If you saw a gang attack someone, would you stab them?

A man has been charged with attempted murder after a youth was multiply wounded in an altercation outside his home. Reporting of the apparent facts in newspapers breaks the usually strict rules of pending prosecutions, but it appears that the man charged was woken when his wife told him his stepson was being attacked by a number youths outside their home. He ran out to confront the youths barefoot, reportedly grabbing a letter opener before the confrontation in which the wounds were sustained. He is on bail as I write.

There may well be more to this case than meets the eye. The man’s wife photographed the youths, she told reporters, but this did not prevent their allegedly continuing their attack on her son. I don’t want to join in the judgmental media speculation about what constitutes heroism but, if it is true that the man decided to arm himself (however poorly) before confronting these youths, it speaks of our contemporary fears. Young men fighting are considered these days as necessarily a potentially fatal risk. One-sided punch-ups may well prove lethal, it is true, but considering the number of fights there are it’s more surprising there are not more deaths or serious injuries. The story has appeal for newspapers because of the sympathy they anticipate for the man charged. It also shows that police balance this fear we have of violent youths by bringing such a serious charge against a person who injured one of five people allegedly attacking his stepson. All five, including the one that was wounded, were all charged with assault and criminal damage. That police arrested six of the eight people involved in the incident is unsurprising.

I should emphasise that the reporting of facts on this case appears astonishingly presumptive (Steven Gerrard’s and Amy Winehouse’s acquittals of assault charges were clearly unexpected by sections of the red-top and black-top press). I anticipate that coverage may change its character between the committal hearings in a magistrate’s court and any eventual trials at Crown Court with juries. Comparison of different reports shows some papers are twitchy about certain things while others are not, which raises suspicions about the coverage. However, if the injured youth did not sustain life-threatening wounds, as has also been reported, an attempted murder charge looks like a sharp warning to the public to think twice before aggressively asserting themselves - even when they apparently have grounds to believe that someone else is quite seriously threatened.

Leaving aside the particular circumstances of that pending case, one of many issues it raises is that of what is legally risky to contemplate for someone who intervenes in an altercation. Given that most people would hope that, if they were set upon by a gang, someone would help, a sensible balance between the moral obligations to defend others and the use of a reasonable amount of armed force is required. If intervention by the private citizen is a serious legal risk as well as physical one, it does not just contradict the consensus that most people would have, it also establishes a legal barrier to maintaining the consensus of conviviality that we rely on for much of our day-to-day ability to get along - without recourse to higher authorities.

Some years ago while working as a local newspaper reporter I was invited by police to a presentation on the uses of the then newly installed CCTV cameras around Sussex. I was shown a tape of an incident in Brighton where a group of six or so young men armed with sticks rounded a corner and attacked two others. “This view shows the scene that confronted officers who were nearby,” a policeman told me. “But when you view the start of this incident from the viewpoint of the camera that covered the other side of the corner, it looks very different.”

The tape showed the six young men (none of whom appeared to be white) walking peacefully along the street, laughing and joking with each other like any group of friends. As they passed the two lads (both white) who were walking in the opposite direction, one of the white lads, inexplicably and without any warning or provocation, spun his foot around in the air and high-kicked the nearest of the group of six in the face, then adopted a bouncing, martial arts-style stance. The larger group showed great presence of mind and immediately rounded on the attacker, arming themselves with pieces of wood from building works right beside them, and drove the pair away round the corner.

The implication of this presentation was that CCTV had helped to establish the natural justice of the altercation. Had police relied on what they had first seen, the version of events that the larger group would have given would have seemed unlikely. Their assertion that they acted in self-defence might have been difficult to believe. To leave aside the now well-documented uselessness of CCTV in reducing street crime, it appears that today the assumption of what was justified might be very different and the legal risks of defending oneself might be much higher than they were in the mid-1990s.

Today it seems there is no consensus on the basis of what Andrew Calcutt calls conviviality, the ability to of people to socially negotiate their private interests in public space, and get along with each other. The reflexive response, of both the state and a section of the public, is to attempt empower or re-empower the individual by the use of regulation and its enforcement. This contradicts the social processes that produced conviviality in the first place and drives away what it seeks to recover. The outcomes that are sought are the peaceful co-existence of various tensions or the suppression of harmful ones, but the unwritten, culturally inculcated basis of conviviality that existed previously, within and between the minds of individuals, has no way of re-establishing itself in anything like its previous form.

The increasing regulatory and legal interference with people intervening to preserve their own interests against transgression, as part of a broader, common social harmony, is corrosive to the fabric of society. To irreversably remove the right and freedom of action within the public space - in which we must all persue our legitimate and private interests - creates a non-public, regulated space that cannot avoid arresting everyone at once and subjecting them to the faulty panopticon of a population on remand.