- TACKLING ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
LIVERPOOL City Council is welcoming three interim anti-social behaviour orders, which have been placed on an eleven year old boy and two twelve year old boys in the city.
The interim ASBOs place restrictions on the three, which stop them entering shops and addresses where they've previously caused disruption and prevent them from using racially abusive language, or damaging property.
The orders were granted after work by Liverpool's Anti-Social Behaviour Unit with the Neighbourhood Police team. It's hoped residents will see a decline in levels of low level crime and anti-social behaviour in the Walton/ County Road area as a result of the ruling.
Councillor Flo Clucas Clucas said:- "This is an example of the community working together to make sure these young boys are stopped in their tracks. It takes a great deal or courage for people to come forward with the information needed to secure an interim ASBO.
Everyone in the City has a part to play in combating criminal activity and if a community is prepared to give us the evidence, we will not hesitate to take people to court and obtain anti-social behaviour, or parenting orders, where appropriate."
- Feeling Safe?
- Liverpool Better Than Southport... Manchester at Bottom.
- Report by Chris Amery
BSc(Hons)
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A SURVEY we conducted this week, looking at the crime rate of the local area, has shown very different perceptions of Liverpool, Southport and Manchester. We aimed our survey at finding out the opinions of safety in the local area. It was taken in both Liverpool and Southport. The people that contributed to the survey were of random age, sex and ethnicity, and equal numbers were surveyed in both locations.
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The results of the survey, perhaps surprisingly, indicated overall that Liverpool is considered the safest place to be, both during the daytime and at night. When asked to estimate which of the three had the highest crime rate, 62.5% thought the answer was "Manchester."
Despite using only a small sample of people, this high majority is echoed by the National statistics, which show Manchester to have a much higher crime rate than Liverpool. Especially if you consider that Greater Manchester had to issue 241 Anti Social Behaviour Order's (ASBO's) between 1999 and 2003, compared with only 67 across the whole of Merseyside. In fact even Greater London only had to issue 114!
Throughout the UK there were just under one million violent crimes recorded by the police in 2002/03, an increase of two per cent since 2001/02. Of these one million violent crimes, 28% were common assaults and 14% harassment, both of which involve no physical injury to the victim. Furthermore, many of the 'other woundings' (35% of violent crime) will have resulted in minor injuries, such as bruising, grazes and black eyes.
According to the national statistics, produced by the British Crime Survey (BCS), over one-third of the public (38%) believed that crime had risen 'a lot', and a further 35% felt that crime had risen 'a little', over the previous two years. Some anecdotal evidence we got from the people surveyed in Southport suggested that swearing, spitting, and hitting people in Southport was on the up. These antisocial acts will surely only make tourists less likely to visit again and add to the overall feeling of Southport being a hostile environment. To confirm this, when the question:- "Which of the three places do you think has the highest crime rate?" was asked in Southport, 40% of the people thought that Southport was the worst for crime. In fact, we found that the people surveyed in Southport rated Southport worse for crime than the people in Liverpool did!
It is also worth noting that whilst doing the survey the levels of co-operation from members of the public was far better in Liverpool than in Southport. As a newcomer in Southport I felt the area it was totally unwelcoming. In fact, the only time I felt welcome was when leaving on the train!
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