Pseudo-Scientific Rationalizations for Police Racism in the Criminology of “Street Gangs”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: For almost four decades, there has been much talk in the press and political arenas in Montreal about a scourge of “street gangs” allegedly made up of Black youths and other youths of color and fueling crime and insecurity in an otherwise peaceable city. The article critically examines the criminological literature on “street gangs” that arose during a period of escalating racial tensions and White anxieties about Black immigration in the 1980s. Findings reveal the “gang” literature is replete with conceptual and methodological deficiencies. Although criminologists have never produced any conclusive evidence of street gangs, they have fitted their methods and findings to suit racial ideologies of delinquency. The article shows concretely how positivist criminology lends a veneer of scientific legitimacy to police racism.
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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 | 0.032 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".