Who Mourns the Gang Member?

By Theresa Rézeau Every child is born searching for a kingdom. Not a kingdom of castles and crowns, but one that answers quieter questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? Who will protect me? Who will stand beside me when the world feels uncertain? Long before a child understands law, politics or morality, they understand belonging. They know what it feels like to be chosen, noticed and accepted. Most children find some version of that kingdom in a family, a school, a faith community, a football team, a neighbourhood or a circle of friends. Some do not, and when those places fail, another kingdom may already be waiting. It offers many of the things the child has been searching for: a name, a family, purpose, status and recognition. It gives someone who feels invisible a place in a story larger than themselves. The colours become more than colours and begin to resemble a uniform. A tattoo becomes more than ink; it declares loyalty. Initiation becomes a rite of passage, respect something to be earned, protection something promised. The people who call you brother may begin to matter more than the adults who barely notice whether you come home. The tragedy is not that gangs understand the human need to belong. The tragedy is that they sometimes answer it first. More than a century ago, Jacob Riis (1849–1914) walked into an alley in Lower Manhattan and photographed a world respectable New York preferred not to see. Bandits’ Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street, taken in 1888, leads the eye down a narrow passage hemmed in by tenement walls. Laundry hangs overhead. Men occupy stairways and doorways while faces emerge from windows. Near the foreground, two figures stare directly towards Riis and his camera. One holds a long object at his side. Nothing about the alley feels spacious enough for anonymity. The architecture compresses its inhabitants together. Private life spills into public space because there is scarcely enough room to separate the two. Domestic and street life occupy the same cramped geography. Home, poverty, neighbourhood and danger have been pushed into one frame. Riis, a Danish-born American journalist and social reformer, became famous for documenting the conditions endured by poor and immigrant communities in New York’s tenements. His photographs helped expose overcrowding and deprivation to audiences who could otherwise keep such realities comfortably beyond their sight. Yet his legacy is complicated. Riis could advocate for the poor while describing them through some of the prejudices and paternalism of his age. He wanted New York to see people it had ignored, yet the language surrounding his images could also tell viewers what kind of people they were seeing. That contradiction matters here because the title Bandits’ Roost has already begun the judgement for us. It has told us what we are supposed to see: bandits, trouble, men to fear. But the photograph contains more than its title permits. There are homes here. There is domestic life alongside whatever danger the title asks us to see. Farther down the alley stands a child. Whatever criminal activity occurred around this neighbourhood, Riis inadvertently photographed something larger than criminality. He photographed a community, with danger and domestic life occupying the same narrow space. That matters when we think about gangs. We often imagine a gang principally as a criminal organisation held together by intimidation and violence. It can certainly be that. Gangs can devastate neighbourhoods, exploit vulnerable people, terrorise families and destroy lives. To understand why someone joins one is not to excuse what they subsequently do. Victims do not become less injured because an offender had a difficult childhood, and grief on one side of violence does not cancel grief on the other. But if condemnation were sufficient to destroy gangs, gangs would have disappeared long ago. Something keeps replenishing them, and condemnation alone cannot explain what that is. Look again at Riis’s alley. Almost nobody is alone. The men stand beside other men. People lean from neighbouring windows. Figures gather on steps and platforms. Even the narrowness of the place forces proximity. Whatever relationships existed between these particular people, the photograph is saturated with human association. This is not an image of isolated individuals. It is an image of people occupying a world together. That distinction matters. A gang does not simply recruit a body; it can recruit a loneliness. It can notice the boy nobody else notices, offer status to the young man who possesses none, or promise protection to someone who has learned that vulnerability is dangerous. It can turn geography into territory and friendship into allegiance. The very things that make healthy communities powerful, identity, loyalty, ritual, shared history and mutual obligation, can be distorted into instruments of control. This is why telling a young person simply to “walk away” can misunderstand what leaving actually means. If the gang is where your friends are, leaving can mean crossing the same estate alone tomorrow. If it provides income, leaving may mean going home without the money your household has come to depend upon. If it offers protection, departure may mean taking the same bus, walking the same streets and passing the same people without that protection. Removing a colour does not remove an identity, and changing allegiance does not change a postcode. If loyalty has become the measure of your worth, departure can feel less like freedom than betrayal. Riis’s photograph makes territory almost tangible. The alley is not merely a backdrop behind the men; it encloses them. Doorways, steps, windows and passageways create a small world with its own observers and boundaries. The men at the front do not simply stand in a street. Visually, they appear to occupy it. More than a century later, the language has changed, but territory remains central to many forms of gang identity. A few streets, an estate, a postcode, a neighbourhood can acquire meanings incomprehensible to outsiders. Geography becomes biography. Where someone comes from can determine who is considered friend, rival or threat. For a young person searching for identity, that can be enormously powerful. To belong somewhere is also to know where you stand. We like morality to arrive in clean categories: good people over here, bad people over there; innocent child here, gang member there. Life is less cooperative because the child does not disappear when the gang member appears. He grows into him. That is one of the unsettling things about looking at Bandits’ Roost now. We cannot determine from these faces every act these men committed or did not commit, yet history has handed them to us beneath the word bandits. Much of their individuality has vanished. They have become types: the tough, the criminal, the dangerous poor. Modern societies can perform the same transformation with extraordinary speed. When a young man is killed, the vocabulary may begin almost immediately: known to police, gang affiliated, previous convictions, drug related. Sometimes those facts are essential. But once the word gang appears, biography can become verdict and sympathy can contract, as though affiliation had quietly reduced the value of the life that was lost. Yet somewhere a mother may still receive a telephone call. A father may identify a body. A sister may lose the person who irritated her throughout childhood. A grandmother who remembers school uniforms, scraped knees and favourite meals may hear strangers describe the dead in a vocabulary she barely recognises. The public knows how to mourn an innocent victim, but who mourns someone who frightened us, or someone who may himself have caused suffering? Usually, somebody does. Their grief does not rewrite what he may have done. This is the power of naming. Gang member may describe something real and important, but it can also swallow every other description of a person: son, father, brother, friend, student, neighbour, child. The label can become so complete that we begin to imagine it was always there. It wasn’t. Every violent person has a history. That is explanation, not acquittal. If we refuse to examine those histories because doing so feels too sympathetic, we may preserve our moral certainty while surrendering any serious chance of prevention. We arrive after the stabbing, after the shooting, after the arrest, after the funeral and ask why young people keep making catastrophic choices. By then, the more useful question may be years overdue: where were we when belonging was still negotiable? Where were the alternatives when respect could have meant achievement rather than fear, or when brotherhood could have been found in a classroom, a sports club, a workshop, a studio, a workplace or a family? Where were they when the child was still deciding which kingdom deserved his allegiance? This is where Bandits’ Roost becomes more than a historical document. The conditions surrounding its figures are visible everywhere. Riis did not isolate the men against a blank wall. He recorded housing, crowding, domestic life and neighbourhood alongside them. The environment does not excuse whatever crimes occurred there, nor does poverty automatically produce criminality. Millions endure deprivation without harming anyone, and it would be insulting to suggest otherwise. What the photograph does insist upon is context: these men existed within homes, streets, relationships and circumstances, not outside them. Gangs flourish where their promises can sound credible. Protection means less to someone who already feels safe. A surrogate family is less seductive to someone securely held by one. Status has less power over someone who has legitimate ways to acquire dignity. Prevention, then, must compete with what the gang is offering rather than merely condemn what it eventually becomes. That competition begins much earlier than the criminal justice system. It begins when a child discovers whether adults notice his absence, when a teenager discovers whether there is somewhere to go after school, when humiliation meets an audience, when fear meets someone offering protection, or when talent finds no legitimate stage but aggression does. Sometimes all it takes is for the wrong person to say, You belong with us, at precisely the moment a child needs someone to mean it. By adulthood, society may encounter only the consequences. We see the tattoo rather than the need that made allegiance attractive. We see the weapon rather than the moment fear became shameful. We see reputation rather than the long construction of identity. Eventually we see the police photograph, the courtroom photograph or the photograph selected for the evening news. Riis’s men stand frozen in another kind of record. More than a century has passed, yet the instinct to divide a city into those who belong comfortably within it and those who haunt its margins has proved remarkably durable. There is a temptation, when confronted with gang violence, to reserve compassion exclusively for the innocent. It is understandable, and victims of violence must never be displaced from the moral centre of the story. Their lives, families and futures matter. No meditation on the person who caused harm should turn accountability into sentimentality. But compassion is not a scarce resource, and mourning one human being does not require us to forget another. The harder test of civilisation arrives precisely when the person before us has done something uncivilised. Recognising humanity in the blameless asks very little of us. Recognising it after innocence has been lost asks considerably more. That is why the question in the title is uncomfortable. Who mourns the gang member? His mother might. His brother might. His children might. His friends might. Someone who knew him before the street name might. Someone who remembers the boy before the uniform, before the initiation, before fear became reputation and reputation became identity. Jacob Riis’s camera cannot show us that moment. It gives us the men standing in the alley after their identities have already hardened in the public imagination. History calls the place Bandits’ Roost, and the name follows them more faithfully than their own names have. But the laundry still hangs above them. People still lean from their windows. A child still stands farther down the passage. Life continues around the men we have been instructed to fear. And that child is the figure worth watching most closely. Because the question is not only who will mourn him if one day he becomes the man at the front of the alley. The more urgent question is who will claim him before the gang does.

Your cart is empty