Seven people died on the A66 at South Bank in the early hours of 22 August. Five young men in a Volkswagen Passat and two Cleveland Police officers, PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough, travelling in a marked police vehicle. Seven families had somebody leave home who never came back. What followed has forced a conversation in Middlesbrough and the wider Teesside area that goes far beyond one horrific collision.
Vulnerable targets
Cleveland Police described the investigation as having “significant links to serious and organised criminal activity” and arrests followed for offences including participation in an organised crime group (OCG), weapons offences, criminal damage and assisting an offender.
That does not establish that the five young men who died were gang members, nor does an arrest establish guilt. But what followed has dragged something already happening on Teesside into the light. Because organised crime needs vulnerable people. And increasingly, the evidence suggests it knows exactly where to find them.
Somewhere to belong
Gangs aren’t unique to Teesside. They’ve emerged in cities and communities across the world, taking different forms in different places and at different times. But beneath those differences are some remarkably familiar ingredients. Territory. Status. Protection. Identity. And, perhaps most importantly, somewhere to belong.
Welcome to the postcode
The word “gang” itself is pretty useless. Five teenagers hanging around outside a shop can be called a gang. So can an organised criminal network shifting kilos of cocaine. They’re clearly not the same thing.
Research in Glasgow found youth gang identities could become intensely attached to geographical areas: neighbourhoods, streets and estates. Territory is identity. This is our bit. These are our people. And those are theirs. The “us and them” mindset.
That doesn’t automatically produce organised crime. Glasgow research actually found youthful territorial gangs could remain very different from economically motivated criminal organisations. But the two worlds can intersect and when they do, something particularly sinister happens. Organised crime monetises the gang.
Loyalty, hierarchy and hunger for status may already exist. Organised crime finds a use for it.
Organised crime groups
And this isn’t an abstract theory on Teesside. Cleveland Police’s own intelligence picture says around 90% of organised crime groups (OCGs) in the area are involved in drug supply and distribution. OCGs operating within the drug supply chain account for nearly one-fifth of Cleveland’s serious violence. At least 17% of homicide and near-miss offences were connected to organised crime.
We don’t actually need to go to Glasgow
In 2024, the Cleveland Unit for the Reduction of Violence (CURV) published a 150-page assessment of serious violence across Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool and Redcar & Cleveland.
It examined five years of police data and surveyed 2,716 local children and young people. Between September 2018 and August 2023, Cleveland Police recorded 9,918 people as suspects of serious violence. 84% were male whilst under-25s were overrepresented.
Concentrated harm
But here’s where it gets interesting. Just 26% of suspects were responsible for 51% of serious violence offences. The harm is concentrated. Middlesbrough isn’t the problem. South Bank isn’t the problem. Grangetown isn’t the problem. The overwhelming majority of people living there aren’t terrorising anybody.
Then you look at the victims. Of the 2,716 young people surveyed across Cleveland, 41% said they had experienced violence themselves. Among boys it was 45%.
Victims of violence
Then researchers asked about committing violence. Of the 498 young people who said they had been violent themselves, 66% had also been victims of violence. The kid frightening somebody else today may have been frightened yesterday. The boy throwing the punch may know perfectly well what one feels like. The child carrying a weapon may want to hurt somebody. Or he may have been hurt himself.
Speaking to a local taxi driver who has talked to knife-carrying boys, his explanation was horribly simple: “they just want to feel safe”.
Trauma shifting
None of that excuses violence. A victim doesn’t get a free pass to create another victim. But unless our only ambition is to wait until another child hurts somebody and then lock him up, we’d better get to understanding it. Because the neat line we like drawing between “victim” and “offender” doesn’t survive contact with the evidence. Violence isn’t always two separate groups of people. Sometimes it’s the same people passing trauma backwards and forwards.
So where does organised crime come in?
South Tees Youth Justice Service, covering Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland, says it has been dealing with unusually high levels of referrals involving serious and violent offending.
Its latest plan says violence among a small minority of young people is being driven in significant part by “their experience of exploitation and involvement in organised crime.”
So this isn’t me sitting at my laptop constructing a sociology theory about Middlesbrough and surrounding areas. The people actually working with these children are telling us it’s happening.
Child exploitation
Tees safeguarding guidance explains that children don’t always think they’re being exploited. Sometimes what they think they’re getting is status. A group. Belonging. Money. Clothes. Respect.
Of course, a child believing they’re participating voluntarily doesn’t mean they aren’t being exploited. Suddenly the grubby economics of organised crime and the psychology of gang culture fit together quite neatly. One needs labour. The other provides young people desperate to become somebody.
We have already seen what that looks like
Operation Curve uncovered an organised drugs line operating in Middlesbrough. Cleveland Police said the 19-year-old running it recruited young teenage boys to deliver Class A drugs. The dealing happened in broad daylight around schools and playparks. The phone line received more than 10,000 calls in two months.
When police searched one property, they found the 19-year-old alongside three other males. One was 13. A 17-year-old was later sentenced for conspiracy to supply crack cocaine.
Who holds the power?
Strip away the balaclavas, electric bikes and mythology and look at the business model: somebody controls the drugs and takes the profit while a child takes the risk. The teenager at the bottom isn’t Tony Soprano. He’s labour.
And that changes the language. “Gang member” can make a child sound powerful. “Criminally exploited child” makes you ask who actually has the power.
Boys, men and respect
We also need to talk about that 84%. Men and boys overwhelmingly dominate Cleveland’s serious-violence suspect population. But boys are getting hurt too. Young males in the CURV survey were more likely than females to report experiencing violence.
So young men are disproportionately appearing in our violence statistics on both sides of the punch. Why? Gang research repeatedly comes back to masculinity, reputation, toughness and respect.
If your social standing depends upon appearing tough, walking away isn’t always experienced as maturity. It can feel like humiliation. And now everybody can be watching. Snapchat. TikTok. Instagram. The humiliation can be filmed, shared and replayed, amplifying the message.
What was the gang offering?
Human beings want to belong. We seek status, protection and identity from groups. None of that is criminal.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply:
Why would a child join a gang?
Perhaps it’s:
What was the gang offering that nobody else was?
They just want to belong
Vulnerability is all over local policing data. Young people who reported being victims of violence were almost twice as likely to have received support from a social worker as those who didn’t report victimisation. The same pattern appeared among those reporting that they’d committed violence.
That does not mean poverty creates criminals. It doesn’t. These are markers of vulnerability, not destiny. But organised criminals don’t need every vulnerable child. They just need the one they can reach.
The one who wants money or protection. The one desperate for status. The one who wants older lads to know his name. The one who just wants to belong somewhere. And if society’s offer is shit while theirs looks exciting, we shouldn’t be astonished when occasionally they win the sales pitch.
Glasgow shows this doesn’t have to be inevitable
This is why Glasgow still matters. Not because Middlesbrough should copy and paste another city’s solution, but because Glasgow spent decades being associated with territorial gangs and extreme violence and eventually started treating violence as something that could be prevented, rather than merely punished afterwards.
One initiative, the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), combined a clear demand to stop violence and carrying weapons with diversion, personal development and preparation for employment.
Among participants followed for two years, overall offending fell by 52%, compared with 29% in a comparison group. Weapons carrying fell by 84%, compared with 40%.
The study wasn’t a randomised trial and the researchers themselves were cautious about what it proved. But it showed something important. Giving people another route can matter.
Boxing, music, apprenticeships or even mentoring. Not somewhere to keep troublesome teenagers occupied for a few hours. Somewhere a child can walk through the door as nobody and eventually be the person everybody else looks up to.
If a gang provides belonging, provide somewhere better to belong. If it provides status, provide somewhere better to earn it.
And stop treating whole communities like criminals
Remember that Cleveland statistic: 26% of suspects accounted for 51% of serious violence. The harm is concentrated. So concentrate on it. Don’t police South Bank. Police the people terrorising South Bank.
There is evidence for this approach. Focused deterrence targets the relatively small number of people driving serious violence while combining enforcement with support and routes away from offending. A review of 24 studies found these approaches reduced crime by an average of 33%.
Don’t treat every teenager wearing a tracksuit as an organised criminal. Find the adults recruiting children. Find the drugs. Find the money. Follow the chain upwards.
Because organised crime rather likes us staring at the teenager on the electric bike. He’s the visible bit. But who’s benefiting from him being there?
Back to the A66
We still don’t know the full story of what happened before seven people died on the A66. The investigation needs to establish it. But what happened afterwards has forced us to look at something that was already here.
South Tees Youth Justice says exploitation and organised crime are contributing to serious offending among some of the young people it works with. Tees safeguarding guidance warns that criminals can exploit children’s desire for status and belonging.
Violence begets violence
Cleveland Police has already prosecuted an organised Middlesbrough drugs operation for exploiting teenage boys. And CURV’s own research found that two-thirds of young people who admitted committing violence had experienced violence themselves.
Those aren’t numbers we should read and then forget. They’re children becoming victims. Victims sometimes becoming perpetrators. Young men hurting other young men. Violence begetting violence, while organised criminals stand close enough to profit from the mess.
We must get there first
We can keep waiting until a 13-year-old is useful to somebody selling drugs, or a 17-year-old is so far in that getting out feels impossible. Or we can get there first.
Give them somewhere to go. Somewhere they’re wanted. Somewhere they can earn respect without frightening somebody else to get it.
Somewhere they can become good at something, become known for something, become somebody. Give them somewhere to belong before somebody else does.
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