Squaring up to the urban terrorist

Using letters from Middlesbrough MP Stuart Bell's postbag to illustrate the town's problems, Chris Lloyd reports.

"My wife and I are separated. She is 39 weeks pregnant. She is frightened. In the past few weeks near her flat I have seen: a car burned out; urination and sexual activity in her stairwell; shouting, screaming and swearing late into the night; footballs kicked deliberately at passing cars; eggs striking my wife's windows around midnight; large rocks being thrown over the top of walls onto whoever is beneath; cars skidding around as if on a race track. This list is partial. This is supposed to be a desirable place to live, yet the police say it has been going on for two years. It's as if it has become tolerated. What are we going to do? There is a baby coming to live here in a week or two..."

BENEATH a battered Union flag, summoning up the spirit of the war and promising to join the people and police in the trenches, Ray Mallon spells out exactly what he was going to do.

At times it was visionary; at times it was frightening.

By next year, Middlesbrough will have the largest private police force in the country. It will be computer-controlled but will rely on old-fashioned policing methods. The computer will identify the anti-social hotspots; the 90 community wardens will hit the streets to sort them out. Four teams of rapid response clean-up men will deal with outbreaks of fly-tipping or graffiti. Closed circuit TV cameras will scan the number plates of every car entering Middlesbrough and known prostitute users will be tailed and curtailed - possibly even having their cars seized.

''Today in Middlesbrough we send out a message of hope to every town and city where decent people witness on a daily basis the decline of their local environment," says Mallon. ''As a tide of litter, graffiti, yobs and muggers blight Britain's streets and public buildings, we in Middlesbrough say: 'we have had enough'."

"I am sick of the urban terrorism which is going unchallenged by our police force. This area gets more like a war zone every day. Houses are being boarded up, shops closing, arson and vandalism, gangs of youths roaming the streets looking for trouble. Since opening a shop six months ago, I have spent at least £2,000 repairing damage caused by the youths of the area entertaining themselves. Soon, this will be just another abandoned shop to add to the growing list."

MALLON bristles at the suggestion that, having being forced to leave Cleveland Police, this is him setting up his own rival force. "Those who dwell on the past don't live very long," he says, darkly. "I intend to live for a long time and I look to the future."

He sees his new role as Middlesbrough's first directly-elected mayor as a bigger stage than being a policeman at street level. "The council has responsibility for social services, education, housing, regeneration, and the environment," he says. "These portfolios are huge, and the police are a small part of it. They are the enforcement edge with power on the street, but they don't control everything else - we do, and we have to co-ordinate it."

This is stage two of zero tolerance which he introduced as a policeman. Eighty pieces of information - from truancy figures to burglary, litter out-breaks to problem families, abandoned cars to abandoned houses - will be fed into Mallon's computer to create a map showing the problem hotspots. He calls it Active Intelligence Mapping.

"It is disgraceful that the council doesn't know what is going on," he says. "If you are going to fight a war you need a map."

He will take his council colleagues to task over what their departments are doing to combat the problems. "Education should be telling us there's a problem with a kid at school who's going off the straight and narrow; housing should be telling us that there's a problem family; transport should be saying there're cars taking a shortcut through an estate and endangering kids..."

His job is to link it all up and make it happen. "I don't see myself as running the town or the police," he says. "I am there as a manager to co-ordinate partners. It is my responsibility in law to do this."

It is not just the authorities. About 50,000 wheelie-bins will be distributed so that people can play their part. "If a member of the community sees a ten-year-old pulling down a tree on a green space and walks past without saying anything, something is wrong," he says. "Regeneration doesn't mean just bricks and mortar. We have to regenerate the people."

On an average night, Middlesbrough fire brigade is called out to 25 fires. Six are house fires, usually in buildings that have been abandoned to the druggies; six are car fires, usually stolen cars. If housing works on the empty properties, if health works on the druggies, if the police work on car crime, if education and social services work with the people involved, if wardens are on the spot to spot trouble brewing, the fire brigade's workload will be halved and the community will sleep easier.

"There is open drug-dealing in broad daylight just outside our restaurant. In the last two years, an average of two customers' cars have been broken into each week. One of our younger male members of staff was propositioned after leaving work. The police say there is nothing that they can do. It has now reached the point that people are afraid to go out for a meal. It is about time the silent majority is heard; it is time to make the criminals the ones who live in fear and not us."

MALLON believes that environment causes crime and criminals. That's why he's obsessively tough about litter. Litter-strewn streets send out a message that the community doesn't care. Clear up the litter, and the community starts to stand up for itself.

"If I had been adopted when I was three and brought up in a criminal environment, I would now look like me but I would have been a criminal," he says. "Thirty-somethings stop me at schoolgates and say 'you won't remember me but you arrested me when I was 16 or 17. I've got out of it now, but what can I do to keep my little Charlie out of crime?'.

"It shows how old I am, but I was arresting their grandfathers. The grandfathers were bad, the fathers were bad and now the children are going to be bad."

To break the cycle, he's going to change the environment. Today. "One of the things that makes my eyes glaze is when I go to a function and all people want to talk about is the long term," he says. "By the time it comes to fruition I will be dead and buried and so will they. It is all about taking responsibility now."

It's so simple, it's visionary.

"There are a lot of drug addicts around our area who are breaking into people's homes. Last night, thieves broke into my shed and stole my bike. Today, I have instructed an estate agent to value my home in the hope I can sell it and move away. This is a drastic move caused by a minority. I feel strongly about people having to live under this threat when some fought a war for this country. Both my husband and myself pay taxes. Do we have to live in fear, too?"

AND Mallon's frightening, too. It sounds as if Middlesbrough could become a police state run by a demagogue with his own little army. People will cower behind their doors, afraid to go out in case the litter squad spots them.

He says: "People will not throw litter onto the street so much if there's a warden there because they don't like being confronted."

Big Brother will watch your every move. He says: "We will control behaviour so that we change it. It's called the law of enforcement. Middlesbrough will do a lot of stop-checks on the hardcore criminals."

He says one of the problems with anti-social behaviour orders is the difficulty the authorities have getting evidence. Under Mallon's authority, that evidence will be found.

He praises the controversial Emmanuel College because of its toughness. "One kid there said to me that there are 76 rules so we do what we are told because it is pointless arguing." Having no arguments does not make a healthy society.

Mallon relishes the rigidity of his regime. "If you have beggars threatening people, it isn't harsh to remove them," he says. "In fact it's more harsh on other people if you don't remove them.

"We intend to remove them, and if it makes us unpopular with the politically-correct brigade, then so be it.

"The public have had enough of people talking in a woolly-fashioned way. They are crying out for action."

He's right. His landslide election victory - mirrored by that in Hartlepool - was partly because the public was thoroughly fed up with politicians who promised the earth but didn't clear the weeds.

Mallon promises to clear the scum and the lowlife, cut crime by 15 per cent next year and probably ten per cent the year after. More important will be changing the residents' mindset.

"This is a vision for a cleaner, safer, more attractive and prosperous society," he says. "We will replace fear with hope."