'Growing up' behaviour too often labelled antisocial, says police chief

A senior police officer has warned that too many young people are being criminalised for behaviour that a generation ago would simply have been regarded as "growing up".

Jacqui Cheer, the chief constable of Cleveland, and the Association of Chief Police Officers' lead on children and youth, said society was becoming "quite intolerant" of young people in public spaces, and the public and police were too ready to label "what looks like growing up to me as antisocial behaviour".

She said police and public had to understand that antisocial behaviour "is not just being annoying or being in the wrong place at the wrong time or there's more than three of you". And she said she feared that new legislation would mean treating more childhood behaviour as antisocial.

"It's a personal view that behaviour that at the moment is not included will be included into the future," she said.

Under Theresa May's new antisocial behaviour bill, which received its second reading in the House of Lords last week and is expected to be law by Christmas, children as young as 10 can receive injunctions for "causing nuisance", and older children can be jailed for breaching such injunctions.

Cheer told the all-party parliamentary group on children that it was not surprising that children gathered in the streets when a lot of the places they could go had been closed down or fenced off.

"What's antisocial to one person is just what I did and what many young people do," said Cheer. "We've closed down a lot of places that people are allowed to go to. We've fenced off school grounds, I get it, but where do people collect? When you're in a crowd of three or four it can get a bit noisy, is that antisocial? When you're walking down a street and might be having a bit of a laugh and joke, is that antisocial?"

She said police were already penalising what she regarded as normal "growing up behaviour". "But we need help from all of our partners because if we have closed down all the public spaces and if we are not providing places for young people to meet and to push the boundaries in a safe environment, we have sort of created this ourselves," Cheer told MPs.

She said frontline police officers were receiving calls from the members of the public about the presence of young people and were being faced with a decision about whether to speak to them, perhaps antagonising them by asking them what they are up to or to be quiet or even to move on. If the officer did nothing then they risked a complaint from the member of the public who complained in the first place, she said.

"I'm not saying that we will tolerate behaviour that is harassing, that is making people feel fearful, that is preventing other young people from going out because they don't want to walk down that street or through that park. That is our job. We are here to protect everybody. But we need to be careful where the line is," Cheer said.

Her intervention was welcomed by the chief executive of the National Children's Bureau, Hilary Emery, who predicted that the antisocial behaviour bill would have perverse and harmful consequences.

"We are concerned that children and teenagers will get into trouble with the law just for being annoying, and that it will penalise them from doing things that all children do as part of growing up – playing in the street, kicking a ball around in a public space or hanging around with their friends," Emery said. "It threatens to further increase the divide between generations, alienate children and divert the police from fighting genuine crimes."

Home Office ministers say new "streamlined and flexible" measures are needed to replace antisocial behaviour orders, more than half of which are breached at least once. Other measures have proved ineffective or inadequate.

Original Article
Source: theguardian.com
Author: Alan Travis