by Becka Hudson @becka_sh

The British public imagination remains replete with nightmares about racialised crime. This year, there are statue desecrators. In the 1980s, there were muggers. There is always the figure of the thug. The illegal immigrant. The terrorist. More recently, over the past decade, there have emerged particularly frightening types of gang: drill music-producing gangs escalating knife crime within inner cities and running ‘county lines’ of child drug dealers outside of them; and the ‘Asian grooming gang’, networks of Muslim south Asian men engaged in child sexual exploitation who target white girls.