AS POLICE and town hall chiefs team up to launch a new drive against criminals and trouble-makers on council estates, there comes a shocking disclosure - just 60 people were responsible for almost half the crime detected in Burnley last year.

In short, they are known and persistent offenders, making life a misery for countless others.

The Safer Estates Agreement formally signed by police and the Burnley Council council aims to put the boot on the other foot and make life a misery for them - so that, through an information- sharing system, bad tenants can be rooted out and evicted.

And we are promised this is not just a paper exercise, but one that will work. Watch this space, says Burnley's police chief Supt Mike Griffin.

We will, sir. Not least because people's lives are being continually marred by housing estate criminals and louts - the vicious, nasty minority in their midst.

But while we welcome all these new initiatives such as this pioneering police-council agreement, the new tougher tenancy conditions and the use by councils of professional witnesses to combat intimidation of complaining neighbours, there is another weapon we want to see wielded to the full - that of on-the-spot policing.

True, the police do not have the resources to be everywhere at once. But, especially with Chief Constable Mrs Pauline Clare's drive to put more officers on the streets, there is, surely, scope for zero-tolerance policing on selected housing estates where the trouble is greatest.

And that shock figure of just 60 people causing 43 per cent of the crime in Burnley suggests that there is scope, too, for pro-active policing of known criminals - the system whereby, instead of waiting for them to commit crimes, officers watch them like hawks and breathe down their necks so that they have little or no opportunity to offend because they dare not.

For if the boot is on the other foot now, then let it be fully studded.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.