ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with gangs, migration, and ethnicity from the point of view of the police in Gothenburg, Sweden. Law enforcement officers speak of silence and unwillingness to inform the police, and report crime as their main problem in disadvantaged and gang-ridden housing estates. In law-abiding societies, this silence is often described with words such as omertà or Cosa Nostra, even if these terms seem far-fetched outside Italian communities (Varese 2006). From classical sociology, we can derive at least three supplementary explanations of this kind of avoidance. Fear, underclass culture, and honour based on ethnicity could all inform our understanding of conflict management in situations involving withdrawal from the police and other institutions of established law. Fear of being injured or hurt in some way, underclass culture as a type of differential association characterised by its criminal intentions, and honour as an instrument of self-help in a highly pluralistic society: if one of these notions is left out in research about what Donald Black calls ‘the curtailment of interaction’ (1998: 79-83), our analyses will be incomplete.
