable members included David Taylor, "baby-faced" Harry Fowles, Ernest Haynes and Stephen McNickle.
Early in the 20th century, one of the Birmingham gangs known as the Brummagem Boys began to spread their criminal network from the streets of Birmingham to around the country. Helped by greatly improved transport, for the first time, regional gangs were able to expand beyond the streets that bred them. The new connecting railway between Birmingham and London meant they could target the racecourse riches of the country's capital.
Following the Handsworth riots in 1985, young people banded together in groups which soon turned to petty crime and robbery. By the late 1980s, the Johnson Crew, named after their Johnsons Café hang-out, controlled the drugs market and nightclub security across some parts of Birmingham.
After a fall-out between members of the Johnson Crew, the Burger Bar Boys formed, taking their name from a Soho Road fast-food joint. This began a violent feud between the Johnsons and the Burger Bar Boys, which was resolved in a truce instigated by Matthias "Shabba" Thompson in 2010, with assistance from documentary maker Penny Woolcock. The process of forming the truce was captured in the Channel 4 documentary, One Mile Away. Following the truce, violent crime fell by 50% in the B6 postcode area and 30% in B21.
The increasingly collaborative relationship between the two gangs has led to some in the media describing them as more akin to a "super gang", seeking to establish a greater national network of organised crime rather than controlling their post-code areas. Other reports suggest both gangs are effectively inactive, and there is no "super gang".
However, 20 shootings in mid-2015 onwards were linked to the feud between the Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew, suggesting any truce is no longer active and the gang rivalry has been renewed.
See also:
The history of Glasgow gangs can be traced back to the 18th century, although the first media reference to Glasgow gangs was not until the 1870s, with the acknowledgement of the Penny Mobs. It has been suggested that the rise in Glasgow gangs from the 1850s was a result of an influx in Irish immigration which included those from traditional Irish fighting gangs such as the Caravats and Shanavests. By the 1920s many Glasgow gangs were widely viewed as fighting gangs rather than criminal gangs, although there were widespread reports of extortion and protection rackets, particularly in the city's East End and South Side. By the 1930s, Glasgow had acquired a reputation throughout Britain as a hotbed of gang violence and was regarded at the time as Britain's answer to Chicago, the epicenter of America's most violent warfare between organized crime. The gangs at this time were also referred to as Glasgow razor gangs, named after their weapon of choice.
One of Glasgow's most notorious gangs were the Billy Boys, a sectarian anti-Catholic gang, who were formed in 1924 by William Fullerton after he was attacked by a group of Catholic youths. Many gangs in the East End of Glasgow were both sectarian and territorial, whereas in other districts they were primarily territorial.
The gang culture prevalent in the older, central areas of the city such as the Gorbals which became overcrowded and substandard in living conditions, did not disappear when these areas were cleared and redeveloped following World War II with many of the inhabitants rehoused either in clusters of tower blocks or in large peripheral overspill estates like Easterhouse; instead, as the job opportunities became limited in the post-industrial age, the structural flaws, planning mistakes and related social issues became apparent in the schemes as the years passed, and heroin addiction spread throughout the city, new gangs formed in the modern environments and remained prominent for decades, particularly in Glasgow's many areas of deprivation and poor health where generations of young people suffered in childhood and found themselves with little to occupy their lives as teenagers other than a cycle of thrilling but pointless collective recreational violence against similar groups from neighbouring districts. This lifestyle was depicted years later in films such as Small Faces and Neds. Some of these young men moved into other criminal enterprises, including the operation of lucrative van routes in the city's East End "schemes" during the 1980s trading in stolen property and drugs, which were controlled by gangsters such as Tam McGraw, with the resulting "ice cream" turf war eventually culminating in the deaths of a family.
An Evening Times report in 2008 stated that there were 170 gangs in Glasgow whilst an earlier report in 2006 included a map showing the location and a list of Glasgow gangs. Along with incidents from other origins including domestic violence and organised crime, the street gangs' behaviour contributed to Glasgow being declared the "murder capital of Europe" in the mid-2000s. Gangs in Glasgow – some involved in the supply of drugs, housebreakings and other illegal activity but most simply a mob with minimal leadership structure, focused on enhancing their local reputation for notoriety and defending their "bit" – marked their territory with tags or graffiti, and adopted a particular style of dress and speech in each era, being defined as 'ned culture'. The majority of large-scale fights were organised in advance by phone calls, text messages and later by online contact, but at all times of the day rival neighbourhoods became "no-go areas" for gang members as well those young people who were not involved in the violence but could be identified as residing in another area.
The habitual carrying of knives and other weapons was common wherever the fear of attack was present, with serious and tragic consequences often resulting from confrontations when they did occur. Several campaigns were launched by law enforcement and government agencies to discourage the possession of weapons, including a 2009 programme of checks on buses heading to the city centre, where the gangs would meet to fight when they left their own territory. An earlier campaign of the 1990s, "Operation Blade", had initially appeared to produce results before the levels of weapon use and violence soon returned to previous levels and thereafter increased. Not all murders were gang-related, but the prevailing culture in the city caused weapons to be carried as a matter of course and, in combination with the abuse of alcohol, serious incidents to result from often trivial disputes.
The latter years of the 20th century saw an increase in Pakistani gangs, particularity in the South of Glasgow. Pakistani gangs came to wider attention following the racially motivated murder of Kriss Donald by local men of Pakistani origin in 2004. During that period, in the wake of the Donald murder, as well as a perception that asylum seekers who had been housed in empty properties in some of Glasgow's most run-down areas were being given priority over locals, some of the teenage gangs in those areas styled themselves as "nazis".
In the decade following the publication of the Evening Times reports, the number of young people involved in "young teams" in Glasgow and the number of serious violent incidents recorded as a result of their activities reduced substantially;
in 2016, contributors to an article in the same newspaper suggested the links to gang identity were deeply embedded in local communities and unlikely to entirely disappear for many years, but that measures to combat the problems such as the police-led Violence Reduction Unit had been effective to a noticeable extent.
Other external factors such as an increased availability of advanced internet-enabled gaming technology and the widespread use of social media among youngsters – which were acknowledged as having their own associated problems such as social isolation and online bullying, as well as allowing the "young teams" a platform to boast of their exploits and taunt rivals – also contributed to a general reduction in the number of local teenagers regularly out roaming the streets bored and seeking companionship or confrontation, with those who did openly express an affiliation to a violent gang more likely to face a negative reaction from the majority of their peers than in the past. In the wake of a rise in knife crime in England and Wales, particularly in London, in the 2010s, it was reported that those areas were studying the approaches taken by Scotland in tackling the issue.
However, it was recognised by the VRU that only around half of all violent incidents which occurred were reported to the police, while violence related to organised crime in parts of the city remained a significant issue. A 2020 novel by Graeme Armstrong, The Young Team, narrated by a gang member in the local dialect, focuses on the "ned culture" of the region in the early 21st century. In October 2023, Armstrong wrote and presented a three-part BBC Scotland documentary series, Street Gangs exploring Scottish gang culture including the recent impact of social media and drill music / roadman culture, and his own lived experience as a gang member 15 years earlier.