Turning down the noise and breaking down the wall of silence on gun crime by Professor Peter Squires

[May 2008]

A continuing problem in tackling gun crime in Britain has been the reluctance of victims to report it or witnesses to come forwards with evidence. The difficulties that the police had while investigating the Rhys Jones murder were not untypical.

Fearing reprisal and the consequences of telling the police is often given as an explanation for why witnesses do not come forward. However, it is too often overlooked that the communities wracked by gun crime often have some of the least satisfactory experiences of policing with little trust and confidence in the police. This is a problem in itself.

Furthermore, criminologists have long recognised that the fullest information and evidence about criminality is likely to be found from those individuals closest to it – a criminal's family, friends and neighbours. This poses further problems. Looking at the profiles of gun offenders and their victims, they are often very similar. Certain communities are paying a very high price for the violence and retaliation these groups seem prepared to inflict upon each other.

While gun crime is actually pretty rare in Britain, it is concentrated in a number of areas where it has a devastating impact upon communities. To understand it better and, more importantly, to deal with it more effectively we have to disentangle the real problems from the outrage, vengeance or fear and political ‘tough-talking' that are too often our natural responses.

Less than 0.5% of recorded crime involves guns. Furthermore around half of all gun crime involves only air weapons, and about half of what remains involves replica guns. Guns are mostly used to threaten, rather than to shoot (handguns were fired in only 12% of the times they were used in crimes). Finally, guns (excluding air weapons) caused serious or fatal injuries on only 3% of the occasions they were used. None of this is intended to diminish the seriousness or tragedy of gun crime, but we have to know what we are dealing with.

There are two issues at hand with relation to gun crime in the UK. One relates to gun supply and the other to the demand for and use of guns. In 1998, following the horror of the Dunblane school shootings, handguns were banned, but it took a further eight years for the government to recognise and tighten up (in the 2006 Violent Crime Reduction Act) the legislation relating to air guns, replica weapons, convertible weapons and deactivated weapons.

So much for the gun supply, but we also need to address the demand for and use of guns. Gun crime is generally not the preserve of amoral, cold-blooded and premeditated killers. All too often shootings result from recklessness, stupidity and bravado; the result of dangerous objects falling into immature hands. And so it is with much contemporary gun crime.

Guns are not exactly falling into immature hands, rather they are being put there by serious offenders, who are perhaps under close police surveillance themselves, and who want younger, gullible, people to do their dirty work for them and who don't want to be caught in possession of illegal firearms.

Recent research* has thrown new light upon the nature of gang cultures in communities. Beyond an inner circle of seriously offending ‘gang' members there are likely to be many more ‘wannabe' gangsters – immature and impressionable young men with few mainstream skills or opportunities and who see crime or drug dealing a way to achieving the flash lifestyle they aspire towards. And there are many more young people whose gang affiliations are likely to be much more ambiguous, even reluctant, but who are bullied or coerced into anti-social and offending activities from a very early age. For these individuals, compliance is safer than risking being the victims of these very gangs.

What can be done?

Acknowledging these features of the ‘gang' problem in some of our cities today suggest that a number of things need to be addressed:

1. We need to take seriously the disadvantage, social exclusion and discrimination which exposes many young men (and especially young black men) to the lure of the gangster life and leaves them with relatively few alternative opportunities.
2. Effective community projects are needed to tackle the low-level bullying and anti-social behaviour which, from an early age, can draw young people into criminal involvements that they later find difficult to escape.
3. There have to be reliable escape options, exit strategies and safe houses allowing those wanting to get out of gang culture and criminality to get clear.
4. We need to capitalise on the kinds of successful mentoring and support schemes developing in parts of the country, employing street-wise and credible ex-offenders who are able to help steer young people away from the violent life.
5. We have to develop more reliable and focused witness and victim support arrangements. These need to be based on a recognition that not only will communities at large benefit from a halt to the violence, but so will many of the more reluctantly engaged young men themselves. This can only develop where trust and confidence in the police is restored and the recommendations here in points three, four and six are in place.
6. We need to learn from American experience of anti-gang projects in Boston and Chicago. The issue of most concern is lethal violence and this needs to be prioritised compared with other less serious offences.

And finally, none of this takes any emphasis at all away from the need for robust police enforcement action against the serious and dangerous offenders, who are at the core of the spate of gang activity that certain communities have had to endure over recent decades. However, viewed as a whole, gangs and gun violence are a result of social problems that enforcement on its own will not solve.

Author note

Peter Squires is the Professor of Criminology and Public Policy at the University of Brighton. He is the author of 'Gun Culture or Gun Control: Firearms, Violence and Society' (2000), and has just completed an updated ‘Gun Crime Briefing Paper' being published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Kings College, London in the Summer.

* Recent Research

• Bullock, K. and Tilley, N. (2002) Shootings, Gangs and Violent Incidents in Manchester. Home Office, Crime Reduction Series Research Paper 13.
• Hales, G., Lewis, C. and Silverstone, D. (2006) Gun Crime: the market in and use of illegal firearms, Home Office Research Study No.298. Home Office, London.
• Pitts, J. (2007) Reluctant Gangsters: Youth Gangs in Waltham Forest. University of Bedfordshire.