Policing the Olympic gang: the rise and fall of the Portuguese Mafia

ABSTRACT

Against a backdrop of rising youth violence in the UK, the issue of gang policing has once more risen to prominence. Intense debates surrounding police cuts have led to renewed calls for a ‘war on gangs’, echoing earlier responses to England’s summer of violent disorder in 2011. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of policing in the London Borough of Newham, this paper reports on a case-study of gang policing during a similarly fraught political moment. In the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics, a street-based group of minority ethnic youth – the so-called Portuguese Mafia (PGM) – became the primary focus for gang policing in the Borough. Though the group did not self-identify as a gang, their activities were inflated and became the subject of a targeted enforcement initiative. These distortions, we argue, resulted from the influence of political decision-making on the working practices of front-line police officers, amplified in a climate of austerity. Through the reconstruction of this ‘natural history’, we seek to contribute an empirical account of the ambiguities inherent in police definitions of gangs, and the discriminatory consequences of categorisation. Theoretically, the paper seeks to contribute a critical sociological account of gangs and gang policing that bridges extant objectivist and constructivist readings of gangs through engagement with the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’.

KEYWORDS:

• Gangs
• youth
• Olympics
• policing
• security
• labelling
• Bourdieu
• field

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 UK Government (2011). ‘PM’s speech on the fightback after the riots’. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-on-the-fightback-after-the-riots [Accessed 15 February 2018].

2 http://www.newham.info/IAS/profiles/profile?profileId=126&geoTypeId=6&geoIds=00BB.

3 The Newham Housing Survey 2009 identified that 38,800 households were living in unsuitable housing, with overcrowding being the main reason (LBN and NHS Newham 2011, p. 85). At that time there were 101,000 dwellings in Newham (LBN and NHS Newham 2011, p. 83).

4 The 2001 Census reported that Newham was the UK’s most ethnically diverse local authority with almost 61% of residents being from non-white ethnic groups (Piggott 2004). There are more than 30 different ethnic communities in the borough, where over 300 languages are spoken (Newham Language Shop 2005).

5 Support for this period of fieldwork was received from the Economic and Social Research Council (Award Ref. Blinded for Review).

6 Confusingly the top ‘nominal’ in 2012 had no gang affiliation – a fact he celebrated to both police and peers. He robbed – often at gunpoint – street-level drug dealers of any named collective safe in the knowledge that this robbery would not become a crime statistic.

7 Particularly notable in this context are the highly racialised nature of these practices (Alexander 2008). Concerns were particualrly raised in Newham in relation to the racialised nature of stop and search (NMP 2012).

8 Under Section 44 of the 2007 UK Border Act the police had the right to ask anyone, regardless of the cause of arrest, for proof of nationality. As the DCI enthused:

It’s a massive power rarely used. If they say ‘Lisbon’ as their place of birth – don’t accept it – it’s the only place they’ve heard of in Portugal where they claim they’re from. If they say ‘Angola’ they might be eligible for deportation. And we can get a Section 18 and search their premises for evidence.

9 For further discussion of the use of stop and search, including strip searches, during the Olympics, see NMP (2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant Number ESRC – RES-062-23-2738].