|
Great Britain has the biggest problem concerning football violence, so they have also tried to find ways to tackle the problem. The plan in which they tried to fight against the hooligans was not so easy, because the problem was for the police to find out and to differ between the dangerous Hooligan and the ordinary football supporter. This difficulty lead the police to developing a system where all fans were included: the ones who were travelling to the match and the ones who were watching the game. The second step in their plan was to find out who the Hooligans were: and this had to be done undercover.
The police believed (because of the media) that all hooligans were members in an organisation, and so the officers got a new identity and they had to live the life of a hooligan and mingle with other hooligans.
They thought that the suspects would be a part of an organised gang that had caused mayhem throughout the country, wearing weapons and reading hooligan literature.
This plan resulted a lot of trials and convictions, but not all of the supporters were really guilty.
Another very common way to fight the problem in the 1970s was that the police escorted visiting supporters from railway stations to and from the match. Fans were surrounded by police and police dogs. Then the fans were herded into grounds via separate entries into areas where they were segregated from the home supporters by high metal fences.
Nowadays this method is not used that often anymore, it is more likely that the officers are posted at specified points.
The nineties has also seen a shift away from using police to control fans inside the grounds, with clubs relying more and more on Stewards, employed by the clubs. A Steward is someone who can punish the people for breaking laws in a particular clubs agenda and in ground rules, whereas the police can only eject people from the grounds if they are breaking the law.
Some Football Clubs play most of their games without a single police officer inside the ground. But the problem with this method is that the Stewards do not have a national standard for the training in crowd control and safety. Another thing is that they don not have the authority as the police.
Other measures in Great Britain are the use of Cameras all over the stadium and introductions of all-seater stadiums or the takeaway of season tickets as a punishment for violent fans. A very new method was that the press put photos of known hooligans on the front cover of the newspapers so that everybody can see them, but it is a question if this is a good idea because the people have lost their jobs after that, which makes them perhaps more violent than they have already been.
But there are not only efforts to tackle the problem of football violence in Great Britain, also other European countries have made their plans how to fight this situation.
Germany had a very different opinion how to solve this situation, and in 1981 the first fan project was introduced. This project had the meaning of preventing hooliganism by youth or social workers among supporters.
The project workers established a link between football fans and the police, in creating a platform for communication, which had not existed before. It also should help hooligans to find their personal identity and to get to know various possibilities of coping with life. The social workers should give the fans educational advice and recreation activities as wall as organised travels together and producing fan magazines.
Currently there are over twenty five fan projects in Germany, and also in the Netherlands, in Belgium, and in Sweden the idea has been adopted.
All in all, it is a fact that the British are Experts in fighting violence with punishments, police, cameras and separation of fans. But I think that this is not the solution to the problem because they do not tackle the problem at its roots, they just try to fight the visible problems. I believe that in the End, such methods like the fan projects are more successful and it is the only way (if there is a way at all) to change the attitude of the fans.
|
