Integrated Through Risk?: How Actuarial and Epidemiological Approaches to Urban Violence Reduction Interact Within a Multi-Agency Gangs Team

Abstract

Despite the emergence of multi-agency initiatives that seek to integrate actuarial and epidemiological approaches to urban violence reduction, little work has compared and contrasted these approaches and considered the associated implications for their integration. This article begins addressing this research gap with findings from the first academic analysis of an Integrated Gangs Team (IGT) in the United Kingdom. Drawing on interviews with IGT members, we demonstrate how discursive and epistemological differences between the actuarial and epidemiological approaches created tensions in the IGT’s work, the practical accommodation of which consistently privileged the actuarial approach. This is further evidence, we conclude, of how deeply embedded actuarial models can neutralize challenges to their logic, even in the context of multi-agency integration.