TROUBLESOME teenagers hanging about outside a village shop are going to have to face the music or move on under a novel police initiative being piloted in South Lakeland.

Youngsters causing bother outside Burneside's Spar shop are to be serenaded with off-putting operatic overtures and classical symphonies in an experiment to cut down on youth disorder.

Abusive youths have tended to gather in gangs outside the shop and all efforts by the owner and police to get them to disperse and meet elsewhere have failed.

But the police, with support from South Lakeland District Council's Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership, have hatched a new plan that will assault the ears of the teenagers and force them to find an alternative meeting place.

The theory is that youngsters will be repelled by the strains of Strauss, Mozart, Elgar and Handel and the passionate performances of Pavarotti and Placido. The music will be piped from inside the shop to speakers protected by metal cages outside the store.

It is an experiment that will run for six months and, if successful, police say they will extend it to other youth "hotspots" throughout the district.

Kendal Police's Crime Prevention Officer and partnership member Terry Belshaw said: "You could say the old adage: Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast' comes into play here."

He said it had been proved elsewhere that if classical music was played it tended to stop young people who created disorder from gathering.

Mr Belshaw said the music would be of a type that did not have a beat and could not be construed as being aggressive. "That rules out Wagner's Ring'!" he quipped. "It will be played loud enough for those people who don't want to hear it but not loud enough to upset the neighbours," said Mr Belshaw. "It will not be played all night, just at certain times of the day. It will have to be monitored regularly but it will not be the sort of music that will reverberate through your house walls.

"There is nothing to say it's going to be used outside Burneside Spar shop forever and a day. But if we find we can use something to help the crime and disorder problem and reduce or prevent it, then obviously we will continue to use it."

Shop owner Arthur Walker welcomed the initiative, pointing out it that had been used successfully at other Spar outlets around the country. He said of the young people who congregate outside his shop: "You can't get rid of them and they drive customers away. Pensioners will not come if there is a gang of lads outside."

He said the young people tended to meet at around 7pm and were often outside causing a nuisance until 11pm. "Everybody in the village is complaining. We have had to ban some from the shop," said Mr Walker. " If this works, and it does not bother anyone else, then it's a good idea."

PC Tony Lees, of Kendal Police's COPS (community orientated problem solving) team, who got the idea from the Home Office Crime Prevention College and after watching a television programme of a successful scheme elsewhere in the country, said it was the first time this method of dispersing young people had been used in Cumbria.

He said the young people were verbally abusing staff and customers. "You never know, we could make them into culture vultures," he joked.

February 7, 2003 09:00