Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

This study is based on a six-month project undertaken in Manchester aimed at reducing the incidence of gun crime, using targeted policing (and funds from the Home Office's Targeted Policing Initiative). The project is based around a similar initiative, Operation Cease-fire, which had proved to be successful in Boston, Massachusetts. Operation Cease-fire aimed to identify immediate and modifiable conditions under which gun crime could occur, rather than the underlying social causes that lead to gang and gun crime. A similar approach was used in Manchester.

Title: Shootings, gangs and violent incidents in Manchester: Developing a crime reduction strategy
Authors: Karen Bullock & Nick Tilley
Series: Home Office Research Series Paper 13
Number of pages: 2 (briefing note) or 68 (study paper)
Date published: October 2002

Main findings

Shootings

• Violence in general, gun violence in particular and fatal shootings are mostly concentrated in specific small areas.

• Victims of gun violence are mainly young, black or mixed race males, who have criminal records.

• Suspected perpetrators of serious gun violence tend to have similar attributes to victims.

• Those who have been victims of shootings are at increased risk of repeat incidents.

• Young black (and mixed race) male victims of shootings were generally known to have been involved in gangs.

• About 60 per cent of shootings are thought to be gang related.

Gangs

• There are differences in the make-up, origins, activities, and organisation of the gangs studied, though members of all are involved in a wide range of criminal behaviour.

• Gang-membership comprised a mix of same-age local friendship groups, blood relatives and recruits.

• Gang-related criminal behaviour includes drug-related offences, but only as one element of a patchwork of violent and non-violent crime.

• Rates of arrest for gang-members tend to fall as they age.

• Alliances are sometimes formed between gangs, but conflict is endemic and easily triggered.

• Firearms carrying by gang-members is at least partly protective and police intelligence records suggest that it may also be part symbolic and part instrumental for the commission of violent crime.

• There are strong norms of non-co-operation in police enquiries into gang-related shootings, in particular in giving evidence, which undermine successful prosecution of offenders.

Ways forward: The proposed crime reduction strategy

The primary concern of the project was to save lives and to reduce serious injury. The most promising interventions, adapted from the Boston project, were:

• Applying co-ordinated leverage to gangs through highly publicised multi-agency targeted crackdowns, aimed at gangs using firearms, possessing firearms or taking part in serious assaults

• Enhancing strong community relations, to obtain neighbourhood support for the targeted crackdowns and to stimulate community efficacy in informal social control and reduction in incivilities

• Engagement with gang-members to elicit information, to transmit consistent messages about targeted crackdowns, and to provide diversionary services.

Three additional elements were proposed to address the differing conditions for an initiative in Manchester. These were:

• Development of inter-gang mediation services, to head off and diffuse tensions that risk leading to serious incidents of violence, including shootings

• Protection for victims and repeat victims

• Sensitisation of agencies to the implications of their actions for gangs and the risks to their members, especially in the light of the provisions of Section 17 of the Crime and Disorder Act (1998).

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