Pitsmoor Shotta Boys: South Yorkshire gang branded themselves with tattoos & bandanas - doing cops a favour
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00:00 Can you tell us what you know about the one gang injunction that South Yorkshire Police have in place in the county?
00:08 Yes, so they only have one, despite there being between 60 to 70 mapped organised crime groups or gangs operating in South Yorkshire at the moment.
00:19 Detective Superintendent Jamie Henderson, who is the forces head of Serious Unorganised Crime as well as their firearms lead, told me that the reason they have been able to take this one gang injunction out successfully against a group called the Pittsmore Shutterboys
00:35 is because members of the group essentially self-identified as gang members by either getting tattoos to indicate that or wearing a specific kind of bandana.
00:46 Essentially gang injunctions are quite hard for police forces to get, they require a very strict set of stipulations in order to be able to get one, but the Pittsmore Shutterboys made it easy for police by essentially confirming their gang membership.
01:03 What do you know about the Pittsmore Shutterboys?
01:06 They are an organised crime group that have been operating in Maxborough for several years.
01:12 Police have been trying to dismantle them through a number of different methods, including this gang injunction which stipulates where they can and cannot socialise.
01:24 They can also evict people from their homes, so that's one of the ways they've been trying to dismantle them.
01:32 But they've also recently had a gang member called Jermaine Watson jailed for several years for possession of a firearm.
01:40 During his court sentencing in January, it was revealed that Jermaine had his first firearms offence when he was just 14 years old.
01:51 How did the staff find out about this gang injunction?
01:55 So I took out a Freedom of Information request, it took a little while for South Yorkshire Police to come back, but after it did I spoke to Detective Superintendent Henderson and he confirmed that it's the force's only recent experience of successfully being taken out of a gang injunction,
02:12 even though it's something they try to do quite often because as I say there are between 60 and 70 mapped organised crime groups currently operating in the area.
02:21 Is there hope that the police force will secure more of these?
02:25 I would imagine this is something they'll be trying to do because dismantling these kind of groups seems to be really key to their strategy to tackle them by separating members and bringing them into court to be brought to justice.