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In the mid-1990s Winnipeg garnered its media reputation as the “street gang capital of Canada” and the names of Indigenous street gangs—Indian Posse, Manitoba Warriors, Native Syndicate—came to be part of the public discourse and equated with the prevalence of crime, violence, and the illegal drug trade in Winnipeg’s inner-city communities. A decade later, street gangs such as African Mafia and Mad Cowz were recruiting refugee youth to work in the city’s illegal drug trade. In response, criminal justice strategies have been employed to “get tough” on street gangs, including heightened police surveillance of Winnipeg’s inner-city neighbourhoods, crackdowns on drug dealing operations intended to undermine the source of livelihood for the gangs, and the implementation of more punitive legislation, policies, and programs designed to deter gang violence. Despite these suppression strategies, however, street gangs are still present in the city. Police estimate there are 1,500 full gang members and 2,500 associates, and that number has stayed roughly the same over the past three decades.
How and why did these gangs come into being? Why do they persist despite efforts to suppress them? Addressing these questions requires attending to the specific historical and social context in which Winnipeg street gangs emerged and persist. Much of what is known about street gangs in Winnipeg comes from the criminal justice system or media reports that draw from that source, which puts the criminal activities of gang members front and centre. Academic researchers, however, have drawn on the accounts of gang members themselves, enabling a fuller understanding of the social factors that brought the gangs into being and the social and economic conditions that sustain them, including the ways in which “get tough” criminal justice responses (policing and prisons) have been implicated in the persistence of street gangs. Both these sources of information help to map out a social history of street gangs in Winnipeg. In addition, relevant data on the social and economic conditions in Winnipeg’s inner-city communities enable a better appreciation of the broader context in which street gangs exist.
The main conclusion to emerge from this social history is that suppression strategies only work to exacerbate the presence of street gangs, not to eliminate them. Street gangs will continue to be a feature of Winnipeg’s landscape so long as we fail to “get tough” on the social and economic conditions—especially the spatially concentrated, racialized poverty that prevails in inner-city communities—that prompt young people to join a gang and feed the demand for the trade in illegal drugs on which the gangs have come to rely.
Grant: Community-Driven Solutions to Poverty: Challenges and Possibilities - 2020-2027
Category: Justice, Safety and Security