RAY MALLON, Mayor of Middlesbrough and former police chief, has a party piece that evokes the new fear creeping over Britain. “How many of you expect your house to be burgled this week?” Robocop asks his audience. No response. “Your car?” A few hands rise. “How many of you expect to feel uneasy or unsafe on the street?” Almost every hand shoots up. Like those who are fighting to win election across the country, Mr Mallon knows that there are votes to be harvested in the gap between the official crime statistics and the feeling that something must be done about spitting, shoving, menacing, motiveless antisocial behaviour.

The Government is aware of these fears, and of the fact that it is the poorest people who suffer most from mindless yobbery. The Home Secretary has made it easier to obtain the antisocial behaviour orders (ASBOs) that were introduced in 1998 but which are only now beginning to bite. Whereas the criminal law punishes past crimes, ASBOs are designed to prevent future misdemeanours and to give victims immediate protection from punks and pests. They are issued by magistrates without need of a trial, and bind people to good behaviour which, if breached, can lead to prosecution.

Yet the very existence of the antisocial behaviour order is a sign of desperation. Did NHS staff really need an ASBO to protect them from abuse by Norman Hutchins, the man with a fetish for surgical masks? Well yes, because public institutions have been so powerless, and unwilling, to protect their staff. Last year I visited more than ten schools in deprived areas. In more than half, a parent had physically attacked a teacher within the previous month, usually for giving his or her child a detention. The schools did nothing: “We didn’t want to penalise the child.”

The ASBO is a belated recognition of our complete failure to provide justice for either the victims of repeated harassment or the youngsters who could be saved from a hopeless future if their early forays into crime were met with proper sanctions, rather than the benefit of the doubt. In rushing to list mitigating factors, lawyers and social workers only condemn the next generation to their lawlessness. There are 25,000 persistent young offenders in Britain, and we have been wickedly complicit in their mockery of the law.

Lawyers who used to ask, “Did you do it?” and enter a plea of “guilty with mitigation”, now parrot “not guilty”, in the hope that the CCTV will be fuzzy or a witness will go Awol. In one recent case, a lawyer entered a plea of not guilty for a boy who had admitted stealing from his foster parents’ home, on the ground that he had confessed at home rather than in a police station. Truth was the first victim. Social workers drag in boxes of evidence about drugs, poverty, and learning disabilities. Yet it is precisely such factors that make it even more important to show youngsters that they are not immune from the consequences of their actions.

A magistrate told me recently of her pain in seeing ever-younger defendants who may know little in the classroom, but who know their “rights” in court. She is often aware that a defendant is waiting outside the court ready to scarper if the witness turns up, and to appear if he doesn’t, knowing that the absence of one or the other increases the likelihood that the bench will adjourn or dismiss the case. She can do nothing about this, nor about the fact that a third of fines are not paid. Defendants claim that they cannot afford them — although they all own mobile phones whose numbers are painstakingly recorded by the clerks.

The British prefer auditing to confrontation. We can record 166,000 instances of antisocial behaviour, from fly-tipping to drug-dealing, on one day last September. But we still put paperwork first. In the 1980s, the New York Police used to count the number of people who avoided paying their subway fare. In the 1990s, they started to arrest them. One in 20 fare evaders turned out to be carrying a weapon, from a cut-throat razor to a sub-machinegun. One was a killer who had murdered his mother.

The “broken windows” policy — arresting people for minor misdemeanours because these often lead to bigger crimes — produced the most dramatic fall in violence New York has seen.

ASBOs reflect the same philosophy. By letting local authorities and housing associations take action as well the police, they are helping landlords to evict nuisance tenants. Yet they are still hedged with caveats, and to be used only as a “last resort”. Only 500 orders were issued in the first three years, a world away from the 5,000 a year envisaged by the Prime Minister. It seems that we lack the stomach of a Giuliani. And the Home Office has had to work hard to make the process less cumbersome.

It is probably too optimistic to think that ASBOs alone can solve a fundamental breakdown in values of common decency that used to be transmitted from one generation to the next. But to make them more effective we need to link them to welfare. In 2001, a Lords select committee decided that families could not lose their right to housing benefit, even after the courts had twice judged against them, because it would breach their “human right” to avoid degrading treatment. This is absurd. If the yobs are undermining the social contract, this kind of decision risks stretching it beyond acceptability for those whose taxes are supporting their tormentors.

If ASBOs are to bite, they need more teeth. We need to restore the concept of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. And we all need to stop walking by on the other side of the street.

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