Situating gangs within Scotland’s illegal drugs market(s)

Abstract

The Scottish government's (2008) publication 'The road to recovery: A new approach to tackling Scotland's drug problem' elaborates and outlines the Scottish National Party's (SNP) desire to make Scotland 'drug free' by 2019. To achieve this objective, the Scottish Government's (2015) 'Serious Organised Crime Strategy' (SSOCS) entails dismantling networks of drug supply. Yet missing from this strategic planning is a) recognition of how, if at all, different types of gangs are involved in drug supply, and b) how drug supply processes actually work. Therefore, this article seeks to extend McLean's (J Deviant Behav, 2017) Scottish gang model, which specifies a typology of gangs in Scotland, in an effort to locate precise levels of gang involvement in the drugs market. This is achieved by drawing upon Pearson and Hobbs' (2001) hierarchical model of the UK's illegal drug(s) market. In-depth interviews with 35 offenders involved in criminal networks and five practitioners, indicate that recreational Youth Street Gangs are really only involved in 'social supply'. Youth Criminal Gangs are primarily involved in commercially motivated dealing at the low-to mid-levels, including bulk-buying between the retail-to-wholesale markets. And enterprising Serious Organised Crime Gangs operate from the middle-to-apex market level. Conclusions which situate this gang typology within the illegal drug market(s) are used to put forward recommendations aimed at dismantling of drug supply networks.

Deficit or Credit? A Comparative, Qualitative Study of Gender Agency and Female Gang Membership in Los Angeles and Glasgow

“…Most spoke of assaulting would-be rivals should they be shown the slightest disrespect or default on outstanding drug debts. When drug supply became more than business and spilled over into the personal arena, there was a greater risk that violence would ensue, thus proving detrimental to business (McLean et al, 2017). Women with a more agentic business engagement with the gang appear therefore to be less distracted by the need to raise their street capital through violence.…”

Putting the ‘Street’ in Gang: Place and Space in the Organization of Scotland’s Drug-Selling Gangs

“…The insights from our research could provide more depth to the existing knowledgebase of the SOCT and the ongoing strategic policy discussions within the Scottish Government and practice-oriented debates among senior officers within Police Scotland and the wider partner agencies involved in tackling OC. The findings could hold the capacity to support Detectives and members of wider agencies with their ongoing vision to divert, deter, detect and disrupt members of SOCGs by providing them with a new evidencebase that suggests the need to target linchpin areas such as YCGs, while simultaneously avoiding the situation whereby minor offenders (who may be members of YSGs or reluctant associates) are brought into the fold, or criminalized (McLean et al 2018). However, we also believe that the applicability of our research goes beyond the implications for the official and rather pedestrian divert/deter/detect/disrupt policy discourse that tends to dominate the law enforcement landscape in Scotland as it relates to OC.…”

“…Gangs may or may not control drug markets, but gang members certainty participate in them and can benefit greatly from their gang's territorial control of a marketplace (Levitt and Venkatesh 2000;Tita and Ridgeway 2007;Decker et al 2008;Bjerregaard 2010;Taniguchi et al 2011;Densley 2013). As we have argued elsewhere (McLean et al 2018), however, there is a continuing lack of understanding about how varying levels of gang organization affect levels and types of gang offending, including drug dealing, within particular geographical settings, and how this, in turn, informs gang members' relationship with physical space. Nowhere is this gap more salient than within the Scottish context, where 'gangs' have historically been viewed solely through the lens of recreational violence guided by a strong sense of tangible, physical territorial space (Fraser 2015).…”

“…This is especially true in the United Kingdom, which initially resisted examining youth group dynamics in terms of 'gangs'(see Campbell and Muncer 1989). Drawing upon our previous work in Scotland (McLean et al 2018), the current study explores how gang territory evolves over time; the shifts in social relationships, visibility and forms of social control in neighbourhood settings; and how this is influenced by emergent local drug economies. We ask whether gang members' perceptions of territory change from bounded physicality to interpersonal, abstract, or relational as the gang evolves, and (in relation to Bourdieu's theories) how habitus, social field and street capital interact in relation to neighbourhood 'turf'.…”

The Rise of Drug Dealing in the Life of the North American Street Gang

“…This article argues that the answer lies in understanding another war that North America was waging toward the end of the Twentieth Century-the War on Drugs. The overlap between gangs and drug sales is well-documented in the literature e.g., [14][15][16], including outside of the United States [9,[17][18][19], but the influence that illicit drugs had on gang proliferation, organization, and violence in the U.S. is a story only partially told e.g., [20][21][22]. The narrative goes something like this: gangs seized upon the availability of illicit drugs, particularly crack cocaine, as a means of income.…”