“It wasn’t that long ago these lads would have walked into apprenticeships at British Steel or ICI,” says Middlesbrough’s Labour MP Andy McDonald, lamenting the loss of the heavy industries which once employed thousands of people on Teesside.
He is talking about the young men – aged between 17 and 23 – who were travelling in a stolen Volkswagen Passat with cloned licence plates that crashed head-on into a police car on the A66. All five of them, and two police officers, died at the scene.
He also means the young men who continue to be involved in tit-for-tat violence in the area, ramming cars into homes or being in possession of firearms. And those who have been turning up to vigils wearing balaclavas, smoking cannabis, driving quads and motorbikes aggressively, spraying graffiti and torching cars in fields.
“How on earth is it that, for young men at such a crucial stage in their development, the most attractive option is to engage in this type of criminality?” asked McDonald.
It is a question many in Middlesbrough are now searching to answer.
Is it deprivation? A failure of the justice system? An underfunded police force? A petty gangland culture turbocharged by the allure of social media?
Local residents, politicians and experts who spoke to The i Paper believe Middlesbrough’s problems are a mixture of all of the above.
And crucially, they believe these are factors not unique to the north east industrial town – but are prevalent across many parts of Britain.
Concern over ‘new gang cities’
Crime in England is generally on a downward trend, with murders at their lowest level since records began.
But criminologist and author Dr Simon Harding told The i Paper he believes there should be wider concern about what he calls new “gang cities”.
These are smaller urban areas – mostly outside cities – not traditionally known for gang crime problems, but now starting to experience them more regularly.
As well as Middlesbrough, Harding suggested places such as Barnsley, Rochdale, Barrow-in-Furness, Blackpool, Ipswich, Coventry, Milton Keynes and Bristol could be put in the same bracket.
Most have pockets of entrenched deprivation. Gangs see them as easier to exploit than larger cities too, where policing and other public services may be more vigilant and better funded.
“These places that might have had quite a mild, manageable level of traditional crime – robbery, car crime that kind of thing – that’s now changing,” Harding added.
“We are going to see more of these Middlesbrough effects taking hold over the next few years.”
‘These thugs have taken over’
Cleveland is the police force covering Middlesbrough and other places such as Redcar and Stockton. It has the highest crime rate by population of any force in England and Wales at 123 crimes per 1,000 residents.
Violence against the person, robbery and theft are all well above the national average.
On Friday, schools decided to close early ahead of the funeral of one of the boys killed in the A66 crash amid fears of repeat anti-social behaviour and criminality witnessed at recent vigils. Six hundred extra police have also been drafted in.
“Cleveland Police are going to need all the back-up they can get,” a local councillor, who asked not to be named, told The i Paper.
“They are going to need to close roads, they are going to have quad bikes driving through town. These thugs have taken over.”
Harding, who spent years working with young people involved in criminality in Middlesbrough, said the recent flare up of gang violence “has been coming”.
He said “long-established” crime families in the town are recruiting “a lot of young men or boys who are bored, kicking about on benefits, they ride around on mopeds and e-bikes usually doing the low-level drug dealing for these crime families”.
Nationwide, there are nearly 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training (NEETs) – a situation described as an “urgent national crisis”.
Eight of the 10 English councils with the most NEETs are in the North of England and the Midlands.
Dying for TikTok ‘likes’
Dr Harding believes the tit-for-tat violence in Middlesbrough witnessed in recent weeks suggests there has been some sort of dispute or business deal gone wrong which has now resulted in “pitched rivalry” between gangs.
While such disputes are not new, the environment in which they are taking place has changed.
At least two of the boys killed in the A66 crash had been posting footage of police pursuits on their social media accounts before they died.
Police are becoming increasingly concerned by the extent to which the ability to film criminals and share it online via platforms such as Tik Tok or YouTube is fuelling dangerous behaviour.
Authorities in Ireland are currently investigating whether a group of young men who died in a wrong-way crash in County Kildare had been filming for a TikTok page.
“They’re trying to get ‘likes’, they are trying to get respect and they are trying to get status because if they get that it will make them a ‘player’ and less vulnerable,” Harding added. “They’re constantly trying to build their own personal biography and their gang biography.”
Downing Street has called “glorification” of dangerous driving footage “disgraceful” and ordered social media companies to remove such clips immediately.
TikTok claims it removes any content that glorifies violence, promotes crimes that could harm people or shows dangerous activities likely to be imitated, such as risky driving.
The social media giant added it is removing any rule-breaking content related to Middlesbrough.
Are other areas underfunded?
Cleveland Police has one of the smallest budgets in the country. Local leaders, including the Tory Mayor of Tees Valley Ben Houchen, believe it has struggled to keep pace with “big city” criminality on its patch.
But there are signs this is happening elsewhere.
In South Yorkshire, there were 102 crimes per 1,000 people last year.
The region’s biggest city Sheffield has been hit by some distressing cases in recent years, including several shooting incidents and the fatal stabbing of 15-year-old Harvey Willgoose in his school.
In Barnsley, a gang of youths attacking security staff at the town’s bus station has recently sparked uproar among locals.
Footage shared online by a young girl who was filming the attack while laughing, shows teenage boys kicking and punching their victims in front of horrified travellers.
Yet South Yorkshire has only 3,021 police officers, less than half the number covering its neighbour in West Yorkshire – which has similar levels of crime per population.
This is because the government funds police forces based on their population – rather than more contextual factors such as deprivation levels.
Police funding formula ‘broken’
Despite having one of the smallest budgets in the country, Cleveland was among the hardest hit by Conservative-led austerity cuts – losing 13 per cent of its officers since 2010.
The Home Office has responded to recent events by giving Cleveland an extra £2m. However, most of this will foot a “mutual aid” bill for at least 600 officers drafted in to help from other forces.
Matt Storey, Labour’s Police and Crime Commissioner, said the extra cash “won’t touch the sides” – adding the force needs £26m per year to cover funding cuts.
“Quite frankly it’s a bit insulting to just be bunged £2m in a performative way by the Home Office,” he said.
He said the current police funding formula is “broken”.
“They need to fund us based on poverty, deprivation and need. If they did that, everything would be significantly better.”
Labour is considering a major reform of the police service which will see Police and Crime Commissioners abolished and the number of forces reduced from 43 to potentially as low as 12.
This could mean Cleveland merges with neighbours Durham and Northumbria into a new “North East” police force – although the changes aren’t expected to be complete until 2034.
‘We can’t wait another 8 years’
“What are we going to do in the meantime?” McDonald told The i Paper. “We need an honest conversation about levels of crime and the resources to address it.”
Storey, who is among those set to lose his job in the shake-up, is even more dismissive.
“The Home Secretary seems to think that if we merge police forces it will be fine because Cleveland can just ask Newcastle for more officers to help us out when we’ve got a problem,” he said.
“That’s not a sustainable way to operate. Plus, this won’t happen until 2034 under the reform agenda, which means we’ve got another eight years before we merge with another force.
“In that time, our funding will continue to be inadequate and we will continue to struggle to sustainably police Cleveland the way we would want to.”
For all the bleak headlines in recent weeks, Storey does not believe actions of a small minority of troublemakers should define Middlesbrough.
“This is a brilliant place to live, it’s my home and it means a lot to me,” he added. “It is not a crime-ridden place or a no-go area, it isn’t that at at all.”
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