The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has pledged £30 million to fund a youth club in every London borough.
This latest round of goodwill no doubt came about thanks to last week’s youth-driven public disorder, most visible in Clapham but replicated elsewhere across the country. These events were social media inspired ‘link ups’ with participants largely drawn from a similar socio-ethnic background, where the rioting and disorder were part of the entertainment.
The idea that hubs or clubs are somehow responsible for improving behaviour sounds nice, but the evidence is flimsy
The idea that this might be curbed by introducing new youth clubs is a tired one. Commenting on the issue, Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, said ‘the closure of over a thousand youth centres since 2010 didn’t just take away facilities, it took away community, connection and opportunity for a generation.’ The idea that hubs or clubs are somehow responsible for improving behaviour – or at least shielding the public from some of the negative externalities of anti-social tendencies – sounds nice, but the evidence is flimsy.
Hub/club proponents often cite a 2024 study by the IFS, which argued that teenagers in neighbourhoods that had suffered from austerity related youth club closures became 14 per cent more likely to commit crimes. But this paper has a few shortcomings. Firstly, its survey on is based on structured after-school activities, not youth clubs explicitly. Organised sport, after-school tutoring or clubs like scouts and guides are all included. Second, youth club closures had no effect on the spatial distribution of crimes, meaning that local crime rates were unaffected by club closures. The paper also finds that any potential beneficial reductions in offending or crime rates vanish for anyone over 17, meaning the youth clubs are temporary holding cells at best, rather than a space that induces long-term behaviour changes.
The above, and the fact that the paper based its research on the closure of clubs in areas that were already less deprived and had lower crime rates, can be used to infer that the impacts are marginal, and that youths from more stable socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to offend, regardless of access to youth club facilities.
In areas of high deprivation, where targeted policy intervention is more likely to occur, the clubs are unlikely to make any difference. Youth clubs can also themselves be places of violence in gang-affected neighbourhoods.
Back in Clapham, youth clubs have little to do with the problem. There are two youth clubs within 15 minutes of the Common, not to mention Clapham Leisure Centre, two nearby Scouts’ branches, and multiple sports and performing arts clubs. A lack of structured after-school activities was not responsible for the ‘link-up’.
The contributory factors to this kind of crime are numerous and profound, ranging from the failed integration of migrant communities to family breakdown. But one obvious factor which in principle could be more swiftly remedied than others is the poor state of London’s policing.
A major concern about this type of organised disorder is the extent to which it is seemingly tolerated by the police. Part of the outrage over last week’s scenes – aside from the disgraceful nature of the behaviour on display – was that a visible police and security guard presence was incapable of preventing or punishing the offenders. Social media footage shows beleaguered officers attempting to herd youths towards shop exits, or standing around aimlessly while large groups run amok.
It’s hard to blame the shop security in these scenarios, who are offered little physical or legal protection in such cases. In an incident that coincided with the disorder in Clapham, Waitrose fired an employee who physically intervened to restrain a shoplifter. Despite calls by supermarket bosses to arm security guards with truncheons and pepper spray, the only lawful power guards have to stop crime is to perform a citizen’s arrest. Should this be done improperly (as it can only happen while an actual offence is taking place and where it is impractical for a police officer to do so) the potential for criminal liability is high, with a guard potentially liable for anything from assault to false imprisonment, or racially aggravated offences.
For the Met, the situation is more complicated, but one can sympathise with the frontline police, given the legal web of repercussions they might face. This is all compounded when dealing with juveniles, meaning any decision to detain requires the fulfilling of additional PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) requirements, such as notification of a responsible adult when charging each offender in question.
Even the issuing of a section 35 order under the Public Order Act, which allows the police to compel individuals to leave a specific area for up to 48 hours, does not allow the type of mass clear-out of offenders that the public might imagine. Officers must direct individuals to leave an area, allow time for compliance and only then are able to arrest if they refuse to do so.
Which leads to the important issue of capacity. That it is difficult for a handful of officers to carry out mass detentions is evident from social media footage. But even if it were possible to restrain individuals, where would they end up being detained? According to the police inspectorate, the Met operates 22 operational custody suites and eight contingency suites, which equates to about 742 cells, 590 of which are technically always available (though routine occupancy rates might lower this to around 400). An individual custody suite, such as the nearby one at Brixton, might hold between 20 to 30 cells.
For the police to attempt a large-scale detention of youths in a scenario like Clapham, it would require the use of between half to a third of all custody suite capacity in London, hundreds of Met officers, and additional resource to process offenders in detention.
Of course, the police are quite capable of doing this when needed. You only need to look at the heavy presence routinely deployed at football grounds to see that the police are happy to use aggressive tactics to break up crowds.
But despite a hundred officers eventually being deployed in Clapham, there was clearly a lack of will from political and Met leaders, forcing officers to operate within severe constraints. This, in practice, seems to have involved establishing a low level of ‘tolerable’ criminality, such as nuisance behaviour, vandalism and petty theft, and then choosing to intervene when this level escalates into something more serious, such as violence. The small number of arrests made during the disorder were for assault.
The trouble is that all sides become very aware of this arrangement. Such tactics essentially permit all sorts of lower level yet highly disruptive disorder, almost challenging the offenders to test the boundaries of their criminality. While this may be operationally pragmatic, it is a disaster for public confidence in policing
It will also inspire further such scenes, given the main lesson most people will draw is that you can effectively get away with a certain level of public disorder. Police resources are stretched, but the Met seem rudderless, and the mayor is unwilling to give the police the political support needed to take a more decisive approach to disorder.
Instead of announcing new youth club funding, Sir Sadiq would be wise to invest the money into new detention facilities across London. But he also needs to stand behind the police and encourage a more proactive approach to detention that is strong enough to disperse an unruly mob.
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