The dynamic and sometimes diffuse nature of membership make gang boundaries sometimes difficult to discern for law enforcement officials or researchers, and even for members themselves. The current study draws on social network analysis of co-offending data to assess its utility in identifying the “core” membership of a youth gang active in a rural region of British Columbia, Canada. The ‘856 gang’ became a significant concern to the police and local population after criminal actions attributed to the group included two attempted murders, and the public attempted assassination at gunpoint of the father of one of the alleged 856 members. As the police were planning an intervention on the gang, a group of investigators set out to identify the “core” members of the gang through informal discussions and manual file reviews. This process led to the identification of 6 members who were arrested and charged in the summer 2007. For the purpose of this study, we used this set of 6 offenders and re-constructed their full co-offending network from incidents occurring between January 2003 and July 2007 as a twomode social network. The findings reveal that a total of 60 offenders were potential members of the 856 gang, as defined by an arrest with one of the core 6 members identified by the police. Categorical and continuous core/periphery analyses of the co-offending data reveals that 13 out of 60 offenders could be defined as ‘core members’, including only 5 of the 6 offenders initially identified by the police, and that only three of the targeted members would have made a top 6 based on network centrality measures.

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