The Disproportionality Project: Addressing issues relating to the disproportionately high representation of Islington’s and Haringey’s BAME young people in the Criminal Justice System

This report presents the findings and recommendations from the second partnership project involving Islington Borough Council and criminologists at City, University of London. The first project, Enhancing the work of the Islington Integrated Gangs Team, was published in 2019. This second project involved evaluating a programme designed to tackle key issues and outcomes relating to the disproportionate representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) young people in the Criminal Justice System and beyond

Respectability and boundary making on a superdiverse housing estate: The cross-racial deployment of intra-ethnic stereotypes

This article examines how white British residents of a superdiverse London housing estate learn about—and subsequently deploy—the intra-ethnic stereotypes used by their British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi neighbours/flatmates. Building on recent attempts to bring together conviviality and boundary making, along with insights into intra-ethnic othering, we show how, for white British residents, these stereotypes offered the chance to add detail and authenticity to judgements about the “unrespectable” behaviour of British Asian residents and/or visitors. Ultimately, however, white British residents' inappropriate and/or imprecise deployment of these stereotypes in relation to British Bangladeshis and British Pakistanis led to the misidentification of low-status people and the unfair extension of discrimination faced by low-status individuals and families. Furthermore, the combination of clumsy application and the positioning of “respectable” British Bangladeshis and British Pakistanis as purveyors of “insider knowledge” about intra-ethnic stereotypes led to the reinscribing of boundaries between racial groups. We conclude that studying the cross-racial use of intra-ethnic stereotypes allows for a subtler appreciation of the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in superdiverse areas

Interrogating the Public Health Approach: Lessons from the Field of Urban Violence

Governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought public health discourse to the fore in societies around the world. The public health idiom had already made serious inroads into understandings of, and attempts to address, urban violence (particularly among young men). With COVID-19 almost inevitably becoming ‘endemic’, the role of public health discourse will only become further entrenched and extend to the analysis of a wider range of societal ‘ills’ (not all of which are directly connected with COVID-19 and other Corona viruses). This article seeks to analyse the application of the public health approach to attempts to address urban violence using fieldwork conducted in London. As explained more fully below, the fieldwork was carried out in a number of settings across the English capital, between 2009 and 2018. We are especially interested in interrogating the public health model on its own terms. For example: What is the disease? How are symptoms identified and gauged? Who are the victims? How is the ‘cure’ formulated and administered? And how is recovery from the social ill of urban violence captured and calibrated? More prosaically, while we know about some of the theoretical-conceptual implications of viewing urban violence through a public health frame (Riemann 2019), we know less about how these implications play out in the everyday settings wherein agencies are expected to work together to combat urban violenc

Enhancing the work of the Islington Integrated Gangs Team: A pilot study on the response to serious youth violence in Islington

This report is the result of research conducted by the Centre for City Criminology at City, University of London, in partnership with Islington’s Integrated Gangs Team (IGT) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). The research was co-funded by MPS and the School of Arts and Social Sciences, City, University of London. Following a collaborative research event in October 2017, City Criminologists were commissioned to carry out a small-scale research project to capture the work of the IGT and to make recommendations regarding its operations, coherence, effectiveness and sustainability. The research team conducted semi-structured interviews over several months with 23 practitioners across the services that constitute the IGT. This report presents the findings and recommendations