Banning Gangs

There are three issues around the call for the banning of gangs, for me. The first is whether it can be done without any “false positives”, the second would it be effective, and the third is it justified?

The issue of false positives is how do you define a gang without also including say a rotary club. The simple solution for me is to have it as a group where more than say 80% of the members have criminal convictions. The other approach is to let the Government proscribe as they do with terrorist groups, but that gives the Government some pretty wide powers.

The issue of effectiveness is the one hard to overcome. If one looks at authoritarian countries like China, they do not have any public patched gangs. But they do have extensive organised crimes through triads etc, so the PM may be correct that banning gangs just sends them underground.

I suspect there would be pros and cons of banning gangs. The pros would be less street violence, less gang forts, less public recruitment. But the cons might be a move to more serious behind the scenes crimes such as kidnapping and blackmail.

Finally the third issue is whether one can justify removing the right of free association, even for gang members and criminals. Now there are some gangs which do just exist for the purpose of planning and executing crimes to which the answer might be yes, but I am informed that there are some gangs which are not such fronts, even though their members still have a fair few convictions amongst them.