Abstract
Despite the proliferation of research examining gang violence, little is known about how gang members experience, make sense of, and respond to peer fatalities. Drawing from two ethnographies in the Netherlands and Canada, this paper interrogates how gang members experience their affiliates’ murder in different street milieus. We describe how gang members in both studies made sense of and navigated their affiliates’ murder(s) by conducting pseudo-homicide investigations, being hypervigilant, and attributing blameworthiness to the victim. We then demonstrate that while the Netherland’s milder street culture amplifies the significance of homicide, signals the authenticity of gang life, and reaffirms or tests group commitment, frequent and normalized gun violence in Canada has desensitized gang-involved men to murder, created a communal and perpetual state of insecurity, and eroded group cohesion. Lastly, we compare the ‘realness’ of gang homicide in The Hague with the ‘reality’ of lethal violence in Toronto, drawing attention to the importance of the ‘local’ in making sense of murder and contrasting participants’ narratives of interpretation.
Highlights
Scholars have argued that violence is fundamental to gang life (Klein and Maxson 1989),“so that membership may have a seductively glorious, rather than mundane, indifferent, significance” (Katz 1988, p. 128)
While some classifications include homicides that are allegedly gang related, others necessitate the homicide be motivated by gang functions (Maxson and Klein 1990, 1996)
The extent to which gangs retaliate for affiliate homicides is unclear; one study found that 37% of homicides in Chicago amongst organized street gangs were reciprocated (Papachristos 2009)
Summary
Scholars have argued that violence is fundamental to gang life (Klein and Maxson 1989),. It is unsurprising that gang violence may be more pronounced in areas where competing gangs share an adjacent turf (Papachristos et al 2013) In such areas, victims/witnesses may be unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement due to distrust in police and strained police–community relationships, an adherence to “street codes” (Anderson 1999) which privilege street justice over police interventions, and/or due to intimidation and silencing (Miethe and McCorkle 2002). This can mask the prevalence and nature of gang violence from neighbourhood ‘outsiders’ (such as police) and can make preventing, investigating, and prosecuting gang homicides exceptionally difficult. Scholars studying social media and criminally-involved groups have begun to examine the role that social may play in inciting or repelling gang violence and homicide (see Urbanik et al 2020 for a review)
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