Introduction

This chapter will examine, within a locally situated context, the impact of the national ‘Ending Gang and Youth Violence’ and ‘austerity’ – and specifically the local ‘Enough is Enough’ – policy agendas on youth provision and policing strategy/practice in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. It draws heavily on data gleaned from a three-year study Youth Crime Prevention Practice & Neighbourhood Policing: A Study of one East London Borough (see also Chapters two and six). The research project set out to examine youth crime prevention practice and evaluate local residents’ perceptions and satisfaction with policing in their neighbourhoods. As well as utilising ethnographic research techniques, the study also comprises in-depth biographical interviews with 66 young adults aged 14–24, as well as interviews with 34 practitioners and key stakeholders, including police officers, youth workers, housing officers, local residents and parents. The majority of the young informants resided in the adjoining neighbourhoods of Gulley and Dungle – the two primary research sites featured in this ethnographic study.

As well as being characterised by super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007) the research sites are also among the 20% of most deprived neighbourhoods in England (HM Government, 2010). The neighbourhoods of Gulley and Dungle are part of Manton Estate, built in the early 1970s and comprised of high-rise tower blocks and eight-storey flats, interspersed with owner-occupied Victorian terraced houses. Within the early part of the 2000s, Manton had been regenerated by the local Housing Action Trust into a low-rise housing estate. Nearly two thirds (64%) of the residents of Gulley and Dungle are from a BAME background (Office for National Statistics, 2012). In this study approximately 10% of the young respondents ‘self-identified’ themselves as White British, 50% as Black British or mixed (black/white) heritage, with the remainder describing themselves as White Other, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Moroccan, Iranian, Mauritian or Somali.

The research project was initially embarked on to locally examine the impact of the many programmes and initiatives that had been introduced nationally by the New Labour government aimed at tackling youth crime and other associated ‘problems’ of marginalised youth. The research site where this three-year study was undertaken was initially identified because it was familiar to the researcher and furthermore because it was a London borough that had experienced increasing levels of serious youth violence including fatalities.