‘Soft cop, hard cop’ tactics will come under renewed pressure, says robert chesshyre |
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Most of these boys are poorly educated and criminalised young. They have never achieved anything, and all they have to fall back on is 'respect' – to be feared as gangsters."
The speaker was not - as one might expect - a social worker, but a veteran detective sergeant in the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) Xcalibre task force, set up to combat the 'guns and gangs' culture of Manchester's notorious Moss Side. He contrasted the gunmen's upbringing with his own - loving parents who made sure that he was indoors in the evening doing his homework.
In south Manchester - where deadly gang rivalry is as fierce as anywhere in Britain - I encountered this 'understanding' tone time and again. Even Mike Todd, the chief constable and a 'coppers' copper' - a big man who leads by example and has the respect of the toughest in his force - said much the
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| Hitting young criminals hard - especially those in thrall to gangs - is only partially successful
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same thing. Police who 15 years ago worked on the principle that all juvenile criminals were scumbags have now changed their tune. I recall one Met detective back then saying: "They're all bad bastards - it's our job to lock 'em up." It is different now.
The starting point was Tony Blair's dictum 'tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime', uttered in 1993 when he was shadow Home Secretary. (It was actually coined by Gordon Brown.) The penny dropped that hitting young criminals hard - especially those in thrall to the glamour of gangs - was successful only up to a point. If nothing was done about the environment from which the teenage gunmen came, arrests simply created a vacuum eagerly filled by other young men.
I paid several visits to Manchester through the summer to report on Xcalibre, and I was frequently referred by police to organisations that work with kids who might well become gun-toting gangsters. Politicised, street savvy youth workers, who in the past would scarcely have given the cops the time of 
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Wall of silence stymies police enquiries
