Governing Through Risk in the Field of Urban Violence: Legitimacy, Inequality, Actuarialism and Public Health

The general rise of risk discourse has been registered in responses to urban violence in the UK, at both national and local levels. This has seen the consolidation of “risk-management” orthodoxy plus a corresponding emergence of actuarial technologies in the context of multi-agency attempts to reduce levels of urban violence. The most well-known of these technologies, the Gangs Violence Matrix, is used by police to gauge and manage the risk represented by individual gang members. However, the last two decades have seen the emergence of an alternative approach to reducing urban violence. The “public health” approach borrows methods from the field of epidemiology, seeing violence as a contagious disease whose transmission can be halted through the identification and treatment of “high-risk” individuals. This chapter uses research conducted across a number of sites to explore how forms of inequality are framed and encoded in the case of actuarial and epidemiological approaches, respectively. More specifically, the discussion examines the categories and risk factors identified within each approach to ascertain how these encompass and encode inequalities along the lines of “race” and social class.