Race and gangs: towards a Black criminology

Suzella Palmer argues that much of (mainstream) UK gang research has obscured the ‘relevance of racism’, choosing instead to pathologies young black males. Although the implicit aim of this research is to reduce serious youth violence, it is hampered, she contends, by a failure to capture the lived realities of young black men; how they make sense of their experiences, how this informs their world view and how it shapes their behaviour. Her belief is that ‘Despite the numerous studies commissioned and conducted, numbers crunched, analysis and re-analysis of official statistics, and papers churned out on this issue, mainstream criminology in Britain is, for the most part, ‘out of touch’, with the Black communities that it has repeatedly scrutinised’. As a result, she argues, what is needed is a ‘Black criminology’ that identifies the unique, racially specific, conditions rooted in concentrated disadvantage in segregated communities, racial socialisation by parents, experiences with and perceptions of racial discrimination, and disproportionate involvement and unjust treatment in the criminal justice system.