Gang Injunctions Research Articles

Assessing the Impact of Civil Gang Injunctions on the Use of Online Media by Criminal Street Gangs

Assessing the Impact of Civil Gang Injunctions on the Use of Online Media by Criminal Street Gangs

Does the public support anti-gang policies and practices and can opinions be swayed? Experimental evidence from a National Survey of Americans

PurposeFor the last five decades, gangs have been a criminal justice priority, commanding the attention of police, courts, and corrections. Legislative bodies and local, state, and federal agencies have adapted or engineered policies and practices to combat the influence of gangs. While these efforts have been subject to inquiry by researchers and media, they have largely been uninformed by public opinion. MethodsWe surveyed 1000 adults in the United States to understand public support for five common yet controversial responses to gangs spearheaded by the criminal justice system. ResultsThere was a widespread consensus of support for police gang databases, civil gang injunctions, Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO), and sentencing enhancements, but not solitary confinement. Respondents were not swayed by the experimental presentation of evidence of racial disparities in gang databases or the psychological impacts of solitary confinement; support for civil gang injunctions fell when learning of potential constitutional violations but not violence reduction; support for RICO fell when learning of the organizational structure of street gangs and the potential for guilt-by-association; and sentencing enhancements were no longer supported upon learning the financial cost. ConclusionsPublic opinion maintains a significant role in criminal justice policy and practice on gangs that criminologists should subject to research and evaluation. This research underscores the importance of evidence-based policy formulation and the need for ongoing dialogue between the public, researchers, and policymakers to address challenges as complex and inexorable as gangs and gang violence in communities.

A Foucauldian Analysis of Gang Injunctions

Gang injunctions emerged during the 1980s with the expansion of prisons, targeting alleged street gang members and their spaces of association. This essay examines gang injunctions, or street gang restraining orders, in Southern California through a Foucauldian framework. Applying a critical analysis of court documents found at law enforcement agencies and district or city attorney offices, I offer a broad insight into gang injunctions , focusing on the county of San Diego. I argue that gang injunctions are significant: although these injunctions are neutral prima facie or on the face of race and ethnicity, they structurally embody ongoing legacies of criminalizing people of color through mechanisms associated with the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration. Gang injunctions embody the surveillance and disciplinary practices of the panopticon created by power and knowledge within civil society and illustrate biopolitical policies implemented by the state that exclusively target purported alleged street gang members in their communities. As gang injunctions systematically criminalize Latina/o street gangs and their communities, they have detrimental effects on all members as their enforcers are motivated by politics and overactive control over specific geographies. This study proposes that gang injunctions create a direct pipeline from civil society to prison.

Territory, residency, and routine activities: A typology of gang member mobility patterns with implications for place-based interventions

PurposeThe current study examines the mobility patterns of gang associates in East Los Angeles using Field Investigation (FI) cards collected by police officers to document informal encounters with civilians. MethodsWe construct a typology classifying each stop in relation to a gang associate's claimed territory, residence, and the location of the stop. We then report on the distribution of mobility types and describe the individual-, event-, and gang-level characteristics commonly associated with each. ResultsOur findings suggest that there is significant variability in the mobility patterns of gang associates, and that associates often live outside their gang's turf, sometimes returning to their turf, but often spending time away from their turf. ConclusionsThese results have implications for place-based gang interventions and suggest that all gangs may not be equally suited to interventions such as civil gang injunctions.

Justice or Just Us? Social Death, Gang Injunctions, and the Creation of a Modern American Apartheid State

This article will discuss the practice of civil gang injunctions in Southern California, its history, and civil court procedures. It explores the gang abatement method's unconstitutionality through the lens of the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, critiquing the unequal treatment of people of color in the justice system. Through philosophical theories of language and authoritarian control, the article will go on to discuss how a supposedly egalitarian nation like the United States could support and continue the utilization of such a harmful tactic. Finally, the article will contextualize gang injunctions with the South African practice of apartheid and argue that it fits the classification of an apartheid policy under the definitions of the international court and other international treaties.

Threat, Latinx Racialization, and Grassroots Leadership: Understanding Mobilization in Southern California’s Anti-Gang Injunction Movement

Under what conditions do Latinx communities mobilize in response to threats of repressive policing? This article addresses this question by comparing three cases of community organizing against civil gang injunctions. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, 20 semi-structured interviews, and analysis of news reports, my findings reveal that mobilization was achieved in low-income Latinx neighborhoods located within affluent White cities, where organizers drew upon strong ties to community insiders to combine analyses of the threat of citywide gang injunctions with critiques of White racism and political power. Conversely, mobilization did not occur when this strategy was used to organize a low-income Latinx neighborhood within a primarily working-class, Latinx city, where organizers confronted a more narrowly targeted gang injunction and had weaker ties to community insiders. I argue this lack of mobilization in the latter campaign cannot only be attributed to the insufficient threat posed by the gang injunction. Rather, local racial and ethnic dynamics, where Chicanx organizers struggled to develop grassroots leadership among community insiders, build solidarity with first-generation Latinx immigrants and link threats of repressive policing to anti-Latinx racism impeded mobilization. These findings highlight how popular mobilization against perceived threats of repressive policing is not race-neutral but instead depends upon racial and ethnic contexts where organizers can effectively link the issue to White racism.

The terrifying abyss of insignificance: Marginalisation, mattering and violence between young people

The concept of mattering can be helpful for understanding the ways in which structural and historical factors affect individual psychologies. This paper lays out the usefulness of mattering as a lens through which to examine why a small minority of young people in Britain commit violent acts. We first explore what it means to matter and the evidence linking the quest to matter with violence, and then examine the factors in contemporary Britain which can diminish a young person’s sense of mattering, using recent community research. We then critique the British government’s attempt to address the problem of violence through Gang Injunctions and Knife Crime Prevention Orders. We conclude by suggesting that policy-makers could gain substantial insight from investigating the connections between marginalisation, mattering and violence, rather than focusing disproportionately on the music young people choose to listen to or create, or the specific weapon that they opt to carry.

Chicanx histories of the present: a praxis against gang injunctions in Orange County, California, 2008–2016

Chicanxs Unidxs de Orange County (CU) is a community organisation in Southern California. Founded in 2006, CU is small, multigenerational and multi-ethnic. Its organising has focused predominantly on building community power by focusing on local politics, abusive policing and the gentrification of Chicanx neighbourhoods. This article presents an evidence-based narrative of several CU campaigns (primarily between 2008 and 2016). CU’s tactical aggressiveness and strategic pragmatism forced significant changes to ‘civil gang injunctions’ in California. For decades, California law enforcement has used such injunctions to suppress a generation of young people of colour as ‘gang members’. Minors and adults have been prohibited indefinitely from engaging in otherwise legal activities without due process. CU’s emphasis on the longevity of institutionalised and societal racism, rooted in the colonial conquest, resembles arguments associated with critical race theory (CRT) – though CU was not inspired by CRT. CU’s praxis resembles practices of critical pedagogy – though it was not directly modelled on it either. Rather, we argue that CU’s praxis is embedded in the members’ lived experience and study of the local history of racism, community and social movements. All five of this article’s authors were members of CU and were involved in the organising described in this article. The authors wrote this at the request of the CU membership, and it has been discussed and revised by the full membership.

The Impact of the City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) Comprehensive Strategy on Crime in the City of Los Angeles

The City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) program was conceived as a comprehensive response to gang violence. Unlike most comprehensive approaches, suppression was excluded from the primary model. Program services including community engagement, gang prevention and intervention services, and street-based violence interruption, were formally launched in late 2011. Strict geographic eligibility criteria mean that GRYD services were available in some Los Angeles communities and not others. Using the geographic structure of GRYD, we use a place-based difference-in-differences model to estimate the effect of GRYD services on both violent and property crime. The analyses suggest a reduction in violent crime of around 18% in areas exposed to GRYD Comprehensive Strategy services, including aggravated assault and robbery. Similar declines are not observed in property crimes including burglary and car theft. Comparison with evaluations of placed-based gang injunctions demonstrate that GRYD is able to achieve nearly one-half of the reductions in crime without a suppression focus.

Civilizing Space or Criminalizing Place: Using Routine Activities Theory to Better Understand How Legal Hybridity Spatially Regulates “Deviant Populations”

The combining of administrative, civil, and criminal law has broadened modern crime control mechanisms and greatly increased the legal authority and discretion of law enforcement officers. Such legal hybridity has contributed specifically to the pervasiveness of spatial regulatory practices (or spatial remedies), such as the use of banishment policies and civil gang injunctions (CGIs), by police in urban centers. While banishment policies and CGIs exemplify the reliance on legal hybridity to manage “deviant” populations spatially, empirical evidence suggests that spatial remedies guided by the theoretical underpinnings of deterrence and broken windows perspectives are not efficacious at predicting observed behavioral changes. We argue for a critical approach to understanding disobedience to spatial remedies, suggesting that routine activities theory is an appropriate framework to expose why these mechanisms fail to generate robust compliance or remedy problem areas.

Evolving Patterns of Aggression: Investigating the Structure of Gang Violence during the Era of Civil Gang Injunctions

Mapping the structural characteristics of attack behavior, this study explores how violent conflict evolved with the implementation of civil gang injunctions (CGIs). Networks were generated by linking defendants and victims named in 963 prosecutions involving street gangs active in the City of Los Angeles (1998–2013). Aggregating directed ties to 318 groups associated with the combatants, we compare four observations that correspond with distinct phases of CGI implementation—development (1998–2001), assent (2002–2005), maturity (2006–2009), and saturation (2010–2013). Using a triad census to calculate a ratio of simple patterns (retaliation, directed lines, and out-stars) to complex three-way interactions, we observed that CGIs were associated with a substantive thickening of conflict—greater complexity was found in conflict relations over time. Dissecting the nature of change, stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs) show that enjoined gangs are more likely to initiate transitive closure. The findings suggest that crime control efforts must make regular adjustments in response to the evolving structure of gang interactions.

Assessing the impact of civil gang injunctions on the use of online media by criminal street gangs

Assessing the impact of civil gang injunctions on the use of online media by criminal street gangs

Policing the beats: The criminalisation of UK drill and grime music by the London Metropolitan Police

As debates on the rise of violent crime in London unfold, UK drill music is routinely accused of encouraging criminal behaviour among young Black Britons from deprived areas of the capital. Following a series of bans against drill music videos and the imposition of Criminal Behaviour Orders and gang injunctions against drill artists, discussions on the defensibility of such measures call for urgent, yet hitherto absent, sociological reflections on a topical issue. This article attempts to fill this gap, by demonstrating how UK drill and earlier Black music genres, like grime, have been criminalised and policed in ways that question the legitimacy of and reveal the discriminatory nature of policing young Black people by the London Metropolitan Police as the coercive arm of the British state. Drawing on the concept of racial neoliberalism, the policing of drill will be approached theoretically as an expression of the discriminatory politics that neoliberal economics facilitates in order to exclude those who the state deems undesirable or undeserving of its protection.

Implicit revanchism: Gang injunctions and the security politics of white liberalism

As part of our theorization of the place-making conduct of new residents living in a gentrifying neighborhood of Los Angeles, we identify a curious paradox in which white liberals openly disavow ov...

Effect of Gang Injunctions on Crime: A Study of Los Angeles from 1988–2014

To assess the effect of civil gang injunctions on crime. We use data on the location and date of 46 gang injunctions between 1993 and 2013 and quarterly crimes reported to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1988 to 2014. We estimate the effect of gang injunctions on crime over the short-term (20 quarters) and long-term (108 quarters) using difference-in-differences designs that take into account spatial and temporal correlation. Three gang injunctions were paused during the study period and provide a natural experiment from which we estimate the short-term effect of these injunctions on crime. Gang injunctions are estimated to reduce total crime 5% in the short-term and 18% in the long-term, most of the effect coming from reductions in assaults. Analyses of the three interrupted injunctions yielded estimates of similar magnitude, providing further support of a crime reduction effect of gang injunctions. We found no evidence that gang injunctions are associated with displacing crime to nearby areas. Injunctions represent a powerful place-based intervention strategy for police and prosecutors. Courts have recently subjected gang injunctions to closer scrutiny. This study indicates that gang injunctions contributed to a meaningful amount of the crime reductions in Los Angeles. Future research should examine whether gang injunctions reduce crime by specific deterrent effects on individual gang members or by the general deterrent effect of placing an area under greater police surveillance and restricting public gatherings and other actions deemed to be indicators of gang activity.

The Impact of Civil Gang Injunctions on Networked Violence Between the Bloods and the Crips

Comparing the centrality of gangs and changing structure in attack behavior, this study examines the effects of civil gang injunctions (CGIs) on violence involving 23 gangs (seven Bloods and 16 Crips) operating in Southern California. We mapped violence networks by linking defendants and victims named in 272 court cases prosecuted in the City of Los Angeles (1997-2015), involving at least one conviction for a violent crime and a defendant tried as an adult. The results show that a small number of gangs are centrally located in a dynamic web of non-reciprocated conflict that exhibited complex hierarchical structures. These results raise four implications for combating gang violence.

Do Gang Injunctions Reduce Violent Crime? Four Tests in Merseyside, UK

Research QuestionDid gang members and gangs named by police in four separate court-ordered 24-month injunctions, issued at different times, reduce the frequency and harm of crimes they committed, and suffer fewer crimes against themselves as well?DataThe study examined criminal histories of 36 members of four gangs for a 36-month period before and a 36-month period after their respective injunctions. Data also included records of crimes committed against the gang members in the same time periods. Criminal activity was measured by arrests, station interviews, fixed penalty notices and summonses. Days offenders spent in custody, which rose during the gang injunction periods, were removed from denominators calculating rates, so that the estimates of changes in offender behaviour and victimisations are all based on their days at liberty and out of prison or jail.MethodsThe study compared the magnitude of change in both individual-level and gang-level measures of crime and victimisation from before to after the issuance of the injunction as ‘natural quasi-experiments’, with comparisons made to other gangs in Liverpool which had not been subjects of injunctions.FindingsAcross all 36 gang members, their individual offending counts dropped by 70% in the 3 years after their gang injunctions, while the Cambridge Crime Harm Index weight of the seriousness of their total crimes dropped by 61%. Fewer criminal events were attributed to 92% of the individuals in the second 3-year period than in the first, while only 8% increased their detected activity. Taking the four gangs as the unit of analysis, their offences dropped by 74% in the 3 years after the injunctions, while their Crime Harm Index weight dropped by 70%. Victimisation of the gang members in their 3-year post-injunction period dropped by 60% compared to the pre-injunction period. Comparisons between gangs with injunctions and gangs without showed downward crime trends in the injunction gangs that were not observed in the comparisons during the same time periods, but regression to the mean could not be ruled out as an explanation for the findings.ConclusionsThe evidence for the effectiveness of gang injunctions in reducing crime harm is stronger than the evidence for most police practices. There is no evidence in this study of these injunctions causing crime to increase. Police agencies may be encouraged to use such powers when available, as long as they track the trends with sufficient care to detect any potential backfire effects.

Public histories of incarceration: reflecting on museums and social change

ABSTRACTCalifornia has a long history of criminalizing youth of color. Gang injunctions and the policies which structure the “school to prison pipeline” are contemporary expressions of this. As members of the graduate student curatorial team at the University of California Riverside, our contribution to the Humanities Action Lab’s national exhibition States of Incarceration was to chart the genealogy of sites of surveillance and policing of bodies of color, from the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, CA, to the streets of 1940s Los Angeles, to the public schools and diverse urban neighborhoods of the twenty-first century. In Detention: The War on Youth treats the policies, practices, and sites of policing and surveillance of youthful bodies as the building blocks of a carceral state which has as its end goal the social control of particular kinds of racialized bodies. As our nation’s carceral project continues to expand, we, as public historians, are called to respond to the crisis. We must continue to make public the histories of surveillance, policing, and incarcerating black and brown bodies.

Loosening the ties that bind: the hidden harms of civil gang injunctions in San Diego County

Civil gang injunctions (CGIs) are court-ordered restraining orders that are being utilized in the name of controlling the daily routine of alleged gang members, reducing crime, and eliminating ‘public nuisances’ in working-class neighborhoods of color. In this study, we draw upon interviews and court observations conducted between 2009 and 2014 in San Diego County to examine the perceptions of a subset of those who have been listed on CGIs or other gang suppression methods, and those who work closely with them, about their individual and collective impacts. We find that the men and women in our study experience several hidden harms of gang enforcement measures that damage their ability to connect with others in the community, including their own family members and friends; and reduce their ability to pursue opportunities related to education, housing, and employment. We demonstrate that the loss of these bonds to community and opportunities, leads to perceptions of injustice and, in some instances, a transformation in gang activity, rather than its elimination. Ultimately, these exploratory findings raise questions about the logic and justice of gang suppression.

New guidance on gang injunctions

The Home Office recently published statutory guidance on injunctions to prevent gang-related violence and drug dealing