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Camden has been chosen to pilot a project to combat gang violence in which teenagers found on the streets at night are taken into custody by police patrols and handed over to social workers or their parents.
Paul Keilthy went on patrol with the first Operation Staysafe in London |
CAN NIGHT POLICE SAVE STREET KIDS?
Patrols take youths off streets in controversial pilot scheme
UNDER the floodlights of the concrete football pitch on Holborn’s Bourne estate, four police officers have gathered three children just outside the centre circle and asked them who they are and why they are there. It is 8pm on Friday night.
“We know why you’re here,” says a tubby boy of about 12. “This is the curfew, right?”
As the officers explain, “this” is not a curfew. It is Operation Staysafe, a Home Office project being trialled in Camden and designed to crack down on youth crime while helping vulnerable children. Friday is the operation’s second patrol.
“Because we have stopped and spoken to you we have to take your details,” a PC explains. “But we are here to make sure you are OK. This is an operation to protect vulnerable young people.”
“Yeah,” replies the boy. “We heard about the curfew.”
Police have always had the power to remove children from the street if they think they are in danger, but in the past they have not done it as a pre-planned strategy.
For Staysafe, Vadni Bish house in Caversham Street, Kentish Town, has been converted into a “place of safety”, effectively a holding centre for young people brought in off the streets and the police and social workers who will handle them.
Patricia Denney, principal officer in the council’s Safeguarding and Social Care Team, is in charge of the social workers. At a briefing held before the first patrol she said: “We need to look at that child, look at whether they are continuing to be at risk, and look at what we can do to prevent that child from going down the road to criminal activity.”
Within minutes, a patrol of six officers, led by Sergeant Foster Percil, is on the streets, beginning a sweep through the borough.
After the Bourne estate, the next call brings the patrol to two youths standing in a pool of light cast by a street lamp on the corner of Underhill Street and Arlington Road, Camden Town.
Both are white, medium height, and wearing heavy chain medallions and baseball caps.
Close up, it is clear that one is actually wearing two caps, and the other, two pairs of tracksuit trousers. Double layers keep rough sleepers warm on a February night; they are also a street-trick used by those who want to change their appearance fast.
This is not a random call. One of these boys is a 16-year-old who has absconded from a Camden care home, and he has been spotted by Camden Town officers who have his description from a “Missper”, or missing person report.
He is resigned to his return. “I’ve been in care for six years now,” he says. “It gets pretty boring, you know?”
But his 17-year-old companion is different.
As soon as the officers begin their explanation of Staysafe, this boy tells them he has argued with his parents and has been on the streets for three weeks. He wants help but seems embarrassed by the attention – there are now five police officers, three PCSOs and a reporter standing around him.
“You’re not going into custody, you’re not getting banged up tonight – we’re going to help you,” explains Sgt Percil.
The boys are searched before they are allowed in the police van. The pockets of the 16-year-old yield a half-bag of lukewarm chips, which he offers around.
The 17-year-old, ‘C’, has a scourer of shredded metal of the kind used to clean stubbornly dirty pans or, outside the kitchen, to cool the smoke from crack cocaine in a homemade pipe.
“Why are you carrying this?” asks a PC, sharp again after minutes of banter. “It’s for drugs,” says the boy. “I like an honest man,” the PC replies, and everyone relaxes once more.
Both boys are taken to the Vadni Bish, from which the 16-year-old is returned to care.
An obvious tension exists in Operation Staysafe. It uses laws – specifically the power of “protective custody” under the Children and Young Persons Act – designed to rescue vulnerable children from situations where they may come to harm.
But the operation is explicitly aimed by the Home Office at reducing crime, which means taking people off the street for very different reasons.
“Intervening” can become an intelligence gathering operation, logging the whereabouts of young people; or it can become a fishing exercise, where police use the operation to “get in pockets”, harvesting minor cannabis or weapons offences.
Staysafe also begs the curfew question. Society broadly agrees that children should be at school during the day and that truants should be taken off the street. But there are no bedtime laws.
On Friday, everyone the police spoke to after 9pm was either taken home or taken to the holding centre, while the children spoken to at 8.30pm were left where they were: 9pm is the cut-off time in much recent anti-social legislation aimed at children.
But officers said this was a coincidence, and that each case had to be judged on its merits.
“I think to myself: ‘Would I want my 13-year-old to be out in these circumstances?’ and I use my discretion,” said Sgt Percil.
Both Sgt Percil and most of the patrol are from Camden’s Youth Engagement Team, experienced at dealing with young people.
Of the children they spoke to, largely met at random on the street, half turned out to be already known to social services – exactly the type of “vulnerable” young person the Operation is aimed at.
By 9.50pm the patrol is talking to two boys in Holmes Road, Kentish Town. Both 12 years old, they have been stopped on their lightless bicycles.
They say they were attending a nearby youth event and had gone out to get food, but the officers take their details and call the boys’ mothers.
“The mothers generally understand that we are looking out for them,” said Sgt Percil. “We’ve told them that we are concerned for them and now we have spoken to them we are going to take them home.”
As a PC loads the boys’ bicycles into the back of the marked van he could be a weekend dad collecting his boys for a day out, keen to make a good impression but wary of scratching the paintwork.
“It does sometimes feel like parenting, like we are doing the parenting for people who can’t or won’t,” said one PC.
But the boys are less than enchanted at the turn their evening has taken.
“Mum is going to kill me,” says one.
“Haven’t you got anything better to do?” asks the other.
In three nights out this month, the patrol has taken 11 children into police protection, and taken seven children home to their parents. Eighteen have been spoken to under the police “stop and account” guidelines.
Throughout Friday’s operation the police patrol is professional, courteous, proactive.
“It is essential to be respectful,” says one PC. “This is for the benefit of young people, but it could be embarrassing for them and you have to be aware of that.”
The night’s last sight is boy ‘C’, the 17-year-old found in Camden Town at 9pm, being given a lift to his bed and breakfast in Queen’s Park at 12.30am.
It seems a long way from what he knows but he takes care to thank the police, perhaps as much for their conduct as for the help he receives.
“What worries me,” says a PC as he leaves, “is that if we stayed out, we could keep bringing in people all night.”
Civil rights campaigner voices concerns over policy
RISKS that the Staysafe project could alienate young people have been raised by the Director of Liberty and the Leader of Camden’s Youth Council.
Rights campagner Shami Chakrabarti raised Staysafe at a Camden Law Centre meeting last week after reading about it in the New Journal last month. She said: “We have to be very careful here about criminalising local boys because they are vulnerable.
“Has this curfew been introduced as part of joined-up, democratic policy? Has it been introduced carefully? I’m not so sure.”
Youth council chief Axel Landin said yesterday (Wednesday): “In principle it is very important to look after young people who are in a vulnerable position and are unable to look after themselves.
“But there is scope for it to be abused in some situations, where it would become young people who aren’t
vulnerable but who are on the streets for other reasons – perhaps because they have nothing else to do – who are picked up for no other reason and without them having harmed anyone else.” |
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