Alliances, Conflicts, and Contradictions in Montreal’s Street Gang Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study proposes an analytical framework for examining the network of street gangs in Montreal. The objectives are twofold. One aim is to describe the core features of Montreal gangs. The second aim is to examine the structure of social relations between these gangs. These analyses allow us to assess whether the city’s gang landscape is structured around popularized rivalries between the Crips and the Bloods. Data for this research were gathered during focus group interviews involving 20 youth gang members residing in the Centre jeunesse de Montreal–Institut universitaire, the city’s main youth correctional institution. These gang members identified a total of 35 active gangs in Montreal. The network does reveal a relational setting that supports the popular Crips versus Bloods rivalry, with intercoalition conflicts and intracoalition alliances accounting for the vast majority of intergang relations. However, the study also revealed some important exceptions to this popular outlook. Such exceptions must be taken into consideration in order to arrive at a more complete and nuanced understanding of Montreal’s street gang landscape. The authors suspect that the conflicts and contradictions that emerge in the Montreal scene are also relevant for other major North American cities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".