Double trouble

Anastasia De Waal, 26 February 2010

Long-time gang leader and underworld ‘godfather’ Colin Gunn was back on the front pages this week as an inquest jury finally closed a case on his ordered execution of an elderly couple in 2004.

Gunn is a prolific offender: his gangland empire led to Nottingham acquiring the moniker “assassination city”.  To refer back to the crime blog posted two weeks ago ‘Prison versus Technology’ on the illicit use of social networking sites from prison, Gunn used Facebook to operate his gang from behind the bars of his maximum security prison, to threaten and intimidating his enemies.  Furthermore, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) ruled that police “errors of judgement” contributed to Gunn’s victims deaths.

Hugely problematic is that neither policy nor police were able to prevent or even contain Gunn’s regime of terror.  He claims he was allowed to set up a Facebook account by prison governors, suggesting it was his legal right; critics suggest authorities may have turned a blind eye out of fear of receiving a legal challenge on human rights grounds.   At the same time, Nottinghamshire police failed to share intelligence on the threat posed by Gunn’s gang; Gunn was also able to use an intermediary to approach corrupt police officer, Charles Fletcher, to whom he gave designer suits as payment.  In short, every step of the way Gunn’s path was paved rather than blocked by both policy and police.

Primary responsibility in tackling gang activity lies with policy – even the official definitions of the word ‘gang’ used by theHome Office and police respectively is inconsistent. To illustrate, the Home Office criteria for ‘gangs’ resulted in the identification of twice as many gangs in London as the criteria of the Metropolitan Police.   More worryingly still, there is no specific requirement for police to record group involvement in a crime.

Ensuring that police are not immobilised by policy when required to act is a good start to thwarting gang crime. Ultimately, however protecting the community from gangs necessitates policy and police to pedal in tandem.

Lara Natale