By Eleno Castro and Randy Kotti

Despite the growing body of qualitative evidence suggesting collusion between gangs and political parties in various parts of the world, little has been done to study quantitatively the extent to which criminal organization may affect political elections in such context. Using police data and voting results in El Salvador, we find that homicides in gang-controlled neighborhoods tend to decrease by 24 percent of the mean during electoral seasons. We also estimate that gang control is associated with a 2.75 percentage point increase in electoral participation. These effects are especially significant in the neighborhoods where political parties have a strong voting base. Consistent with the interviews we conducted, this suggests that parties negotiate with gangs to mobilize electoral participation in the areas where they are more likely to receive electoral support and thus increase their chances of winning. To conduct our analysis, we geolocated the homicides reported daily in the registry of the National Civil Police from 2005 to 2019 crossed with electoral results reported at the voting-center level across El Salvador. We exploit the sudden and exogenous decrease in criminality resulting from the 2012 truce between the government and the two main gangs in El Salvador to identify gang-controlled neighborhoods. We also use penitentiary data from the General Directorate of Prisons for robustness measures. 

Pre-publication, 2022. 51p.

By Nikita Melnikov, Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi   

We study how territorial control by criminal organizations affects economic development. We exploit a natural experiment in El Salvador, where the emergence of these criminal organizations was the consequence of an exogenous shift in American immigration policy that led to the deportation of gang leaders from the United States to El Salvador. Upon arrival, the gangs gained control over many urban areas and re-created a system of borders to protect their territory from outsiders. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find that individuals in gang-controlled neighborhoods have less material well-being, income, and education than individuals living only 50 meters away but outside of gang territory. None of these discontinuities existed before the arrival of the gangs. A key mechanism behind the results is that gangs restrict individuals’ mobility, affecting their labor market options by preventing them from commuting to other parts of the city. The results are not determined by high rates of selective migration, differential exposure to extortion and violence, or differences in public goods provision.     

  NBER Working Paper No. 27832  

Cambridge, MA:; National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022. 123p.

By Andrew Whittaker, James Densley , Tirion Havard, Len Cheston , Tajae Tyrell , Martyn Higgins and Claire Felix-Baptiste.

  The aim of the current study was to understand how gangs have changed in the past ten years since Pitts’ (2008) study in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. The study undertook interviews with 21 practitioners working on gang-related issues and 10 young people affected by gangs or formerly embedded in them. Two focus groups involving 37 participants from key agencies then explored the preliminary findings and contributed to a conceptualisation of a new operating model of gangs. The study found that local gangs had evolved into more organized and profit-oriented entities than a decade earlier. The new operating model rejected visible signs of gang membership as “bad for business” because they attracted unwanted attention from law enforcement agencies. Faced with a saturated drugs market in London, gangs moved out to capture drugs markets in smaller UK towns in “county lines” activities. This more business-oriented ethos has changed the meaning of both territory and violence  While gang members in the original study described an emotional connection with their postcode, territory is increasingly regarded as a marketplace to be protected. Similarly, violence has moved from an expressive means of reinforcing gang identity to being increasingly used as an instrumental means of protecting business interests. The current study offers a rare opportunity to gain a picture of gangs at two time periods and contributes to work on the contested nature of UK gangs and renewed interest in gang evolution. These findings have important implications for local authorities and criminal justice agencies who need to address directly the profit motive of gang activity.  

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research volume 26, pages. 1–22 (2020). 

By John Pitts

This book provides an account of the emergence, nature and impact of armed youth gangs in an East London Borough over the last decade. It describes the challenges these armed young men and women pose to their communities, those charged with preventing crime and those struggling to vouchsafe 'community safety'. While the focus of the book is 'local', the processes it outlines and the effects it chronicles have both a national and international relevance.

It argues that the main reason behind the emergence of the armed youth gang has been the coalesence of two previously discreet socially deviant groups; the rowdy, episodically criminal, adolescent peer group on the one hand and the locally-based organized criminal network on the other.

The book analyses the impact of the globalisation of the drugs trade and the consequent shift in the focus of local organized crime from the 'blag' to the 'business'. It also discusses how socio-economic and cultural factors, as well as family and neighbourhood histories and loyalties and localized racial antagonisms all play their part in the emergence of the armed youth gang.

Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing, 2008. 188p.