PARENTS who let their children indulge in anti-social behaviour on Gyllyngvase Beach should be “banging” their offspring’s heads together rather than complaining about police tactics.

That was the opinion of former mayor Cllr Steve Eva at a meeting of Falmouth Town Council on Monday night, following a report from PC Matt Cummins about anti-social behaviour on Gyllyngvase Beach.

PC Cummins, from Falmouth Neighbourhood Team, said they were currently working hard with schools and working on other projects to try and tackle the problem of anti-social behaviour on Gylly Beach and St Mary’s Gardens over the summer.

“The problems around beaches have been quite apparent this year,” he said. “It is now getting towards the end of the summer and we’ve had a huge amount of input down there, extra resource provided at weekends in an effort to combat the anti-social behaviour.

“We’ve seen some of it first-hand so we are working with the schools to try and combat this, see if we can educate as well as enforce.”

He said they could have up to 200 children on the beach and about 150 of them have done “absolutely nothing wrong”.

“But you will have about 30 that are in the wings watching the influencers and then you’ll have ten to 20 who are problematic,” he said.

“We have been targeting them pretty hard, we’ve had some arrests. We try not to criminalise children but unfortunately it’s inevitable, occasionally with the ringleaders they leave us absolutely no choice.

“We can go for weeks and nothing happens down there and then I see the work of people who look after the garden I see beds that are provide for primary school children trampled.

“It sounds really minor, but my daughter has been taught to pick up litter since she was three years old. I don’t understand why we are down there picking up litter, alcohol bottles, all sorts of things.”

He said the police and other agencies were working to educate on a complete package to tackle anti-social behaviour.

“We can’t police all society, we need education, we need members of the public to report it to us.”

Falmouth mayor Kirstie Edwards said they had created a youth targeted Safer Falmouth working with all bodies, including the Dracaena Centre, to provide level of safety for the children that are there and don’t want to be involved in what is going on, on the beaches.

But she told the meeting that on some occasions even she had felt very intimidated on the beach and she had been with a police officer.

Cllr Eva said sometimes he thinks police are the easy target with people asking ‘Why aren’t they doing this?’ and ‘Why aren't they doing  that?’ “I wonder where the parents are sometimes?” he said “Instead of saying to the police: ‘Why are you picking on my child?’ Why aren’t they down there banging their heads together? Or saying we’ll come down and give you a hand.”

Asked by Cllr Alan Jewell whether the licence to sell alcohol granted to the new Co-op on the seafront had made things worse, PC Cummins said he could categorically say it didn’t.

He said the culprits would get alcohol anywhere they could and in some case he’d seen that the parents had provided their offspring with alcohol.

“I don’t think the Co-op is responsible for the issues that are there,” he said. “I think everybody is responsible. I have heard this but I think they are being made a scapegoat.”