US 'supercop' Bill Bratton: Scotland Yard should name 10 most wanted gangs

The US "supercop" called in by David Cameron to advise on gangs after the summer riots said Scotland Yard should publish lists of the 10 most wanted and most violent.

Bill Bratton said that naming and shaming the worst gangs was an effective tactic that worked in the United States.

Mr Bratton, a former police chief in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, said: "Los Angeles had 400 gangs and the majority you don't hear about but what we said to the gangs was: 'If you want to raise your profile, we're going to give you that publicity.'

"You might think that the gangs would love that kind of publicity but they didn't. Some think that the glorification was exactly what the gangs wanted but we did not find that."

Mr Bratton also urged the Met to set up academies to train former members to intervene in gang disputes.

Scotland Yard has drawn up a "matrix" of London's most dangerous gangsters but refuses to publish details, claiming it "glorifies" criminals.

Mr Bratton said that gangs in the UK tried to copy those in the US. "There is a fascination with the American gangster. The Bloods and the Cripps are the two most widely known. The clothing, the signs that they use, even the language. It's hard to tell the difference between a UK gang and an American gang because of the fascination with the designs and the clothing and the desire to emulate."

In a few weeks the new Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe is expected to launch a new unit in London to take on the capital's growing gangs problem.

Mr Bratton also revealed how gangs in Britain were now contacting ones in the US via social networking sites. Once tipped as a Met Commissioner, Mr Bratton caused controversy recently by calling Britain's gun crime problem "laughable" when compared with that in the US. He said that in the UK it was still "proportionally much smaller in size or scale than the US".

But he added that he believed the Met was already achieving success in tackling gangs, singling out the anti-gang strategy in Hackney. He said: "You're focused on it and focused on it in a good way. You have already learned something that it took us three generations to learn - you can't arrest your way out of the problem. I don't think London is going to go the way of LA or New York."

Mr Bratton said that former gang members could be trained to calm the situation after a shooting or attack. He also said there should be a national definition of gangs so that police could understand the scale of the problem.

Of the summer riots, Mr Bratton said one result was that police would be "better prepared to identify more quickly the size of the disturbances". "It was clear nobody in your country expected something like that would occur in multiple cities so quickly. If that were to have occurred when they had so many resources assigned to the Olympics and throughout the country it really would have been a catch-up game."

Mr Bratton, speaking at the New York offices of Kroll, the security company of which he is chairman, said the Met had a "significant number of active investigations" into terror suspects in the run-up to the Games.

"We live in a very dangerous world with terrorism and your country has more than your share of groups already established. That's the bad news story. The good news story is you have an extraordinary police intelligence service in terms of keeping an eye on these people."