UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 22 DECEMBER 2016
There is an administrative defect in the British Criminal Justice System when it comes to understanding organised crime, an academic at Birmingham City University has warned.
It comes as a new study from the institution focuses on the overlooked and under-researched correlation between organised crime and murder.
Currently, there is no discrete offence category for organised crime, which therefore means that there is no set definition. While the Serious Crime Act 2015 considers organised crime groups, it only provides vague descriptions of ‘participation’.
Because of an administrative flaw, organised crime groups and urban street gangs are considered ‘separate’ and ‘unrelated’, when in reality they often operate hand in hand.
The new study by PhD Researcher Mohammed Rahman from Birmingham City University’s Centre for Applied Criminology (CAC) argues that some members of organised crime groups start in youth gangs, before making the leap into criminal enterprise and governance. With this leap comes the unavoidable world of violence, including fatal violence.
2003 Aston New Year Shootings
To understand the relationship between organised crime and fatal violence, the 2003 Aston New Year Shootings in Birmingham were used as a case study.
The research, entitled ‘Understanding Organsied Crime and Fatal Violence in Birmingham: A Case Study of the 2003 New Year Shootings’, marks the first time there has been an academic study on the events that led to the murder of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis, as well as the two organised criminal fraternities involved; the Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew.
Prior to the fatal incident, there were many high-profile murders in Birmingham as a result of organised criminality between the two groups, and the media often covered those incidents as ‘tit for tat’ violence.
However, the new research showcases them as organised crime groups which operated within a criminal entrepreneurship standpoint, and therefore enforced lethal practice as a means of maintaining and advancing their criminal enterprises.
As Mohammed’s study points out, for these firms, it was not just about ‘being masculine’, but it was also about ‘doing masculinity’, and this type of masculinity was often achieved in the context of violence and fatal violence.
Mohammed Rahman said:
“Fatal violence within organised criminality is a masculine affair. When the masculinity, collective identity and legitimacy of a gang member is challenged, the need for lethal practice often becomes mandatory and revenge-based murder is obligatory.”
Birmingham's criminal underworld
To fully understand the relationship between organised crime and fatal violence, Mohammed spent time with members of Birmingham’s criminal underworld – including former members of the Burger Bar Boys.
‘Ali’ was an ‘enforcer’ in Birmingham’s underworld during the 1990s. He told Mohammed:
“You know the saying, an eye for an eye, makes two blind. Well some people don’t see it like that. I’m just saying, if my brother got (sic) killed, I wouldn’t be waiting on no (sic) police to find his killer. I’d take things into my own hands. It’s just how it is.”
Mohammed also spoke with policeman involved in the case and visited the site of the murders – Uniseven Studio hairdressers – on two occasions.
“My primary investigation of the murder site revealed that it would have been impossible for ‘Mark Brown’ to identify Marcus Ellis in the circumstances that he described in court. This was because I conducted a ‘criminological autopsy’ of the case, which means I visited the crime scene and re-enacted certain events that unfolded on that tragic night.
“I came to the conclusion that it would have been impossible for ‘Mark Brown’ to visually identify Marcus Ellis from the distance he stated in court, as there was insufficient natural and artificial lighting.”
In the case of one of the defendants, Marcus Ellis, the prosecution heavily relied upon the anonymous witness statements of a man referred in court as ‘Mark Brown’. However, a number of disclosures of Brown’s character were made, including that he was a habitual offender and refused to identify Ellis via an identification parade.