Barry Manilow: Secret weapon against crime

I came across this report that tells how police in the United Kingdom have borrowed from their Australian counterparts an ingenious method of managing loitering youths. To fight the growing problem of pimply teenagers gathering in public places with their trousers around their knees, iPods embedded in their waxy ears, composing badly spelled SMSs and thinking of ways to annoy the adult population, they have begun funding something known as the “Manilow method”.

It is inspired. Find the places where kids hang out. Put up a couple of loudspeakers. Play Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits Gold Collection on repeat and, before you can say “Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl,” the kids will have sulked off to the next corner.

There’s another part of the plan and that is to install devices that emit a high-pitched, mosquito-like buzzing noise that, apparently, teenagers find distasteful (clearly whoever invented that had never heard of Britney Spears). But it all seems to be working — authorities report that the implementation has led to a 24% drop in anti-social behaviour. That is, of course, assuming that one doesn’t categorise the playing of Barry Manilow really loudly as anti-social behaviour. Which I believe you should. But no one asked me.

This scheme is child-management gold. But I wonder if it would work here in South Africa?

You could try to put up the speakers around popular shopping malls, but chances are they’d either be stolen in seconds or some bright spark would hack in and replace the blonde, big-nosed one with Fokofpolisiekar (in my opinion a vast improvement anyway). But there is another possible application.

Housebreakings are a common problem in the suburbs of Cape Town and Johannesburg. Why not apply the Manilow method to chase people off our manicured lawns? Every night, before you go to bed, lock up the dogs and play the sweet sounds of Bazza to the night creatures in your garden. No self-respecting tsotsi would be seen dead trying to get into your house. And even if they did, chances are they would leave clutching only a handful of fluffy pink trinkets and the Noot vir Noot box set. You could take it a step further and rewire your home alarm system so that instead of a shrill siren when your privacy is invaded, your neighbours are alerted by Manilow crooning, “Well, you came and you gave without taking, but I sent you away, oh Mandy …”

I’m not sure how effective the Manilow method is in the UK. I suspect that it simply shifts the problem from one street corner to the next. The only way to stop it altogether would be to plant a small iPod Nano with a Wi-Fi connection in every teenager’s brain and operate it remotely using an iTunes playlist devised by the Shady Acres Home for the Frail. Or you could simply stream them Snuki Zikalala reading the latest SABC Radio News bulletins (although that may be crossing some sort of line and be classed as child abuse). Either way you would be able to torment teens wherever they are, from wherever you are. Job done.