Hate to say I told you so, but I did. From The Telegraph:

Sir Denis O’Connor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, says the rowdy and abusive behaviour of yobs is a “disease” within communities that has been allowed to “fester” because police have retreated from the streets in the past two decades.

In a report, he claims that forces have been guilty of chasing crime statistics and targets and ignoring anti-social behaviour or “screening out” 999 calls because it is deemed “not real police work”.

[…]

In the report, he says the “retreat” of beat policemen since the 1990s has been a “mistake that had undermined their connection with the public, and allowed some of these things to gather momentum”. The growing “intensity and harm” of anti-social behaviour in Britain signals a “lack of control on our streets”, he says.

The report, entitled Stop the Rot, discloses the scale of the problem.

About 45 per cent of all calls made to the police in the past year were about anti-social behaviour, the vast majority related to disorderly behaviour, the joint study by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Ipsos MORI and Cardiff University found.

More than two thirds of forces did not even know when they were dealing with a repeat victim of intimidation when they called, the report says.

The report goes on to point out that nearly 50% of respondents to a poll said they changed their routines due to fear of out of control youths. But this report is too little, too late. If the cops think they can take their streets back from these gangs after giving them nearly 20 years of slack they’re dreaming.