No one looking back on the last few weeks could say that Middlesbrough didn’t make the most of its time in the spotlight. I’ve been in the northeast during this time and opening the local papers has been like a diabolical advent calendar: a new horror for every day.
On Saturday, August 22, we discovered that five Middlesbrough boys, aged 17 to 23, with 22 convictions between them, had raced the wrong way down the A66 and smashed into a police car, killing themselves and the two poor officers too. On the Sunday, we learnt that the speeding boys had been chasing another car, a Volvo, which, in the early hours of Saturday had reversed repeatedly into the front of one of the boys’ houses.
There was stern talk of “joyriding” in the press, but joyriding doesn’t begin to do credit to the imaginative uses a Middlesbrough man can find for a stolen car. It’s not uncommon, apparently, in parts of town to find your house caved in and a Volvo in your front room. Such “ram-raiding” is the calling card of one of the town’s criminal gangs.
They all enjoy arson, which is why on August 26, after another fun ram-raid, a caravan was torched; and the next day, a mother and her young niece burned to death in their house. If Facebook is to be believed, in a separate part of town there was a machete attack, leaving a man with a severed arm.
Because the world was suddenly watching and because cops had been killed, reinforcements arrived sharpish. Cleveland, one of the smallest and most understaffed forces in the country, dealing with the worst crime rate, suddenly had 200 new officers making a reassuring spate of arrests: 27 to date. And now, as Middlesbrough fades from the headlines, we’re left with the impression that finally a great reckoning has arrived.
The drug-crime bosses, not just their scrawny foot soldiers, are being hunted down – and yes, there will be prison places to put them in, the PM announced last week, desperately paddling away from the early release fiasco.
Except that I’m not sure many members of Middlesbrough’s organized crime gangs give much of a fig about being arrested. I’ve been rootling around online inside the lives of the families involved and it’s pretty clear that doing time is all part of the game. Particularly instructive have been the social media pages of a 19-year-old called Curtis Cremin, who last year was arrested and a few months later sent to prison for running a “county line” – a phone network for ordering drugs. Curtis’s line took more than 10,000 calls in just two months, and the investigation found that he recruited and used younger boys to distribute the wares.
It was a coup for the cops to get Cremin, but the arrest barely broke his stride. The next day, out on bail, he set up a new county line number and was discovered to be supplying Class As. He urged his followers to go to a party to celebrate the lives of the A66 boys: “Everyone be there to give them the best send of [sic] they can have.”
If you can use social media in jail, can you run a county line from there too? One crime gang boss in the northeast likes to brag that he “owns” the prison, so who knows, perhaps you can.
Cremin has a baby daughter and a girlfriend who thinks he’s a hero. There seems to be no shame in doing time from her point of view; it’s as if he were a soldier fighting overseas. And if the boys doing time are the warriors, the dead ones are the martyrs. Across the social media pages of their families and friends, in the flyers for the party – a “balloon release” – the A66 boys are pictured as angels with huge glittering wings, rising on a cloud of balloons. “Alfie’s got his wings,” someone will say, to mean he’s died, as if awarding a posthumous medal (Alfie is a made-up name). And often: “Dad’s waiting for you, Alfie.”
Brilliant Rod Liddle, brought up in Middlesbrough, wrote a lot about the problems caused by the near-total absence of fathers. The dads are dead or inside or they’ve scarpered, and it makes young boys easy pickings for gangsters in need of drug delivery.
What other role models are even available? Men in uniform – heroes for children of the last century – are now considered the enemy by the boys who need them most. Though the dead boys were speeding on the wrong side of the road, it’s still the police who are blamed.
Perhaps it could be different if the police were a constant, steady presence on the streets, but policing in Middlesbrough, and across the UK, is reactive not proactive. Officers swoop in and make arrests, then retreat to safety. There are well-intentioned projects – Project Orme, for instance, which aims not just to arrest criminals but to engage with the criminal families. But there isn’t the money, the manpower or even the will for an old-fashioned beat.
In parts of the city, it’s not uncommon to find your house caved in and a Volvo in your front room
Even firefighters and paramedics are despised. Last week, in Newcastle, boys threw bricks at firemen putting out a bin fire and disabled a fire engine.
It was a mother of one of the A66 boys who rallied the troops for the big balloon release not far from where I am in Durham. Balloon release doesn’t quite summon the right image. Think thick smoke, burning cars, foil balloons rising in the murky sky, terrified horses, young children on bikes taking in the martyrs’ send-off, an £80,000 Porsche torched in their honor like a burnt offering.
Think also of Durham police and the fire brigade, who were called out by despairing residents but took one look at the scene and fled. “Following a dynamic risk assessment,” came a later announcement, “it was established that there was no immediate threat to public safety and no significant risk of the fire spreading.”
The crackdown on crime very much continues though, of course, and officers are investigating round the clock.
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