The English street gang and government policy

John Pitts outlines governmental responses to ‘gang’ and serious youth violence in the twenty-first century. He observes that although gang-related knife and gun crime among children and young people of African Caribbean descent was rising rapidly in London from 2004, it was the murder of Rhys Jones, an 11 year-old White boy, in Liverpool, in August 2007 that caused Prime Minister Gordon Brown to launch the Tackling Gangs Action Programme (TGAP). Later, the 2011 riots triggered the Ending Gang and Youth Violence programme of 2012, initially targeting 30 areas and extended to a further 22 in 2016. Evaluations of the programme were equivocal but by now the government’s focus had shifted to child sexual and criminal exploitation and County Lines drug dealing, withdrawing funds from local authorities and handing responsibility to the National Crime Agency. Nonetheless County Lines proliferated and knife crime soared, leading PM Theresa May to convene a Serious Youth Violence Summit in February 2019. Maintaining that we could not ‘arrest our way out of the problem’ May placed a requirement on health and welfare agencies to prioritise youth violence prevention. However, July 2019 saw the election of Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel who promised more stop and searches, more police and more prison places.