Police officers spending hours escorting antisocial youths home

Police officers are being taken off of Glasgow's streets to deal with antisocial behaviour by children - as young as 12-years-old.

Clyde 1 News exclusively shadowed officers on a Friday night shift in the city centre.

The force has a city centre policing plan which sees pairs and groups of officers engage in more foot patrols, to act as a deterrent for potential criminals.

Officers walk around designated streets of the city centre to make their presence known.

Alcohol warnings

Within the first couple of hours of shadowing the officers, there were multiple instances of dealing with vulnerabilities including drug and alcohol use and homelessness.

Officers issued warnings to people drinking alcohol on the streets, disposed of the alcohol, and spoke to people sleeping rough on the streets to ensure they were alright.

PC Sean McFadden said: "It is a real mixed bag of offences that we see on the weekends.

"At the weekends, everything is just increased and we have to pull in resources from elsewhere because cops who work in the city centre wouldn't be able to cover everything on their own at weekends.

"We have a lot of people who live here, dealing with the fall out of drug-misuse, antisocial behaviour and other criminality.

"We've got a lot of people who work here and a lot of retail premises - we get a lot of retail crime happening in the city centre.

"We're more aware with vulnerabilities now and we try to pull in partners to help us deal with that, particularly thinks like youth offending and with calls about mental health."

Trouble with youth offending

However, at around midnight - the police were made aware of a young boy who was causing trouble for business owners.

The boy had been stealing equipment from a local McDonalds and was causing trouble within a local Tesco.

When he was pointed out to officers, the boy shouted obscenities at them and made rude gestures.

Officers began walking towards the youth, who then turned and began to run away - through dense city centre traffic.

After a short pursuit on-foot, officers caught the young boy who was then questioned about why he was on his own in the city centre close to midnight.

It was established the boy was 12-years-old, but could not remember his parents' phone number, or his home address.

Officers made the decision to escort the boy home in a police van - a task which took hours out of their foot patrolling shift.

PC McFadden added: "This needs to be done to keep people safe, and to get people the help they need.

"But, I just think we're not necessarily the right people to give that help.

"We have other partners who are better trained, better equipped and have better processes when it comes to certain situations."

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