Time to get tough on teen yob rule – Provos could tackle crime
**Via Newshound
(John Coulter, Irish Daily Star)
Hunt down anti-social hoods by bringing the Provos back onto the streets as a uniformed version of the once feared RUC B Specials armed militia.
Anti-social crime – especially by hoards of teenage yobs – is climbing, but many rural and urban communities feel helpless to combat them.
The peace process is at an all-time high after last week’s highly successful US investment conference in Belfast with thousands of Yank dollars and jobs pouring into the North.
While the police have permission to enter former no-go republican regions, the cops seem powerless to clamp down and eradicate spiralling anti-social crime.
If the Sinn Féin/DUP government does not get policing and justice powers returned to Stormont before September, community frustration at teen yobs will deteriorate into vigilantism.
Neighbourhood watch scheme members don’t have the muscle to face down the yobs.
A typical pulse on yob culture’s grip is the rapidly expanding commuter Co Antrim village of Maghaberry , one of the peace process’s housing success stories.
Gangs of hooligans roam the developments at will, sticking the boot in people’s doors and battering windows.
And even if residents provide CCTV footage of the yobs in action, the perception is the cops are powerless to stamp out community crime.
Across the North, it could be compared to the Biblical tale of the Israelites who escaped slavery in Egypt.
When times became tough, even though they had escaped the ruthless and cruel Egyptians, some Israelites wanted to turn back to the rigid Egyptian discipline.
In some republican districts, there is a private feeling residents want the Provos back on the streets with their iron bars and baseball bats to control anti-social behaviour.
The same sentiments are filtering in from loyalist heartlands.
There’s a compromise. Bring back the B Specials – armed, local militias who have the power to be heavy-handed with their districts’ yob culture.
Legalised patrols by former terrorists who have received ‘proper’ training in anti-yob tactics may be bitter medicine for many to swallow.
But the alternative is that pissed-off residents recruit and fund armed mercenary vigilantes to illegally crack skulls and smash kneecaps of drug dealers, thugs and anti-social vermin.
There’s even been loose talk about nutty Right wing racists from the Klan and Combat 18 forming their own ‘vigilante patrols’ to secure housing estates from the yobs.
The problem is with these nut cases – let them in, and you never get them out, and eventually it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the anti-social teens and the racist ‘protection patrols’.
May 13, 2008
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This article appeared in the May 12, 2008 edition of the Irish Daily Star.
