“…After the 2011 England riots were wrongly pinned on gangs (Densley and Mason, 2011; Densley, 2013), Prime Minister David Cameron (2011) made tackling them his ‘national priority’. A national Ending Gang and Youth Violence (see Disley and Liddle, 2016) strategy followed that was heavily criticised for failing to establish an evidence-based operational definition of a gang, for ignoring the academic state of knowledge on gangs and what works in gang intervention, and for wasting taxpayers’ money on initiatives that were neither clearly described nor comprehensively evaluated (Densley and Jones, 2016; Fraser et al, 2018; Shute and Medina, 2014; Smithson and Ralphs, 2016). Related interventions, such as civil gang injunctions, the application of ‘joint enterprise’ doctrine to gang members, and The Metropolitan Police’s database or ‘Matrix’ of gang suspects, were similarly criticised for the collective punishment and criminalisation of innocent young people (Amnesty International, 2018; Cottrell-Boyce, 2013; Williams and Clark, 2016).…”