‘I’ve never been more dangerous than when I was 14’: an ex-member of Scotland’s teen gangs fights back
Prison, death or redemption. These were the three options laid out in front of 21-year-old Graeme Armstrong when he reached a pivotal moment in his life. On Christmas Day in 2012 he had reached a point of no return. “I just wasn’t coping,” he says. “I was using drugs to self-medicate and I was traumatised from friends killing people, committing suicide, or dying from overdoses.” That day something overcame Armstrong and he prayed. “Finding faith was a catalyst for change in my life,” he says.
Growing up in Airdrie, a town about 12 miles east of Glasgow, Armstrong had been lured by the violent life of street gangs, known in Scotland as young teams, and by 16 he had 15 criminal charges under his belt. “I’ve never been more dangerous than when I was 14,” he says in Street Gangs, a new BBC documentary series that is available on iPlayer and is being shown on BBC Scotland.
Following Armstrong’s move away from criminality, he earned a master’s degree and turned his experiences of violence, drugs, death and life on the streets into bestselling, award-winning 2020 novel The Young Team. In Street Gangs – where each episode is focused on Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee – Armstrong uses his own story as a mirror for what is now going on in Scotland: a spike in violent young teams. “It’s definitely a concern,” he says. “Not just for me but for many members of the community, teachers and community leaders. We’re seeing scenes that we’ve not encountered for a long time.”
Kids as young as 14 are in the streets masked in balaclavas, sometimes carrying large knives, drinking, taking drugs and brawling – with the results frequently shared on social media. A new generation of teen gangs are also soaking up “new cultural influences such as gang symbols that we would normally associate with places like LA,” says Armstrong. “That’s feeding into difficulties already in place in Scotland: social deprivation, poverty, cost of living – it’s crisis after crisis.”
Armstrong also does extensive outreach, community and mentorship work in schools across Scotland and so has seen these changes first-hand. Some gang names that have been dormant for years are being reactivated, he says, with freshly spray painted graffiti marking the reinstated territory of young teams. “In Scotland people say gang violence is a thing of the past and that we solved it,” Armstrong says. “That’s not true. You don’t solve gang violence, you manage it. Years ago, there was a huge explosion and we were part of that – the 2005 peak of violence, with Glasgow being the murder capital of Europe. We were totally engulfed in gang violence. And then it did decline – the figures support that – but from 2014 we’ve seen a steady rising arc and the only thing that stopped that was Covid.”
Lockdown may have caused a break in gang activity but it may also have played a part in the post-Covid surge. Many kids went into lockdown as children and came out as teenagers filled with pent-up energy, frustration, lack of social interaction with peers, and a rush of hormones. “Some of these kids were catapulted straight into third year at high school,” Armstrong says. “Which is the year things really start to manifest; more serious violence, more substance abuse. Soon it’s the last chance teachers have got to engage kids, because they can leave at 16.”
The series also looks at the role of social media, musical influences such as drill, and lack of family stability, which are all issues cited within street gangs. However, the boom in young teams is not something that is easily or neatly categorisable, as Armstrong found. “I don’t think any one person or organisation can get all the answers,” he says. “It’s cyclical. These things fall and rise, but unfortunately it feels like we’re in an ascendancy at the moment.”
To hit home the strong lineage of street gangs in Scotland, Armstrong meets up with the 63-year-old awardwinning actor Peter Mullan – who was in a street gang and wrote and directed the 2010 film Neds based on his experiences. “What attracts anyone to a gang is that sense of belonging,” says Mullan, who joined one after being snubbed by another friend from the posh end of town. “It’s everything. It’s like family.” He admits that it was perhaps the reputation of his older brother that allowed him such easy access. “I was in the gang but I was a tourist, a wanker,” he says with a deep gruff laugh. “I could talk a good game.”
To truly appreciate the pull of gangs, Armstrong thinks it’s important to understand the role of young teams in Scottish history. “When I go into schools, one of the first things I do is a potted social history of gangs,” he says. “Because the names that these guys created decades ago, before even my mum was born, are still active now. It has a real heritage in Scotland and you dismiss that at your peril. The fashion changes and uniforms change but the reality is there’s still a really tough social life in Scotland with deprivation and lack of opportunity. Scotland is fertile soil for gangs and it always has been.”
The lack of opportunity and hope is a focus and recurring theme in the series. “There’s a lot of misery out there for these kids,” says Armstrong. “Their trajectory for life is not very hopeful. I’d be asking young lads, who want to be rappers, about what’s next and nothing was really coming. The hopelessness is palpable.”
During one touching scene, Armstrong returns to visit his high school teacher, who had faith in him when few others didn’t. “I’d been expelled from my school before and here I was a kid full of attitude and he could see through that,” he recalls. “He had a superpower. He could see potential that was hidden. That’s something I keep close to me when I’m speaking to young people in schools.”
As a result, despite often tapping into an inescapable feeling of “palpable hopelessness” while visiting various schemes, Armstrong is not without hope himself. “We’ve got talent in abundance in these communities,” he says. “It’s just about how do we take talent and ambition and roadmap it so these young people can actually access it. Success isn’t always a metric that we can measure but continual effort and consistency for people in the community … that does change lives.”
Street Gangs is on BBC iPlayer now
to the numerous vulnerabilities within the US food safety system. “Our food safety system, in particular, the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] which oversees most of it, has some serious shortcomings,” he said.
Part of the problem is the division of labor, within an agency that heavily prioritizes the drug portion of its name, and with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which can be “maddeningly complicated”. The difference of jurisdiction can be as arcane as frozen pepperoni pizza (USDA) versus cheese pizza (FDA), or beef broth (USDA) versus chicken broth (FDA).
Part of it is budget – the agencies have roughly the same amount of federal funding for food safety inspection, though the FDA has responsibility for about 80% of US food products and purview over 35,000 produce farms, 300,000 restaurant chain establishments, 10,500 vending machine operators and more than 275,000 registered facilities, more than half of which are overseas. “Very basically, the FDA is spread extremely thin, and the USDA isn’t,” said Oliver.
Some of the FDA’s problems are without, and some within. “Even by government standards, it has an infamously slow bureaucracy,” Oliver noted, pointing to its lethargic response to E coli outbreaks in leafy greens in 2018, which sickened hundreds and killed at least five people.
Oliver concluded that “a massive overhaul is needed here”, such as what happened to the USDA after undercooked hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants caused one of the worst E coli outbreaks in US history in 1993, resulting in the death of four children. The Obama-era Food Safety Modernization Act, passed in 2011, was supposed to do the job. But it wasn’t funded enough, and the agency was still hamstrung by its “glacial bureaucracy”.
For example, the law mandated that the FDA come up with a standard for water used in agriculture – “basically, a way to keep your salad from getting lightly misted by microscopic cow shit,” Oliver explained. “The problem is it’s 12 years later, and it still hasn’t produced a final rule.”
Oliver pointed to some recent progress – last month, the FDA established a new role at the agency that would put one person in charge of the entire food safety program. “It’s a bit incredible that that role didn’t exist until just now, but still, I will take it,” he said. “But history suggests that it won’t be nearly enough.”
Oliver advocated for an entirely separate food safety department, citing experts who said a food safety system built from scratch would look nothing like the patchwork US system today. “Under the system that we have right now, future outbreaks aren’t just possible,” he concluded. “They’re absolutely inevitable.”