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Title: Keeping Order

Subject:	A day with Stockton's Neighbourhood Enforcement Unit.

Yes, they'll fine you for littering and dog fouling, but they're also getting involved in larger scale antisocial behaviour, like industrial fly-tipping, seizing untaxed cars and seizing alcohol and tobacco from underage children.

Does it work though?

They're certainly seizing a lot of alcohol, taking away a lot of untaxed cars and issuing a lot of penalties. What the council's got to do is try to figure out whether the benefits of this are enough to justify the three quarter of a million pound bill to the taxpayer that the service costs.

What powers do they have?

They have the power to seize alcohol, the power to issue fixed penalty fines for littering, dog fouling, fly tipping and vandalism.

If they see your car without a valid tax disc, they'll come along with a pick up truck and take it away.

They can also issue anti-social behaviour forms, which can then lead on to an ASBO being issued. In fact, they handed out about ten of these a week in 2006.

The trouble is, they have no powers of arrest, so although it is an arrestable offence not to give them your name and address if they ask for it, they will have to call the police to come and arrest you.

So the team have to rely on their own ability to talk to people because at the end of the day, they don't have that big final sanction of being able to arrest you.

Title: Watching You

Subject:	A view from inside the CCTV control centre

So why not just give them the power to arrest?

There aren't many people who would welcome that. Certainly the Police Federation wouldn't. The argument they make is that would just make it too tempting to use Enforcement Officers as an excuse to cut the number of police officers, so instead of having a force which, while limited, augments the police, you would have police officers being replaced by what would be a cheap alternative.