The summer school holidays are almost over; and security officers and managers, and front-line workers generally around Britain will breathe a sigh of relief, whether at work in libraries, bus stations, on buses and trains, in convenience stores and shopping centres or anywhere that youths go or gather. Because midsummer is a time when they’re plagued by youths being an antisocial nuisance. Hence plenty of official responses; but what actually works, beyond well-intentioned words? asks Mark Rowe.
Hanging around, being rude and aggressive, or outright criminal, stealing things, riding bicycles on one wheel, even setting fire to dry grass; town centres around Britain have had to put up with antisocial behaviour, mainly from the young, including the drunk. The Labour Government acknowledged this before taking office in July 2024 with their promises to ‘take back’ streets, which implied the streets have been lost to such nuisance and crime. When Reform UK recently unveiled Colin Sutton as their police and crime adviser, Mr Sutton and leader Nigel Farage spoke from a lectern that said ‘Britain is lawless’. Across the political spectrum, then, is acknowledgement that something must be done. Hence the ‘summer safer streets’ initiative by the Home Office that is running from July to September. In hundreds of places, police are running extra patrols; but can they be often enough to offer a deterrent and a response to ASB (antisocial behaviour)?
Some examples
ASB alas may dial down, but does not stop when the schools go back; because children in term time come out of school in the afternoon and may hang around bus stops in town centres and quick service restaurants and cause ASB on their way home. Besides wearing down shop and other staff, it may put shoppers and other visitors off a high street. In neighbourhoods, as Adam Hug, leader of Westminster City Council acknowledged recently, anti-social behaviour has a corrosive effect on neighbourhoods. He said: “Whether it is vandalism, noise, drinking or the more serious realm of blatant drug dealing, it undermines the quality of life and can make people anxious to leave their front doors.”
Westminster in central London is Labour-controlled. It may be unusual because it includes the West End, the premier shopping destination in Britain, besides high-end, and everyday, residential districts. In February, Westminster Council announced it was committing £2m on city management schemes including doubling the size of its public realm CCTV network to 200 cameras (including up to 40 new cameras in the West End to focus on the often busy Leicester Square and Soho) and recruiting more City Inspectors who form part of a new PACT (Police and Council Tasking Team).
On that note, in September, Westminster Council Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Public Protection Aicha Less is about to formally decide that for the first time Westminster will fund Metropolitan police officers to work alongside council officers to concentrate on anti-social behaviour and crime. Another string to the Westminster bow (and many other councils) are public space protection orders (PSPOs). The September edition of Professional Security magazine features two proposed for Birmingham city centre, against chronic problems of noise, and illegal street traders.
As for Westminster the new team will have three objectives:
tackle persistent and high impact anti-social behaviour.
provide a highly visible uniformed presence on the affected streets.
enforce relevant anti-social behaviour and criminal legislation through tools including community protection warnings and community protection notices
Coastal
Coastal North Tyneside meanwhile, can see disorder due to Newcastle people taking the Metro or buses to the seaside (just as Southend can have trouble from visiting Londoners). Hence Labour Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Northumbria Susan Dungworth embraced her party’s ‘safer summer streets’ work and ‘Operation Coastwatch’, run by police, the Metro operator Nexus and local government since 2014. She said: “I joined patrols across North Tyneside to see work in action – as well as engagement there was some useful intelligence sharing and problem solving. All this joint working is helping towards the significant falls we are seeing in the area in terms of antisocial behaviour and serious violence.”
Leicestershire Police and Crime Commissioner Rupert Matthews has released his Prevention Strategy 2025-29 for his Midlands force. It speaks of a holistic approach to policing focused on identifying and tackling the root causes of crime, anti-social behaviour (ASB) and vulnerability. Mr Matthews said: “Prevention is the golden thread running throughout my new Police and Crime Plan. The holistic approach set out in this strategy pulls together all the action necessary for achieving my mission to build safer and more prosperous communities.
“Without a strong emphasis on prevention, policing becomes a cycle of reacting to incidents without ever addressing the underlying issues. This is simply not feasible in a world where policing budgets are seriously overstretched, and services are buckling under demand.”
Mr Matthews’ approach is of particular interest because while he was first elected in 2021 (and re-elected last year) as a Conservative, he has signed defected to Reform.
While all parts of the country have their operations, Mr Matthews’ warning has force. In economically depressed towns and prosperous shires alike, ASB keeps happening. In Wiltshire, police ‘hotspot locations’ seeing extra patrols have been in Swindon, Salisbury, Chippenham, Devizes, Marlborough and Trowbridge; many small and not obviously struggling places; some, such as Marlborough, even picture-postcard. Yet as reported in the August edition of Professional Security, Tesco (and other, more outspoken, retailers such as Richard Walker, Executive Chairman of Iceland Foods) say that no part of the country is free of ASB and crime.
All this talk so far has left out those doing the ASB. The Home Office recently released findings after it commissioned the polling company Ipsos UK ‘to conduct qualitative research to develop an understanding of the risk and protective factors of anti-social behaviour (ASB) perpetration’. In other words, what may lead people (quite a minority, as the police and others point out) to do ASB, and what may deter such behaviour.
Risk factors
Briefly, the seven ‘risk factors’ that made someone more likely to do ASB were: poverty and deprivation; mental health issues – mental health services (or lack of them) often regarded as the ‘missing link’ to tackling ASB, for adults more than youths; substance misuse (cannabis more for the young, alcohol for adults); ‘negative early life experiences’ and trauma, such as abuse as a child; the ‘home and family environment’; education, or rather exclusion from schooling; and peer pressure (more likely among the young).
What you can do
Security readers will note that all those seven are social factors that are not particular for hired security people to affect any more than anyone else in society. As for what can deter ASB, some of the factors are the mirror image of those ‘risk factors’, such as a supportive family. Two factors are in the hands of private security – one entirely, the ‘physical environmental factors’ such as CCTV and access control, and the ‘fear of being caught’; and one partly, ‘sanctions’, though the research added that sanctions may reinforce the behaviour, ‘rather than the symptoms of the ASB being addressed’.
