BIRMINGHAM, England — The Burger Bar Boys. The Cash or Slash Money Crew. The Bang Bang Gang. These names sound straight out of a dime-store novel, but they’re real-life Birmingham gangs — some of the underground armies that spearheaded England’s worst riots in a generation.

As Britain comes to grips with the causes of the past week’s descent into anarchy, Prime Minister David Cameron has identified the growth of gangs as a key factor and is recruiting high-profile American anti-gang experts to help bring them to heel.

While senior British police officers openly resent that move, analysts of gang culture say it seems logical to seek American assistance, because today’s British gangs consciously ape American gang ambitions and style, from the bling to the lingo.

They talk in a street patois shaped by U.S. rap lyrics, use noms de guerre lifted straight from American gangster films and crime dramas, and choose such icons as Don Corleone, Al Pacino’s Scarface or Baltimore ganglord Stringer Bell of “The Wire” TV series as their avatars on social-networking sites.

“These teenage gangsters are creating their own criminal worlds, and in their minds it’s very much an Americanized world. When they talk about the police, it’s ‘the Feds,’ or ‘The 5-0,’ as in Hawaii 5-0,” said Carl Fellstrom, an expert on England’s gangs and author of a recent book on the topic, “Hoods.”

British law enforcement authorities admit that, until only a few years ago, they sought to minimize the scale and violent potential of their homegrown gangs. They promoted their preferred label of “delinquent youth groups” and billed full-blooded street gangs as an American phenomenon.

In the wake of the August riots — when gangs used text-messaging to deploy break-in artists to breach steel-shuttered shops — politicians now use the “G” word pointedly.

“Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, the gangs are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes,” Cameron told the House of Commons in an emergency debate on the riots. “They earn money through crime, particularly drugs, and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates, with gang-on-gang murders and unprovoked attacks on police.”

English gangs often defend their turf down to the curbstone. Many even attach the postal codes of their district to gang names. They also mark territory with wavy-lettered graffiti of tribal identity that would look at home on a Los Angeles highway underpass.

Virtually every spot on the English map that suffered riots is home turf to one or multiple gangs, according to an interactive online map called London Street Gangs and related gang-mapping efforts by the Metropolitan Police and University of Bedfordshire youth-crime expert John Pitts.

Cameron: ‘Moral collapse’ to blame

LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron declared early today that Britain faces a battle to find its moral compass following four days of riots that left five people dead, thousands facing charges for violence and theft, and at least 200 million pounds in property losses.

Cameron said senior ministers of his 2-year-old coalition government would spend the next few weeks formulating new policies designed to reverse what he described as a country being dragged down by many citizens’ laziness, irresponsibility and selfishness.

“Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?” Cameron said.

— The Associated Press