16. Organised Crime
16.1 Introduction
Dr. Sundeep Sunny Mangat and Dilvur Dub, M.A.
🎯 Learning Objectives
- Define gangs and organised crime, and discuss the connection between the two.
- Describe how colonialism and early Canadian laws contributed to structural inequality and the criminalisation of some communities.
- Discuss how Indigenous histories, colonial policies, and intergenerational trauma shape some contemporary experiences with crime, victimisation, and gang involvement.
- Identify social and historical factors that contributed to the rise of ethnic-labelled gangs in Canada from the 1960s through to the early 2000s.
- Compare traditional ethnicity-based descriptions of gangs with contemporary social-network approaches, especially in British Columbia.
- Discuss major forms of organised crime activity and the challenges they create for communities, prevention, and policing responses.
Organised crime is often introduced through dramatic stories: outlaw motorcycle clubs, mafia families, cartels, drug trafficking networks, or high-profile gang conflicts. These stories can be useful starting points, but they can also create misleading assumptions. They may suggest that organised crime is always highly structured, ethnically uniform, male-dominated, violent, and separate from ordinary social life. In practice, organised crime is more complicated than that. In fact, organised crime groups can be hierarchical or loose, local or transnational, visible or hidden, stable or short-lived. They may be shaped by friendship, family, neighbourhood, business opportunity, coercion, trauma, racism, and/or state policy (Beare, 2015; Chatterjee, 2006; O’Brien et al., 2013).
This chapter approaches the topic of gangs and organised crime as both legal constructs and social constructs. A legal definition matters because it shapes criminal justice system decision-making at various stages, from initial police contact through to judicial sentencing decisions. A social definition matters because it influences how communities, media, schools, and governments understand risk. The same group of young people may be understood as friends, a troublesome youth group, a street gang, or a criminal organisation, depending on who is defining it and for what purpose (Esbensen et al., 2001; Ezeonu, 2014; Magnus et al., 2019; Wiley et al., 2017).
The chapter also places organised crime in a historical Canadian context. This means looking beyond individual choices, and considering how colonialism, racism, immigration policy, poverty, exclusion, and uneven access to opportunity have shaped both criminalisation and participation in illicit markets. A structural approach does not excuse violence, exploitation, or harm. It asks students to understand how harm develops, why some communities experience more surveillance than protection, and what kinds of responses might reduce violence rather than only punish it after it occurs (Chalas & Grekul, 2017; Kohm & Maier, 2023; Wiley et al., 2017).
