Youth crime is a problem for all

THEY are images that have become depressingly familiar. Vandalised buses; smashed up community centres; images of hate in the form of a teenage mugger sporting a Scream mask.

The Scream mugging was just a couple of days ago. Before that it was a children's play area at Rawcliffe Country Park that was the target of teenage yobs.

There has been the attack on Heworth Community Centre, the vandalism of the former Layerthorpe Working Men's Club, a 'catalogue of crime' by young thugs in Acomb's Chapelfields Road area and the repeated attacks on York's fleet of new buses that led one despairing First York manager to describe vandalising the vehicles as the 'latest craze' among York's youth.

It's not only in York itself that teenage crime seems to be rife. Recently, town councillors in Pickering warned that vandals who had been wreaking havoc were ruining the market town for everyone.

This is all part of a broader national picture which has seen shocking incidents including the murder of Damilola Taylor.

Set that against a recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which revealed almost half of all secondary school pupils in England, Scotland and Wales admitted to having broken the law, and you could be forgiven for thinking that our society - and the younger generation in particular - was trembling on the verge of anarchy.

That is not the case. Despite identifying a worrying increase in 'binge drinking' among young teenagers, one of the main conclusions of the Joseph Rowntree report - a conclusion largely overlooked by the media - was that most young people, most of the time, were behaving themselves pretty well. That's a message that York police commander Chief Superintendent John Lacy is keen to emphasise.

"The majority of kids in this city are bright and enthusiastic, and we must never lose sight of that," he says.

However, despite figures released by York's Youth Offending Team which show that last year youth offending in the city was down by ten per cent (and that in the face of a 17 per cent rise in crime overall), Mr Lacy admits he is concerned about youth crime.

"We see more and more kids who are questioning the authority of policemen and teachers," he says. "In society in general, booze is easier to get, and the misuse of alcohol and drugs by youths is an absolutely worrying trend.

"Many of the kids we bring in on Friday and Saturday nights - nine-year-olds to 17-year-olds - are affected by drink and drugs.

"It is not an offence to be young and it is not an offence to stand around on the street corner. But there is a saying the devil dances in empty pockets. When kids have nothing to do they get into bother."

When people find their communities threatened by crime and thuggish behaviour, people turn first to the police.

The problem is the police are stretched to the limit. There may be more officers than ever in the North Yorkshire force but, because we live in a more violent and unpredictable society, crime levels have more than doubled compared to 25 years ago - and that is despite six years of steadily falling crime between 1994 and 2000.

That downward trend was broken last year when crime rose in York by 17 per cent - leaving the city with 4,000 more victims of crime than the year before.

That rise may have been caused partly by new rules for counting crime, and it was made worse by the fact that many front line officers last year were occupied dealing with the aftermath of September 11, Great Heck, the floods and foot and mouth. There were also three murders to deal with, and officers from North Yorkshire were seconded to Bradford to help during the riots there.

Nevertheless, Mr Lacy concedes, the figures represent a 'significant rise' in real crime - and mean that over-stretched police are forced to prioritise.

It was in that context that officers failed to respond to a call for help when youths were trashing Heworth community centre recently - a failure Mr Lacy himself describes as 'unacceptable'.

The police will continue to do their best - the North Yorkshire force has one of the best detection rates of violent crime anywhere, Mr Lacy points out. The hard work and dedication of its officers has been recognised by the Home Office and its strong licensing policy has helped set national standards. But the police alone can never solve all of society's ills.

The buzzword these days in tackling crime is 'partnership' - linking police, local councils, the government, the courts and, not least, local communities to produce a strategy for tackling crime that approaches the problem from all angles. That includes addressing the causes so that people are not driven to offend in the first place, as well as catching and punishing criminals once they have committed an offence.

Some of those problems go very deep. We may think we live in a society of opportunity for all - a society where, whatever your background, you have the chance, through access to decent education, to make something of yourself. But a recent report to the Royal Economic Society revealed that that simply is not the case.

Social 'mobility' in Britain decreased between the 1960s and 1980s, the report showed - largely because the expansion of higher education, which was supposed to open the doors of opportunity for all, benefited people from rich families more than those from poor.

"Differences in educational attainment across family background have led to a decline in equality of opportunity," the 'Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain' report says.

"This is despite the large expansion in post-compulsory schooling. This may be unexpected to some observers, who see great gains in education and earnings from one generation to another and leave the story there. But these gains have been unequally distributed across society. The majority of beneficiaries have been children from families who were already doing well."

That lack of opportunity for those at the lower end of society has consequences.

"Crime pervades all social classes," says David Poole, manager of York's Youth Offending Team, which works with young offenders to try to turn them away from a life of crime. "That having been said, the majority of youth crime is likely to be committed by young people from 'disadvantaged' backgrounds.

"If young people come from communities which are not aspiring to lead law-abiding lives, they are always going to be more likely to get into crime than people from better off communities.

"A lot of the young people we work with don't necessarily have incredibly far-reaching ambitions. They will have been outside mainstream education for a while, and they will come from homes where they are not encouraged to think in terms of achieving and reaching important goals in life." Little wonder they become disaffected.

IT is not fair, either, to blame that disaffection simply on parents. Lack of decent parenting is one factor, but there are many others. Some young offenders do come from families where parents or older siblings themselves have a criminal record, or are unemployed or hooked on drink or drugs. But it may equally be that the community in which they live is impoverished, Mr Poole says - with high levels of crime, unemployment and drug and alcohol abuse.

You don't, he says, have to look far in York to find where those areas are.

A proper strategy to deal with youth offending needs to look at all these issues.

The good news is that there is much being done in York to tackle the problem. A range of new initiatives by organisations such as the Youth Offending Team, the city council, the police and social services are aimed at intervening early to prevent young people being drawn into a cycle of crime.

Some seek to provide first offenders with new skills and opportunities; others to identify young people perceived as being at risk of becoming offenders in future, so they can be turned away from crime before they even start.

There is work going on to combat truancy, to encourage better parenting and to ensure young people excluded from mainstream schools can continue to get a full-time education.

In some schemes, young first-time offenders are being forced to confront the consequences of their actions - either in the form of face to face meetings with those they have victimised, or by 'making reparation' to the communities they damaged.

In others, persistent young offenders are being given intensive supervision by professionals - and 'tagged' in the evenings to ensure they comply with strict curfews.

Those measures are working. In addition to the fall in the number of young offenders last year, even better news is that most of those who took part in Youth Offending Team initiatives did not go on to re-offend.

Sometimes, Chief Sup Lacy says, getting tough is the best way to be kind. Some persistent young offenders had been turned into 'monsters', he says, because they weren't locked away early enough and so believed they could get away with anything. Most crimes, he points out, are committed by a very few persistent offenders.

But what most youths need, he says - the ordinary teenagers who hang out on the streets because they have nothing better to do - is something to keep them occupied.

He laments the days when it was more common for members of the community to do their bit by running sports groups and youth clubs. There are still many unsung heroes doing that kind of work, he says - but we need more.

But what the city really needs, he says, is a Vision for Youth. Coming from the senior police officer who sits on the panel charged with setting out a clear vision for the city's future, let's hope those words carry some weight.

Updated: 11:07 Friday, May 03, 2002