Contrary to the official statutory UK definition of gangs, which is (or should be) now used across all police and public services, there is still no consensus of opinion or agreement about the problem and proliferation of youth gangs in the US, never mind in Britain. Almost 100 years since Frederic Thrasher's classic study, still ‘the least settled issue in gang research is the age old question: “What is a gang”’. Ironically the overwhelming majority of gang experts do seem to be able to ‘agree on only one point in this regard: that there is no agreement – neither among’ those academics who study gangs ‘nor among the cops who police them’ (Greene and Pranis, 2007:9). The picture becomes no clearer when we narrow the issue by asking, what is a youth gang? or what is a street gang? Moreover, what is the difference between drug gangs and street gangs? There is clearly much confusion and boundary blurring and these definitional issues are amply reflected within much of the literature on gangs. The prescribed and dominant definitional boundaries as proposed by influential American scholars such as Malcolm Klein and Irving Spergel have also resulted in the racialisation and criminalisation of youth gangs. Portrayals of black and Latino gangs in the global media, which are informed by those dominant academic and police definitions, have further helped fix in the public's consciousness the strong association between race and violent urban crime.

If as researchers we become embroiled in looking for a world of gangs, as is suggested by Hagedorn, what definition or typology of gang are we to search for? Are we only to focus on groups of poor urban male youth from racial/ethnic backgrounds who are engaging in violent conflict? Even if we do, we run the risk of travelling down a dangerous academic cul de sac, because just as there is a great deal of contention around definitions, there are equally major concerns about linking youth gangs and violent crime too closely. First, there is insufficient research evidence to justify the widely accepted belief that gangs cause crime (Katz and Jackson-Jacobs, 2004; Greene and Paranis, 2007); and second, gang academics who define gangs in terms of criminal behaviour provide the empirical evidence that the police, news media and mass society ‘feed on and reinforce the tendency to reify gangs’ (Sullivan, 2006:6).