Leeds: fight the 9pm curfew!

Leeds police are up to their old tricks. They’ve just announced a dispersal order which covers the entire city centre of Leeds, which means that groups of young people can be forced to leave the city centre, and that under 16′s have a forced curfew on 9pm.

The dispersal order gives the police the power to split up groups of more than 3 people and ban them from the city centre for 24 hours. Refusing to comply with the ban can lead to a fine of £5000 or even a jail sentence. The order also bans people under the age of 16 from being in the city centre between 9pm and 6am without a parent or guardian. Young people who work late, who live in the centre of town, who attend sports clubs, who go to the cinema or even (shock horror) like to hang out with their mates in town, are being criminalised for their routine.

This piece of legislation is an attack on the rights of young people to assemble as we like. It sends out the clear message that young people are the cause of “anti social behaviour” (whatever that means) and that we don’t deserve rights due to our age.

This is not the first time West Yorkshire police have tried this either. A few years ago they tried to put one of these dispersal orders on the outside of the Corn Exchange, a well-known place where young people hang out after school and on weekends. This time they’ve gone nuclear, applying the banning order to the entire city centre.

But all is not without hope. When the police tried to place the dispersal order on the Corn Exchange in 2005, REVOLUTION helped organise a demonstration of 150 young people to the local police station which effectively overturned the blanket-ASBO by making it clear that young people wouldn’t passively accept this gross infringement of our rights. The cops haven’t tried to enforce the order since.

We need the same now. If young people take to the streets (and old people come out to support them), then we can make it clear that we will not accept being victimised, villainised and criminalised. We can organise a night-time march and break the dispersal order in our hundreds to demonstrate just how ridiculous it is.

It’s no coincidence that at a time when one million young people are unemployed, the Tories try and blame young people for their own boredom. Dispersal orders were Labour’s answer to Thatchers Criminal Justice Act which banned free parties at a time of mass youth unemployment . That’s why we say smash unemployment, boredom and ASBOs too.

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