PAUL VALLELY'S BRITAIN - A CITY FIGHTING FOR ITS REPUTATION

Manchester:

The city hosts the Commonwealth Games in 2002, but remains notorious
for its levels of violent crime, with gangster families terrorising
retailers and night clubs

"BASTARD," screamed the man from the pavement, looking directly at me.
"Bastard, bastard!" His face was puce with anger and his lips were
flecked with spittle. "Bastard, bastard, bastard!"

I was not sure what I was supposed to have done. I was sitting at a
table at a pavement cafe in St Peter's Square having a coffee - and
reading in the Manchester Evening News that crimes of violence in the
city had risen by 50 per cent over the past year.

I decided to ignore him, and turned my eyes studiously to the paper.
My assailant lurched across the road to the Cenotaph and started
hurling bedraggled poppy wreaths into the air before taking his
inexplicable anger elsewhere.

"Don't take it personally," smiled the stranger at the next table. The
trouble is that we do take it personally. Or as Alan Haughton put it,
with an epigrammatic flourish: "We live in a world of anecdotes."

Mr Haughton is the manager of Lifeline, a drugs agency in the city,
which works in the dance and rave clubs that are said to be the
focuses of the city's violence. A leaked letter from the leader of the
city council to the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police
recently accused the force of failing to combat the "rampant
lawlessness" of the protection rackets and the drug dealing in the
city's clubland. Is it that bad?

Anecdotes are not much help here. When I asked Ben, a clubber in his
late twenties who reckons he has been out on more than 1,000 occasions
in the past decade, he replied: "Not at all. I've only seen one
incident in that time." Yet when I asked Anna, a 19-year-old student,
she responded: "Every time we go into the city we get involved in some
kind of violence" - and told tales of bottles raining through windows,
of dance-floor punch-ups, of broken noses, and even of a "friend of a
cousin's friend" who, while dancing, had been stabbed with a syringe
labelled "Welcome to the HIV club". If the last tale sounds like an
urban myth it still tells us something. The thing about a myth is that
it may be based on truth, or it may not be, but it becomes more potent
than reality and therefore a new reality in itself. The fear of
violence is what worries the council leader, Richard Leese, who can
clearly spot a threat to investment a mile off. Manchester is to host
the Commonwealth Games in 2002.

"The city has already begun to attract extra investment," he said amid
the Victoriana of his oak-panelled Town Hall office, "and that that
will step up significantly after the 1998 games. All this 'Britain's
most violent city' stuff doesn't exactly help, even if the truth is
that you have less chance of being attacked than being hit by a car."

The new crime statistics were released for the meeting of the local
police authority yesterday. Mr Leese had been on to the Chief
Constable ahead of the meeting for an explanation. "He told me that
they had changed the way they calculated the figures to include minor
assaults, which previously had been omitted."

Did that entirely account for the increase? "He said he can't answer
that question. So I don't know - and it appears that nobody knows -

whether violent crime in Manchester is going up." Later, the police
issued a statement insisting that if you took out the minor incidents
of "pushing and slapping" the real increase was not 50 per cent but
less than 2 per cent.

But if the Evening News insisted that such explanations "will not
wash", there can be no doubting that beneath the mythology there lies
the conflation of three separate phenomena: hard drugs, so-called
leisure drugs and alcohol.

Hard drugs were at the centre of the city's gun wars in the early
1990s. Heroin and crack dealing are concentrated not in the city
centre but in the notorious inner-city suburbs such as Moss Side. In
recent years there has been relative calm in these areas, which is to
say that only the occasional shooting is reported. Lower unemployment
and the wider availability on prescription of methadone, which makes
the addicts dozy, are said to be the cause. This is reflected in
yesterday's statistics. Smackheads tend to involve themselves in what
the police call "acquisitive crimes" - shoplifting, burglary and car
theft - which, along with guns offences, are all down.

Today's problems are different. They are centred around the dance and
rave clubs, where local crime families, who five years ago were
involved in armed robberies, have moved into ecstasy supplying. The
kids who take the drug may claim it fills them with universal love,
but the same cannot be said for the individuals who supply it.

Club owners in the city have felt powerless, since these gangsters
often control the bouncers through payment or intimidation. "Dealers
can make A312,000 per club per night," one club owner told me.
"Doormen can share more than A33,000 a night as their cut." Anyone
who objects is beaten or shot. The gangsters do not even have to
produce their guns. A word is enough to secure access and free food
and drinks.

It is the spill-over of this culture into the mainstream that has
worried the city authorities. Gangsters tried the same tactics at a
five-star city-centre hotel recently. Newly opened restaurants that
refused to pay protection have been trashed. One major eating chain
recently cancelled its opening. Ram-raids on designer fashion shops in
the past six months seemed aimed more at intimidation than theft.

"We've had discussions with the managers at Armani and the others and
they are adamant that they are not paying protection," Richard Leese
said. Still, he is relieved that the first phase of the city centre's
closed circuit TV system - which was delayed by the IRA bomb there two
years ago - is to open in August.

Moreover, although the local police say little, it is evident that
they have changed their approach in the weeks since Mr Leese wrote his
stinging letter. They have begun to make their presence felt with
"disruptive policing". They have begun towing away cars parked
illegally outside a bar frequented by gangsters. Officers in body
armour have made appearances in clubs, backed up by armed response
units outside. Five-hour rolling roadblocks every weekend for the past
five weeks have produced exemplary arrests for drugs and firearms
offences. Now, clubs are being encouraged to use out-of-town security
firms from as far afield as Birmingham, so that doormen are not
vulnerable to the threat "we know where you live".

But there is a third problem. Most casual violence on the streets is
fuelled not by drugs but by alcohol. In the past year the city has
been shocked by what locals call the Good Samaritan murders, five
separate cases in which those who tried to break up fights were
killed. No one is sure of the correct response. The authorities hope
that the general police clampdown will have its effect. Mr Leese looks
uneasy when asked whether the local liberalisation of the licensing
laws might partly be responsible. "No, more liberal laws have
generally eased the problem. You don't get the 2am closing time tension."

Others, such as Alan Haughton, are more pragmatic. Lifeline is about

to produce a set of "What to do if ." leaflets. If what? "If you see
someone collapsed in the street, if you see a guy beating up his
girlfriend, if you encounter violence in the taxi queue or kebab shop."

What does it tell us about society if self-defence is the only
response, I asked. "We can't look at this as anthropologists," Mr
Haughton replied. "We have to live here and ask 'What works?'"

So, I was about to riposte, we turn away our eyes. And then I
remembered that that was exactly what I had done with the man in St
Peter's Square. Suddenly it seemed as good an answer as any.

Checked-by: (trikydik)