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This study sheds light on the professional world of gang experts and street outreach workers and raises questions about the future of urban governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork primarily in one South Los Angeles neighborhood that I call Lakeside and interviews conducted between 2009 and 2010, my findings show that gang experts demonize street workers, shun professional contacts, and instead aggressively enforce them. Confrontational police encounters provoke resistance from street workers. The findings also highlight the limited opportunities for integrated governance. To conclude, I discuss the broader implications of these findings for public policy and qualitative research in gang-inhabited and heavily policed urban environments.
THE nation's largest and wealthiest cities are undergoing a new urban crisis and gangs are once again its folk devils. Mayors London Breed of San Francisco and Eric Adams of New York have each spoken publicly on the crises of gangs, drugs, crime, and violence in their cities. Adams, for instance, declared a state of emergency in response to increasing gun violence in New York after several notable shooting deaths (Rubinstein &Mays 2022) and Breed has called for improved public safety measures in the wake of numerous strong-arm robberies and increased public drug sales and consumption (Shanks 2023). Both leaders argued that gangs, which, according to police and city data, are most concentrated in black and brown neighborhoods, were the driving force behind recent increases in urban crime (Southall 2021, Valdez 2022).This is not the first time we have seen this process unfold. Stuart Hall et al.'s (2017) classic, Policing the Crisis, outlined how urban crises are moral campaigns wherein moral entrepreneurs like Adams and Breed label certain groups dangerous and demand expanded state enforcement powers to neutralize these public safety threats. The reactions of mayors and moral entrepreneurs, as Hall et al. (2017) would suggest, are most drastic after highly publicized incidents. Critical gang scholar David Brotherton (2015) shows how moral campaigns work against urban groups labeled as gangs. In these campaigns, police take on a prominent role, serving as both moral entrepreneurs and moral enforcers capable of constraining the lived experiences of labeled gang members who are most often poor, young, black, and migrant men. These figures are demonized in the moral campaigns.
Though Adams and Breed have...