Gang Politics: Revolution, Repression, and Crime

By Kristian Williams and Robert Evans

In three taut essays, Kristian Williams examines our society’s understanding of social and political violence, what gets romanticized, misunderstood, or muddled. He explores the complex intersections between “gangs” of all sorts—cops and criminals, Proud Boys and antifa, Panthers and skinheads—arguing that government and criminality are intimately related, often sharing critical features. As society becomes more polarized and the conviction that things are only going to get worse, and more violent, grows, William’s analysis is a crucial corrective to our simple, unquestioned ideas about the role violence might or should play in our social struggles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AK Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781849354578

Book preview

Foreword: Street Fights and Revolution in the City of Roses

Robert Evans

For almost three years now, I’ve reported on the running street battles between Portland-area antifascists, the Proud Boys, and police. In that time I’ve watched the city’s antifascist movement shrink, from a broad popular coalition to a smaller, hardened core of activists. This is less reflective of antifascism’s popularity in the City of Roses than it is of the danger of confronting the far right in the streets. Gunfire is now very close to guaranteed at any sizable confrontation.

As Kristian Williams ably traces, the Proud Boys got their start as a gang. As we enter the Biden years, they might seem on the edge of morphing into an insurgency. This impression is deceptive, though. The Proud Boys have not gone out of their way to win the hearts and minds of the public. Instead, they’ve supplicated themselves to the levers of power. They’ve volunteered their time and efforts to act as an armed wing of the Republican Party and an auxiliary to the local police. The police in the Pacific Northwest have responded by allowing the Proud Boys and their affiliates to run wild, without interference, so long as their targets are anyone vaguely on the left.

Gangs and states very much exist on the same continuum, and the conflicts between them largely arise from the ability of gangs to challenge the state’s monopoly on power. What we’ve seen with the Proud Boys is that many agents of the state are willing to approve the legitimate use of violence as long as these foot soldiers for fascism do not fundamentally challenge their benefactors. As Covid-19 precautions are increasingly politicized, Proud Boys have been allowed to accost school board meetings and threaten schools themselves in the name of medical freedom.

It was not until I read Kristian’s work that I started to think about the Proud Boys and what they represent in a much more functional manner. At the end of the day, these far-right groups ­aren’t just showing up to fight for the hell of it; they’re presenting a very specific audience with an alternative view of what the state could be. The widespread refusal of American law enforcement to act against the Proud Boys suggests that this audience has liked what they’ve seen.

On the other side of things, antifascists have come to increasingly resemble an insurgency. The growth of mutual aid networks accelerated in 2020 thanks to the pressures of the coronavirus and the BLM protests. This has led to a situation J. Edgar Hoover would have abhorred, and it has at times provided anarchism in particular with the best popular PR in modern U.S. history.

But I have seen uglier things develop on the left as well. Kristian notes that Anti-Racist Action and the SHARPs started life as a gang, which turned toward the cause of racial justice. In some places, particularly Portland, I see a risk that organized antifascism will evolve away from this and shift more into the shape of a gang. I’ve seen elements of this on the ground in Portland: small groups declaring themselves security and using force—paintball guns and mace—on neighbors or fellow protesters who break the rules.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that, in the process, they do not become a monster. The same is true with fighting a gang like the Proud Boys. In the past year, I have watched as paintball and airsoft guns, as well as the indiscriminate deployment of bear mace, have gone from staples of far-right street fighters to ubiquitous on both sides. The appeal is obvious; when you’re shot with a paintball, it’s natural to want to shoot back.

But I think yielding to the far right in this way is its own sort of defeat. There are times when weapons must be used, but nine times out of ten a fire extinguisher loaded with paint does more damage than an airsoft rifle ever could. Rotten eggs damage gear more than paintballs. Raw force will always avail antifascists less than cleverness and surprise.

Law enforcement would, of course, love nothing more than to see decentralized, horizontal packs of affinity groups turn into something more centralized, violent, and foolish. They would much rather deal with a street gang, engaged in running gun battles and casual brutality to bystanders, than a proper insurgent force that offers a compelling alternative to the state.

In tracing the devolution of the Black Panthers and the history of the Blackstone Nation, Kristian provides rubrics for how the future of antifascism and the militant left might soon look. Today’s activists would do well to pay attention to these historic examples. This is vital work, because only with such a rubric can we hope to avoid the missteps of the past.

September 2021

Portland, Oregon

Questioning under Caution

An Introductory Note

Bloods and Crips. Rangers and Panthers. Police and thieves. Proud Boys and Antifa. Insurgency and counterinsurgency. Revolution and counterrevolution. Politics and crime.

How different are these? And how are they alike?

In these three essays, written over the course of a dozen years, I explore the complex intersections between gangs and politics and argue that government and criminality are intimately related. The first essay, The Other Side of the COIN, examines the adaptation of the strategies and techniques of counterinsurgency warfare to dom­estic law enforcement, with particular attention to the policing of gangs. In the second essay, Gangs, States, and Insurgencies, I pose the next obvious question: If the police take a counterin­surgency approach to combating gangs, what does that suggest about the relationship between gangs and insurgencies and the state’s attitude toward each? The third essay, Street Fights, Gang Wars, and Insurrections, applies my analysis to two groups that are often in the headlines—the Proud Boys and Antifa—and considers the ways that they each adhere to or diverge from the idea of the politicized gang, the degree to which that mode of organizing coheres with their politics, and the very different treatment each has received from the authorities. Throughout the book, I emphasize both the potential and the limitations of the gang form for liberatory politics.

In a sense, a gang is an inherently political formation and set of activities, involving the concentration and application of power, thereby influencing the distribution of resources within a community. The same may be said of the police, whatever the cops themselves happen to think about it. Both are therefore political, whether or not they self-consciously adhere to an identifiable ideology. When gangs do adopt an explicitly political program, the results tend to be mixed. Even with a new orientation, which will sometimes bring prestige and other benefits, they will nevertheless likely retain, and be constrained by, the gang’s established structure, culture, and strategy. Ultimately, an organization’s form may matter as much as the intentions of even its most powerful leaders.

As I researched these questions, and especially as I saw their ­increasing relevance for contemporary events, my thinking on gangs changed considerably. I have edited the earlier writing to reflect the ways that my ideas have developed, but astute readers may yet notice some shifts in tone, changes in perspective, and subtle differences in terminology between one essay and the next. To some degree that is an inevitable, if unfortunate, result of ­repurposing material more than a decade after it was produced. But there is also an element of ambiguity and approximation inherent to the subject.

Resisting Definition

What it is that makes a group a gang is always contested, and the gang form itself may be more fluid than taxonomists would prefer.

The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology offers under gang: this term is typically used to refer to small groups which are bound together by a common sense of loyalty and territory, and which are hierarchically structured around a gang leader.¹ The more current and technical Eurogang definition, popular among criminologists, describes a gang as any durable, street-oriented youth group whose own identity includes involvement in illegal activity.² The U.S. Department of Justice provides this definition:

Gangs are associations of three or more individuals who adopt a group identity in order to create an atmosphere of fear or intimi­dation. Gangs are typically organized upon racial, ethnic, or political lines and employ common names, slogans, aliases, symbols, tattoos, style of clothing, hairstyles, hand signs or graffiti. The association’s primary purpose is to engage in criminal ­activity and the use of violence or intimidation to further its criminal objectives and enhance or preserve the association’s power, reputation, or economic resources. Gangs are also organized to provide common defense of its members and interests from rival criminal organizations or to exercise control over a particular location or region.³

In each case, criminologists try to encode in the definition ­conclusions about what I think must be (and remain) empirical questions concerning features like the gang’s size, methods, purpose, affective ties, territoriality, structure, longevity, urbanity, demographics, public presentation, and self-conception. I find that on this narrow issue the commonsense meaning and even the pop-culture stereotypes may have more going for them than the criminological definitions. If you consider what the gangs have in common in such varied films as The Gangs of New York, Boyz n the Hood, The Warriors, and even West Side Story, I think you would have a pretty good idea of what people mean to invoke when they use the word gang.⁴

Equally troublesome is the concept of crime. In legal terms, of course, crime just refers to that body of illegal activity that can be prosecuted in the criminal courts (as opposed to being regulated by an administrative body, for example). But the term also carries a kind of moral implication, such that violations of certain fundamental norms—kidnapping, extortion, or murder, for example—may be coherently thought of as criminal, even when permitted by law and authorized by the state. Here there are two commonsense meanings, with a great deal of overlap but some important distinctions. The essence of crime remains uncertain.⁵

As I hope to make clear throughout this slim volume, I consider this sort of indeterminacy to be an advantage. The blurring of these lines, the complication of our categories, is among my purposes in writing.

Labels and Frames

The authorities, especially the police, like to describe certain militant groups as gangs for a variety of reasons, some technical and some political.

Most simply, a gang is a type of organization with which they are already familiar. The label brings with it an interpretative frame, a way of understanding the phenomenon. It allows the authorities to fit the new organization into their existing categories and procedures. They already have gang squads, gang files, and a range of laws and strategies designed for countering gangs. Labeling a group a gang is thus as much a matter of selecting the right tools for countering it as it is one of understanding the organization itself. Such ready-made templates, of course, risk oversimplification and error, but such may yet be preferable to confronting a novel, unfamiliar, and (for the moment) incomprehensible adversary.

Then again, sometimes oversimplification is precisely the point. There is a propaganda value to calling your opponents a gang. The term itself, in respectable circles, is assumed to be both depoliticizing and delegitimizing. It denies the value or validity of any cause the organization may espouse, and it frames the counter­vailing police action as normal law enforcement rather than political repression. Naturally, as both crime and gangs are commonly conceptualized in racial terms (that is, racist terms), some groups are more likely to receive the gang label than others, and those groups operating among populations that are already over-policed and presumptively criminalized are the most likely of all.

Interestingly, however, the gang frame can also justify police inaction, or even indifference—especially in the case of rightwing gangs. Discounting the politics means that the authorities can ­ignore racist graffiti, meetings, and rallies, rather than seeing them as part of a campaign of intimidation. Even actual violence, provided that it is directed against another gang—that is, against ­another opponent of the state—may receive minimal attention, being cynically treated as a case of one problem solving another. And, by viewing both leftwing and rightwing militants as gangs, the police can treat them as equivalent, in effect downplaying the violence of the right while exaggerating the violence of the left.

Naturally, my interest in investigating gangs is entirely different from, and at many points directly opposed to, the cops’ interest in doing so. And nothing I say in this volume should be taken as justifying the childish notion that calling a group of people a gang automatically makes them the bad guys, or that designating one gang the police somehow makes them the good guys.

Questions and Interpretations

What is interesting to me is not whether the various groups I discuss here are gangs in some definitive sense, but whether they may be understood as gangs, whether or not they understand themselves that way, and what features and dynamics become apparent under that interpretation.

I hope that this discussion may help inform our thinking not merely about gangs but also about a wider range of questions ­related to conflict, repression, legitimacy, and the state. Those questions are basic to any radical organizing, and our answers—or, more often, our unexamined assumptions—may determine a whole range of subsequent choices about the types of organizations we build, the basis of our solidarity, our political strategy, our tactical preferences, and the cultural expression of our values. The stakes here are sometimes absurdly high, and they are often more real than we allow ourselves to recognize. If nothing else, I believe the stories I tell in these essays underscore the need to take care how we organize, especially if part of what we are organizing is the ­capacity for violence.

---

1. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, eds., Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, 4th ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2000), s.v. Gang, 147–48.

2. Quoted in Shannon E. Reid and Matthew Valasik, Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 6.

3. About Violent Gangs, U.S. Department of Justice, April 30, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/about-violent-gangs.

4. Both the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology and Alt-Right Gangs refer to the controversies attached to any definition. Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, 4th ed., 148; and, Reid and Valasik, Alt-Right Gangs, 3–6. If pressed, we could follow something like the procedure I employed when defining police in Our Enemies in Blue and assemble the above criteria to construct an ideal type. To the degree that a particular organization matched the criteria, we could say with certainty that it would ­qualify. This approach may be thought of as more diagnostic than definitional. Rather than a strict yes-no binary, it would allow us to position different groups along a spectrum as being more gang-like or less. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, 3rd ed. (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 51–55.

5. I wrote in Our Enemies in Blue: "By ‘crime’ I do not mean mere illegality, but instead a category of socially proscribed acts that: (1) threaten or harm other people and (2) violate norms related to justice, personal safety, or human rights, (3) in such a manner or to such a degree as to warrant community intervention (and sometimes coercive intervention). That category would surely include a large number of things that are presently illegal (rape, murder, dropping bricks off an overpass), would certainly not include other things that are presently illegal (smoking pot, sleeping in public parks, nude sunbathing), and would likely also include some things that are not presently illegal (mass evictions, the invasion of Iraq)." Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 365.

The Other Side of the Coin

Counterinsurgency and Community Policing

Prologue: Saving America

In August 2011, British prime minister David Cameron called William Bratton to ask his advice concerning the