The Real Concern Is Not For Who You’d Expect…

Kingston Council has been criticised in a report examining how two troubled teenagers were left with potentially life threatening injuries after a triple stabbing in Chessington.

The two teenagers tried to rob a drug dealer near Sir Francis Barker recreation ground in Chessington on May 30 last year hours after walking out of a courtroom with a community sentence for another offence.

Well, I’d call that ‘their just deserts’, myself..!

The serious case review, published today, outlines how police and social workers, focused on "procedures not outcomes" for the boys, who had both been involved in previous criminal activity and had spent time in prison.

While the report says the incident may have been unavoidable, it criticises the borough's multi-agency working which allowed the pair to each skip more than a year of school.

It also says no-one recognised "that the escalation of their criminal activity could mean that they were at greater risk of significant harm".

Them. Their harm. That’s what concerns the report. Not potential harm to anyone else who happened to cross their path, whether a criminal themselves or an innocent member of the public.

It also called the failure to provide formal education to the teenagers "unacceptable".

And here they have a point – what stopped the council forcing them to attend school? Why is the council not taking itself to court, the way it would take anyone else?

Deborah Lightfoot, the newly appointed chair of the Kingston Local Safeguarding Children's Board, which commissioned the report, said: "The case is unusual in that it involves two young men who were simultaneously victims and perpetrators of crime.

"The events probably could not have been avoided but there were significant issues for us to learn lessons from and improve services.

"Professionals were not sufficiently aware of the implications of this anti-social behaviour. We were also looking at the individual and not looking at the impact of the two young men together.

"We are using this serious case review to ensure that across the local partnership the front line professionals are aware of these sorts of issues."

Which cut-and-paste effort probably cobbled together from all the other reports tells you nothing…

The police, however, are keen to make a point:

Kingston police borough commander Glen Tunstall, also newly appointed, said: "Stop and search is an effective tool. Had we done one more stop and search before they got to that location we wouldn’t be here.

“It is unclear whether we could have stopped these events from occurring."

Heh! Pick the bones out of that one, progressives!