gang member

plural gang members · alternative gangmember

1. Someone regularly participating in the activities of a gang (group of hoodlums or criminals).

   On a recent stay at a hotel, my family selected an in-house video, “The Devil’s Own,” co-starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. The film focuses on a young IRA gang member from Belfast played by Pitt, who has come to New York undercover to purchase illegal weapons.

   1997 August 27, Constance F. Anderson, “Though R rated, film has merit”, in The Catholic Commentator, volume 35, number 14, page 6

   3 more examples

   There is as well some narrative compression in the film, as befits the differences between the two media. […] The film conflates the characters of Royal Baron and Priest, who is referred to as a “businessman” early on by Duke. Similarly, the character of Chester, a black gay who has managed to escape the neighborhood by becoming an isolated, virtually imprisoned lover of a rich white man downtown (Duke describes Chester as having “a white man's face with a black skin over it”) is eliminated entirely from the film. In the book Duke attempts something similar, going with fellow gangmember Rod to Central Park at night to turn tricks, but this too is absent from the film although it is alluded to briefly in the dialogue when BeBop makes a sarcastic remark to Rod about prostituting in the park.

   1990, Barry Keith Grant, “When Worlds Collide: "The Cool World"”, in Literature/Film Quarterly, volume 18, number 3, page 180 of 79-187

   Tie signs (e.g., having an alleged boyfriend show up at school to threaten gangmembers) are more substantively indicative of “anchored relationships” than simple cover stories and provide an “open and direct means for staking a claim, the claim being a relationship to the [tied] individual” (Goffman 1971, p. 203).

   1994, Bruce A. Jacobs, “Undercover Social-distancing Techniques”, in Symbolic Interaction, volume 17, number 4, page 400 of 395-410

   Sociologists typically portray trust as a three-part relationship between (A) the “trustor,” (B) the “trustee,” and (X) the object or result toward which trust is directed. […] In the gang context, X may be to beat someone up, collect a debt, give early warning of police raid, deliver a message, or hide a murder weapon. If gang member B does X under the above conditions he is considered “trustworthy.” If gang member B is unable or unwilling to fulfill X then he is considered “untrustworthy.”

   2012 August 1, James A. Densley, “Street Gang Recruitment: Signaling, Screening, and Selection”, in Social Problems, volume 59, number 3, page 303 of 301–321