I grew up in Middlesbrough, so watching the aftermath of the horrific A66 crash at South Bank has brought back memories I haven’t thought about for years.
TWOCing
For those who didn’t grow up with the term, TWOC meant “taking without owner’s consent”. Stealing a car, driving it around an estate, often at ridiculous speeds, dumping it and sometimes setting it on fire.
It became such a feature of growing up here that I remember Cleveland Police coming into schools to explain why getting into a stolen car was, actually, a fairly terrible life choice.
Vehicle damage was normalised
I also remember shutting my windows on hot summer days because another car had been torched around the corner from my house. Some weekends it felt almost routine.
You’d smell it before you saw it. That distinctive stink of burning plastic and rubber drifting through the estate. Another car. Another fire engine. Another police car. Then everyone carried on.
That’s why, when I see young people today wearing balaclavas, filming cars, celebrating dangerous driving and posting anti-police hashtags, I don’t see an entirely new phenomenon created by TikTok. I see something horribly familiar.
Before TikTok, there was this
It isn’t nostalgia playing tricks on me. TWOCing really was a significant part of the landscape of 1990s Middlesbrough.
In 1991, it was being discussed in parliament. During a debate on aggravated vehicle-taking, an MP described footage of a police chase through the centre of Middlesbrough involving a 14-year-old driving a stolen Vauxhall Astra at 90mph on the wrong side of the road. Police abandoned the pursuit four times because it had become too dangerous. This child cost £2.5mn in car vehicle damage in one year alone. That would be equivalent to £7mn in 2026.
By 1997, Cleveland had the highest rate of auto-crime per 1,000 households among comparable police forces.
So we didn’t need TikTok to make dangerous driving exciting. We had word of mouth. Someone nicked a car. Someone got chased by the police. Someone escaped. By Monday morning everyone knew about it.
Who is that masked man?
Today, the audience can number thousands. The chase can be filmed. A balaclava becomes part of the image and the police become characters in the entertainment.
Hashtags such as #FuckClevelandPolice and references to FTR – Full Throttle Racing circulate around this culture. Social media didn’t invent the desire to show off. It just gave it a much bigger stage.
Real life consequences
And then, in the early hours of Saturday 22 August, something unimaginably horrific happened.
A Volkswagen Passat carrying five young males travelled the wrong way along the A66 at South Bank and collided head-on with a marked Cleveland Police vehicle.
PC Matthew Blades, 37, and PC Tom Clough, 38, were killed. All five occupants of the Passat, aged between 17 and 23, also died.
Seven people. Seven families whose lives changed in seconds. The circumstances surrounding what happened are still being investigated, and we should be extremely careful about filling gaps with assumptions. But it is possible to ask a wider question.
How did we get here?
Children aren’t born into a culture – they learn it
One thing particularly troubles me about the culture surrounding dangerous driving. Just how young some of those attracted to it appear to be.
You see children in balaclavas. Anti-police slogans and police pursuits treated as entertainment. It’s easy to dismiss them as “bad kids”. It is considerably harder to ask how children come to see these things as normal.
Generational criminality
A nine-year-old doesn’t independently develop a passionate hatred of Cleveland Police after conducting a detailed assessment of its institutional performance. Attitudes are learned.
That doesn’t automatically mean from parents. It might be older siblings, cousins, friends, older teenagers or what they consume online. But where criminality becomes established across generations, children can grow up around its language, loyalties and attitudes long before they understand what any of it might eventually cost them.
That is the uncomfortable reality of generational criminality.
It doesn’t have to be like this
It does not mean children from families where offences have occurred are destined to offend themselves. They aren’t. Nor does poverty produce criminality. Most working-class families in Middlesbrough are not involved in crime, and thousands of us grew up around TWOCing without participating in it.
Intervention matters
But neither should we pretend that environment has no influence. For some children, criminal behaviour can become familiar before it becomes criminal. Hostility towards the police can be inherited as an attitude. An older person involved in crime can carry status rather than stigma. Risk can look exciting rather than frightening.
That is where intervention matters.
Schools, children’s services, youth workers, councils and police may all encounter different pieces of a child’s life. But who puts those pieces together? And how early are we prepared to intervene?
A much wider picture is emerging
Those questions have become even more important as the investigation into the A66 crash has widened.
Cleveland Police has now made 17 arrests, involving people aged from 16 to 61, and described the investigation as having “significant links to serious and organised criminal activity”. Among those arrested are a 16-year-old, an 18-year-old and a 21-year-old on suspicion of participating in an organised crime group.
A widening net
An arrest is not a conviction, and none of this establishes the individual backgrounds of the five people who died. It would be wrong to use an ongoing investigation to speculate about them.
But the age range alone raises legitimate questions about how young people can become exposed to suspected organised criminality.
If someone can become caught up in that world at 16, prevention cannot begin at 16. It has to ask what was happening years earlier.
It’s not just a policing issue
This is why generational criminality cannot simply be treated as a policing problem. Police largely encounter it once something has already happened. Breaking a cycle means reaching children before offending becomes identity, before an arrest becomes status and before the criminal justice system becomes a familiar part of family life.
Problem families
We often use the phrase “problem families”. Perhaps it is more useful to talk about problems within families and communities – and whether the services around children have the resources and ability to address them.
That isn’t about blaming families. It is about preventing another generation being lost to the same patterns.
This isn’t a video game
There is another consequence of turning police pursuits into entertainment: the people behind the blue lights can disappear.
Police become the obstacle. The enemy you’re supposed to outrun. But PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough were human beings. They went to work. They had families and people expecting them home.
Their police vehicle was not conducting the pursuit when the collision occurred. They were travelling along the road when a vehicle coming the wrong way collided with them.
They never chose to become part of somebody else’s risk. That is what gets lost in the strangely harmless-sounding language of “joyriding”. Joy for whom?
Not the person coming the other way. Not the family answering the door afterwards. Not the emergency workers arriving at a scene involving seven people who could not be saved. A car travelling at speed isn’t content. The consequences are real.
When notoriety becomes content
What social media has changed is the potential reward. When I was growing up, notoriety was local. You impressed people on your estate, your mates or whoever heard the story afterwards.
Now there can be an audience waiting. Balaclavas, hashtags, videos and anti-police rhetoric can create an identity around the behaviour. It isn’t necessarily just about driving fast. It can become about belonging to something.
Lost children
That matters when we’re talking about lost children.
Young people have always done stupid things to impress each other. What they haven’t always had is an algorithm repeatedly demonstrating which stupid things attract the most attention.
The more outrageous the behaviour, the better the content. A near miss is dramatic. Blue lights in the rear-view mirror add excitement. Getting away provides an ending.
What doesn’t make such compelling content is what comes afterwards:
The knock at somebody’s door.
A prison sentence.
A permanent injury.
A funeral.
Years of grief.
Removing videos that glorify dangerous driving may therefore be worthwhile, but it cannot be the whole response. If the culture exists offline, deleting its online counterpart doesn’t make it disappear.
Social media may be the megaphone. We still need to understand what is being shouted through it.
What happens next matters
There are seven families at the centre of this living through something most of us cannot begin to comprehend.
Behind every photograph and every name is somebody who was loved. Parents have lost children. Children have lost a father. Partners, siblings, friends and colleagues have lost people who mattered to them. Nothing written about what happened should lose sight of that.
Nor should asking difficult questions about the wider culture become an excuse to speculate about those who died or direct anger towards their families. They are grieving. They did not choose any of this.
What happened before?
There will be investigations into the events of that night, and there are questions only those investigations can answer. The questions for the rest of us are about what happens before a tragedy.
We must reach them
How do we reach lost children who are beginning to see criminality as status or belonging? How do we stop anti-police hostility becoming an inherited identity? What support exists when professionals recognise that a child is being drawn towards older people involved in crime?
There won’t be one answer. Families matter. So do schools, policing, children’s services, youth provision, poverty, opportunity and the communities children grow up within.
Stop being reductive
Perhaps most importantly, we should resist reducing an extraordinarily complicated tragedy to a story about good people and bad people.
Seven human beings went onto the A66 that night and none of them came home. That should be enough to make Teesside stop and think. Not only about the final minutes of seven lives, but about all the years that come before them.
Generational change
I grew up in a Middlesbrough where TWOCing became sufficiently normal that another burnt-out car could simply become part of the weekend.
I don’t want another generation of children to grow up believing the modern version is normal too. We cannot change what happened on the A66.
But there are lost children growing up on Teesside right now whose stories are still being written.
What we do for them is something we can change. It’s time for them to be found.
Thank you to Ray Casey for contributing to this article.
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