Brace yourselves for a new crime wave sweeping across the country — the government is doing away with ASBOs. Or, rather, don’t. The truth about ASBOs is that they were rather less significant than Labour would have you believe. As reports such as this one from Policy Exchange suggest, they’ve probably cropped up more frequently in newspaper articles than they have in real life. Only 20,335 ASBOs have been issued to date, covering less than one per cent of all incidences of anti-social behaviour.
What’s more, there’s little evidence to suggest that those ASBOs that were issued made much difference. As the graph below shows, 57 per cent of all ASBOs have been breached at least
once by their recipients. 42 per cent have been breached more than once. The average number of breaches per ASBO is 2.6. As deterrents go, that’s pretty weak:
All of which is to say, we shouldn’t really mourn the death of the ASBO. But we should question whether the coalition’s replacement measures will do much good. Myself, I’m not so
sure. As her speech today made clear, Theresa May remains enthusiastic about the idea of ‘community
triggers’ — i.e. that local councils and police forces will have to devise a plan to tackle a problem, within a set time period, should they receive a sufficient number of complaints
about it. This may not be the sum of the government’s response to anti-social behaviour, but it does seem to muddy the more encouraging idea of elected police commissioners. As Blair Gibbs
put it in a Coffee House post in January, isn’t that all about making sure the police deal with the public’s priorities anyway? Is another Whitehall policy initiative really needed on
top of it? CoffeeHousers, your thoughts please.
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