By DAVID LAWRENCE
Social-issue docos usually require a wade through statistics, and this one - on youth crime in Britain, in particular Birmingham - has them knee-deep.
We hear that in the past year (presumably January to December 1999, as the programme was made this year, and presumably in comparison to the previous year) robberies in Britain increased by 26 per cent. Arrests of young people for robbery almost doubled.
In the centre of Birmingham the police dealt with more than 1600 muggings. Almost 30 per cent of crime in one area of the city was committed by children.
As if in need of more figures, the BBC team surveys 3000 schoolchildren and discovers that 40 per cent of them are concerned for their safety when travelling around the city. At 32 per cent, robbery tops the list of crimes they worry about most.
More than 25 per cent of them have been robbed. And 14 per cent know someone who once met a bloke on a bus who had a friend whose cousin's next-door-neighbour was robbed (sorry, strike that last one).
The point is made - in fact it is relentlessly driven home until there is not the faintest possibility of room for a microbe of doubt in the furthest recess of any viewer's mind - that robbery is a problem for young people in Birmingham. This is the documentary's crowning achievement.
When it comes to working out what the stats mean, however, the show falters.
Arrests for robbery double. Is this bad news, indicating that robbery is on the rise? Or it is cause for celebration, as the Chief Constable of the West Midlands Police would have us believe, because it shows the cops are winning?
Or is it, as community leaders of leafless Birmingham suburbs suggest, evidence of increasing police harassment of blacks?
The BBC's investigation, featuring not-very-dramatic reconstructions and interviews with offenders in arty silhouette, is led by an earnest Scotswoman with a social worker-like approach.
She asks a 16-year-old mugger: "How do you think your victims feel?" It is tempting to applaud when he replies in that lilting Brummie accent: "As if they've had something stolen off them."
Young Robbers fails to put the figures in a comprehensible context. Neither does it examine the causes of youth crime beyond the Chief Constable's view of it as "a product of a materialistic society" - an analysis better expressed by a teenager who says: "If they haven't got it they're going to go out and get it" ("it" being mobile phones, wallets, watches and jewellery).
But the programme becomes interesting when it comes to policing and race.
The war on mugging, we are told, is top priority for the West Midlands force (they're going easy on the Irish now?) and their "preventive strategy" is to stop and search potential muggers under the special powers of a public order act introduced to deal with football hooliganism.
This - and one cop admits as much - means that simply by being on the street a black kid in a baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt is identifying himself as a potential mugger.
When the earnest reporter puts it to the Chief Constable that a lot of innocent black people are getting stopped and searched, he declares that stopping and searching innocent people is what police get paid for (honest, he does).
After that it's a touch ironic to hear the plaintive lament of one community constable: "It would be nice if we could get a few of them to trust us, it really would."
So we are left with blacks claiming that they are disproportionately targeted by police, and police claiming that blacks are disproportionately involved in muggings. Apparently there are no statistics available on either of those.
Young Robbers
Prime, 8.35 pm
TV: Where policing issues are black and white
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