yes but just like anything else in the uk at the moment is it actually enforced? where i have lived the street was a designated no alchemy zone (football ground nearby) yet every day the same group would be on the street corner with cans of carling and poorly rolled joints with plod just driving by and getting jeered at

Cory sez: “and the streets were *swarmed* with drug-dogs that were set on young people.”

BBC sez: “Officers and *a* specially-trained dog”

Is it possible for *a* dog to swarm? And “set on” rather implies “attacked”, poor use of words. Drug dog is not the same as riot dog.

And that 90% claim? [[Citation Needed]]

You should know better than to base your Monday morning outrage on a half page article on the BBC website.

This Is Nottingham have much more information about the nature of the operation, much of which was based around education and information – http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/homenews/Police-arrest-23-blitz-knife-crime-youth-violence/article-1930693-detail/article.html

Quotes:

“Youth workers and police officers spoke to 266 young people across the city, including those who were vulnerable of becoming a victim or involved in crime.”

“Another team of officers and a drugs dog were also checking people as they got off buses in Beastmarket Hill, while covert officers on the buses identified suspicious activity.”

“Ten people suspected of offences were taken to a special search centre at Central Police Station where officers had an array of technology to search for weapons and drugs.”

Wow, a whole ten people, that’s a mighty big war they’ve got going.

“These included a metal detector arch, a drugs screening device and a full body scanner” – so that’s one of each, again, big war they’ve got there there.

“Saturday night’s crackdown was the culmination of two months of work including school visits, low-profile patrols by street officers engaging with youths and searches of target areas using dog teams.”

Quote rozzers – “Our approach involves improving education and increased public safety and awareness. Through our youth issues officers, we go into to schools and educate children from an early age that carrying a knife is dangerous and committing such crimes has serious consequences.

Doesn’t sound like a war to me, sounds like neighbourhood policing combined with a high visibility but targeted operation.

And no mention of this mythical curfew. No-one was being sent home. Kids were not banned from the streets.

I am really disappointed in BB. I thought you were better than this. Resorting to hyperbole is not the way to convince, especially when you spend so much time fighting the extremist fear-mongering tactics of the likes of the Daily Fail and Fox News.

This is a serious issue and overcooking the outrage just convinces people you are an uninformed hot-head who doesn’t think or know what he’s talking about. Which I don’t think is the case.

Do I really need to tell you what is wrong with this article? and thats before we come to the stats. “Over 1,000 English cities and towns” Really??? Given that there are just over 1000 towns, and a handful of cities, I call bullshit on that number.

Another fact check if one was needed “anyone between 13-24 getting off a bus into town was sent through a metal-detector”, totally impossible, there are two bus stations in Nottingham, and hundreds of bus stops, it appears they had one scanner.

This isn’t your greatest work.

Idle hands….

You still have cases like a mother-daughter suicide because of yobs bullying and a man dying while challenging yobs that routinely tormented him.

Are we oppressing young people? Maybe, but this is also a reaction to some young people oppressing their own communities. Hate ASBOs as much as you want, they do work in most cases; I experienced it with my neighbours (near Manchester), where a few calls from police threatening ASBOs were enough to make them behave. Even when they don’t work, they still make it easier to record a history of bad behaviour and follow up with harsher penalties.

Yob culture was somehow understandable in the 80s, when the only thing that the underclass could expect from society was a big “up yours”. After 18 years of huge increases in minimum wage, subsidies and opportunities for improvement, this sort of behaviour is simply not acceptable any more.

My high school graduating class of 200 had three young men end up in prison. Several became physicians, lawyers and educators. One recieved a silver star and two purple hearts. Should all of us have been treated as if we would all end up doing hard time? I’d wager those same three young men would still have ended up making poor choices and some of those truly successful young people would have had their plans derailed.

You do nothing positive by making young people out to be villains. What then need is space, privacy, trust and, on occasion, honest engagement by concerned adults.

Drug dogs and checkpoints are for criminals.

It would perhaps be more suitable to interpret this event as the local police making a demonstration of their capability, to issue a warning: “carrying knives and drugs is unnaceptable”. Indeed it is possibly even a good sign that as few as ten were taken to be searched, considering those ten as a proportion of all the targeted age range observed by the police during that event.

(Unfortunately, if the Tories get a majority in May, we’ll get back to the good old days, when the emphasis was on stick and stick only. Then you’ll really see how to criminalize entire classes; this sort of thing will look like fun in comparison.)

I honestly believe that there isn’t a single country in the world where the government doesn’t think like this. It just happens that I live in a country where they are really bad at hiding it. That’s a good thing, because I’d rather know.

(+1 to the idea that any number of children being automatically searched for no other reason than their age makes this a good article. But of course that means that any hyperbole on BoingBoing’s part would be wasted, too)

Have you seen the fights in Nottingham town centre on a Saturday night? In the day, the square is a gathering place for skaters, emos and all sorts of alternative teens (How the town has developed such a scene is unknown to me since the chances of a punk teen surviving to adulthood unmolested is practically nil). At night you don’t see any alternative kids there at all – despite the UK’s biggest rock club being just a 5 minute walk away; because they would be torn to shreds in seconds. As it is, the square is left to swaggering gangs of the most stereotypical chavs who treat it like some kind of gladiatorial arena, falling upon the least numerous among them in fits of orgiastic violence.

So yeah, the police’s natural response worries me – demonstrating that the authoritarian’s response always involves exercising greater force or control; but frankly, they’re dealing with people who won’t exhibit any self-control so I’m not sure what they are supposed to do.

I happen to work with some fantastic kids (in the UK) the the kind of teens who’ve been given ASBOS etc and can turn themselves around when given stability, guidance and respect.

Keep up this line of post Cory, we need kids who are taught respect and personal responsibility by being given respect and personal responsibility.

I know this works with “tough kids” and it works easily with with the ordinary kids of bleeding heart liberals, like my own.

If kids are threatening its because they’ve experienced threat. If they use fear and control it’s because that’s what we use against them. duh!!

Right here in the good ‘ol US of A!

I agree that the UK has some serious problems in its attitude toward children — although I’d argue that while the legislation and enforcement is new, the attitude is as old as time — but the cause isn’t helped by articles like this. You’re basically writing strawmen for the other side to demolish.