How aggressive policing plays out in one neighbourhood in a Canadian city where gang policing has been in place for years

According to the first of today's Five Studies About+: Gangs

Welcome to The Art of Explaining Crime, the independent newsletter that helps you think and write about crime.

Two editions of Five Studies About are published each week: Five Studies About (free) and Five Studies About+ (paid, more in-depth). Each is a tip sheet where I curate recent crime and justice studies related to one topic. Today’s topic is gangs.

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Photo by David Stewart, credit to homegets.com, CC BY 2.0. Modified by Aaron Jacklin in Canva.

These new crime studies related to gangs were recently published by journals I monitor. Each of the following study listings include two quotations from the study’s abstract. The first quote discusses what they set out to find and the second describes what they found.

For some studies, I may also offer my own thoughts, which I try to limit to suggestions relevant to the purpose of the newsletter. In those cases, I often pose questions you might have when considering research you come across and offer suggestions for how to answer them.

1. Racial Tropes of ‘Street Gangs’ and the Aggressive Policing of Black Youth and Other Youth of Colour [The British Journal of Criminology]

What they sought: “The article examines police violence towards Black youth and other youth of colour in a neighbourhood of Montreal where gang policing has been in force for years.”

What they found: “It combines findings from qualitative interviews with young people and evidence on gang policing to argue that racial tropes of ‘street gangs’ legitimate aggressive policing by reinforcing racial ideologies of innate Black deviance and conflating delinquency with mature criminality. Aggressive policing results in excessive police stops, coercion and intimidation, and acts of verbal and physical abuse.”