Early Identification of Violent Criminal Gang Members

Gang violence is a major problem in the United States accounting for a large fraction of homicides and other violent crime. In this paper, we study the problem of early identification of violent gang members. Our approach relies on modified centrality measures that take into account additional data of the individuals in the social network of co-arrestees which together with other arrest metadata provide a rich set of features for a classification algorithm. We show our approach obtains high precision and recall (0.89 and 0.78 respectively) in the case where the entire network is known and out-performs current approaches used by law-enforcement to the problem in the case where the network is discovered overtime by virtue of new arrests - mimicking real-world law-enforcement operations. Operational issues are also discussed as we are preparing to leverage this method in an operational environment.Comment: SIGKDD 201

"I’ve been there, done that…" : a study of youth gang desistance

This article, based on research conducted in Glasgow, Scotland, analyses the complex process of desistance from youth gangs. The discussion is multifaceted focusing on the agency of the young people themselves as well as on how relationships within their local community can have a role in replacing their previous identification as gang members. It explores what is meant by a youth gang, why some young people stop identifying with the youth gang and argues that the local community and broader society have a role in providing social recognition and identity-enhancement opportunities for these young people

Youth Gang Violence and Guns: Data Collection in California

Provides an overview of data on youth gang-related homicides, the role of firearms in the rising lethality of gang violence, and the state of data collection. Illustrates the need for a comprehensive database to support effective prevention policies

Gangs, Guns, and Drugs: Recidivism among Serious, Young Offenders

The primary goal of this study is to understand the factors that best explain recidivism among a sample of 322 young men aged 17 to 24 years released from prison in a Midwestern state. Specific attention is paid to the predictive validity of gang membership, gun use, and drug dependence on the timing of reconviction and the current research on desistance frames the analyses. Results from a series of proportional hazard models indicate that race, gang membership, drug dependence, and institutional behavior are critical factors in predicting the timing of reconviction. Contrary to expectations, gun use was not related to postrelease involvement in the criminal justice system

Representing the riots: the (mis)use of statistics to sustain ideological explanation

This paper analyses the way that figures were used to support two kinds of accounts of the riots of August 2011 prevalent in media coverage and in pronouncements by government ministers. The first of these accounts suggested that the rioters were typically characterised by uncivilized predispositions. The second kind of account suggested that damage to property was typically irrational or indiscriminate. These accounts echo discredited ‘convergence’ and ‘submergence’ explanations in early crowd psychology. We show that the ‘convergence’ explanation – that the rioters were typically ‘career criminals’ or gang-members – was based on arrest figures, treating as unproblematic the circular way that such data was produced (with those already known to the police most likely to be identified and arrested). The ‘submergence account – the suggestion that violence was typically indiscriminate or irrational – was based in part on grouping together attacks on properties in different districts; those areas where 'anyone and anything' was attacked were affluent districts where the target was the rich district itself. Like their academic counterparts, the two types of accounts of the riots of August 2011 are profoundly ideological, for they serve to render the riots marginal and meaningless rather than indicative of wider problems in society

Youth gangs, sexual violence and sexual exploitation: a scoping exercise for the Office of the Children's Commissioner for England

This report presents the findings of a scoping exercise on the issue of youth gangs, sexual violence and sexual exploitation, derived from key informant interviews and a literature review