Middlesbrough Mayor Chris Cooke said today it had been ‘very tough’ for the town to be in the spotlight but said police are ‘doing a sterling job’ and denied the town was ‘lawless’.

It follows a week of escalating violence thought to be linked to a gangland war between two factions of a local organised crime group, with police previously resorting to surveillance tactics employed in Northern Ireland.

PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough were killed along with five youths in a head-on crash last Saturday, after the car the group were in went the wrong way on the A66 and smashed into the marked police car.

A series of ram raids on homes across the area are thought to be linked to the incident, with the young men and teens in the car said to have been pursuing rival gang members shortly before their deaths.

The small area of Middlesbrough also saw a fatal housefire this week, which killed Natalie McDonald, 34, and Valentina Foster, seven – although thought to be related to gangs in the area, it is not directly connected to last Saturday’s crash at this stage.

And fires were seen in local fields after at least five cars were set alight at a balloon release in memory of one of the crash victims. 

Police have made a series of arrests in recent days targeting the wider crime group, including seven more on Friday, bringing the total to 24. 

Responding to accusations the town is ‘lawless,’ Mr Cooke said today: ‘I find that rather ironic given the number of arrests that have already been made. Police are doing an absolutely sterling job to round up as many people as possible.’

Contradicting comments made by his predecessor Andy Preston yesterday, the Labour mayor claimed crime had reduced in the last two years and Cleveland Police ‘had been making progress’.

A house in Acklam, Middlesbrough, linked to the father of Cole Worthy, one of the young men who died in the A66 crash, was rammed hours before Saturday’s collision

Several cars were set ablaze by youths in a field near Haswell in County Durham on Thursday, purportedly during a balloon release for one of the crash victims

Armed police swoop on an address five miles from Grangetown, Middlesbrough, on Thursday night

A house in the South Bank area of Middlesbrough was rammed by a car on Wednesday

‘They are the second most improved police force in the UK. They are doing extremely well in spite of the lack of funding.

‘They are a police force that has been one of the hardest hit with over a ten per cent reduction in police officers while other places have seen over 20 per cent increase and that isn’t fair,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

‘The funding for police needs to follow need and what the statistics are. It cannot just be based on population size as it currently is because that serves no-one well.’

Mr Cooke said the focus in Middlesbrough needed to be on ‘long term need’, what could be done ‘to stop the statistics happening’ and ‘breaking the cycle’.

‘When a crime shows up on the crime statistics, it is already too late at that point so that’s why my focus is on youth clubs,’ he explained.

‘There will be a youth club in every single ward. It is also about making sure we have opportunities for young people like the Ten by Ten programme to ensure that every child by the age of 10 gets ten aspirational activities to make sure that they can see that there are other paths in life.

‘Those won’t stop criminals today or tomorrow but it is about breaking those cycles which go on and go on.’

Asked whether local people had simply given up, he said: ‘I have lived here and in Teesside all my life. I grew up in foster care and lived in some of the estates and witnessed some of the things as I was growing up.

‘I know better than some of the people who claim to speak on some of these subjects who have never lived in that sort of world or on these estates. I really understand what is driving some of those issues.

PC Matthew Blades, a father of two, was killed when his police vehicle was struck head-on by a VW Passat travelling the wrong way down the A66 near Middlesbrough 

PC Tom Clough also died in the crash last Saturday, which occurred around ten seconds after a police pursuit of the Volkswagen had been called off

‘Those estates aren’t written off. Those estates aren’t forgotten or left behind. We just haven’t managed to get them to the place they need to be yet and a lot of that comes down to the fact of how much are we willing to accept a narrative that we are a place that is lawless because that’s just not the case because police are arresting.

‘Are we just willing to accept that as our future or are we willing to actually focus on a better future for our children and future generations and if that isn’t our focus we might as well all give up?

‘For me I will always have the resolve that we need to make sure that we go forward, we do the best that we can and we uplift every single generation so that it is better than the one that came before it. It would be so easy to lose sight of that in the midst of what is happening.’

He said the town would ‘bounce back, was always persistent and was always here’ and paid tribute to the community who had backed the police who had ‘been overwhelmed by kindness with offers of food and help at police stations’.

‘They have seen the best of people come forward through what has been a really tough week.’

It comes after it was revealed this week that the orgy of violence and disorder which has swept through Middlesbrough is underpinned by a battle for supremacy in the drugs trade between rival gangs.

The mayhem, which a local MP branded ‘terrorism’, has continued night after night, despite the announcement of 200 extra police officers being drafted in from neighbouring forces.

The five youths and young men who died in the A66 crash in the early hours of Saturday – which also took the lives of two police officers – were involved in drug dealing, but were foot soldiers and not major players in the criminal network.

In recent weeks, our investigation has revealed, there has been a fallout among the younger members of the organised crime network and they split into two factions.

Makai Saddington, one of the five killed in the VW, had posted videos on TikTok of him being chased by police and was awaiting trial for racially abusing and assaulting officers

Cole Worthy (right) with his friend Theo Rae, who also died in the crash on Saturday

Jacob Matusiak, another occupant of the car which hit the officers’ patrol vehicle, also posted videos of himself driving recklessly

One of the A66 youths, Cole Worthy, 17, and a former friend involved in the gangs had a dispute over the spoils of their criminal activity and it led to the gang splitting in two.

It is thought it was the rival faction who were in the Volvo XC60 which rammed Worthy’s father’s home and the homes of other people connected to Worthy’s group – a favourite way for Teesside criminals to send a threatening message.

Cole Worthy’s father, Gye Worthy, 39, is an offshore worker who lives in a quiet middle-class street in Acklam, Middlesbrough, and although his home was targeted there is nothing to connect him to criminality.

One of the A66 gang, Michael Cahill, 23, also had close links to criminal elements in the traveller community.

A well-known traveller crime family is thought to have moved into the Teesside drugs scene in recent months, further ramping up tensions with the established supply lines that have operated in the area for years.

The A66 gang – which also included Theo Rae, 17, Makai Saddington, 18, and Jakub Matusiak, 23 – operated out of Pallister Park in east Middlesbrough in the poverty-stricken TS3 postcode, which is in the bottom 1 per cent of the most deprived council wards in England.

Historically there has been a rivalry between youths in TS3 and the neighbouring TS6 postcode, which takes in South Bank and Grangetown.

In the past gangs known as the TS3 and the TS6 have fought running battles in the area armed with golf clubs and batons.

It is believed the blaze which killed seven-year-old Valentina Foster and her aunt Natalie McDonald, 34, was not directly linked to the house rammings and fatal smash on the A66.

But it is believed to be linked to the wider organised crime violence sweeping the area, because Ms McDonald’s uncle, Marty Timms, is a notorious gangland enforcer currently serving an extended sentence of nearly 14 years for a drive-by shooting.

Valentina Foster, seven, and her aunt Natalie McDonald, 34, died in a house fire on Wednesday

At least 12 armed police swoop on a residential street in Thornaby, North Yorkshire, overnight

Ms McDonald, 34, and young Valentina are understood to be innocents caught in the vicious cycle of underworld attacks and reprisals that have gone on for at least two years.

Timms and two associates went hunting their quarry in a white BMW armed with a .22 long-barrelled rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.

When they spotted their 21-year-old victim, Timms, who was driving the car, shouted: ‘There he is, man. Shoot him. Shoot him.’

One of his accomplices – Christopher Teasdale, 42, and Richard Finn, 45, – opened fire and a bullet ripped through their victim, leaving ‘an entry bullet hole in his back and an exit wound in his chest’.

The shooting sent shockwaves through Grangetown, near Middlesbrough, with rival factions vowing to seek revenge.

Police are understood to be looking at links between Timms and the arson attack on his niece’s semi in Birchington Avenue, less than half a mile from where the shooting occurred in 2024.

Cleveland Police said the fire had also left a 48-year-old woman in a critical condition in hospital alongside another three people who suffered non-life threatening injuries.

Gangland rivals also rammed a house belonging to the mother of one of the A66 youths just minutes before the fatal collision.

The woman’s silver Audi – which was parked on the driveway – was shunted into the front of the three-storey property in the early hours of last Saturday.

In total, three properties linked to the gang were targeted by rivals in a Volvo XC60 in the early hours last Saturday.

Photos showed the crumpled convertible Audi parked outside the boarded-up home, with a blue tarpaulin covering the damage to the building.

Her son Theo Rae, 17, was in a stolen VW Passat with the others looking for the rival gang when the car collided with a police vehicle.

His grandmother’s home is also believed to have been rammed, along with a property owned by the dad of another one of the A66 victims, Cole Worthy, 17.

The Sun reported that homes in Middlesbrough have been rammed for months as part of a tit-for-tat campaign involving rivals amid a gangland feud over drugs and money.

But how did this former boomtown of the coal, iron and steel industries sink, as former mayor Andy Preston put it, ‘to its knees’ and become the provincial ‘crime capital of England’, with only London reporting worse stats?

The Victorians nick-named Middlesbrough the ‘Infant Hercules’ and ‘Ironopolis’ for its thriving growth in trade, but now those jobs have gone and the deserted town centre with huge numbers of empty shops tells its own sorry story.

Venture into the South Bank estates, parts of which are among the poorest 1 per cent in the country, and it doesn’t take long before you glimpse youths in balaclavas on mopeds and souped-up ebikes.

Mr Preston believes the roots of Middlesbrough’s malaise is nuanced, but has no time for those who simply ‘blame Thatcher’. He also points out that despite its undeniably deep-seated problems, the town does have a thriving tech sector and that the vast majority of its citizens are ‘decent, honest, law-abiding people’.

‘You go into estates that are technically among the most deprived in Britain and you see people looking after their homes, tending their gardens and painting their front doors,’ he said.

‘But alongside them is a relatively small group of people who live outside the normal expectations of society.

‘Some are second or third-generation benefit claimants. Drug addiction is common within that group and, for some, taking and dealing drugs becomes a way of life.

‘They live chaotic lives and many quickly become deeply antisocial and criminal. The tragedy is that decent people living around them end up paying the price.

‘These people don’t play by the same rules, they have little fear because they have nothing to lose. They intimidate people, commit crimes and make their neighbours’ lives a misery. Normal people are often too scared to report the crime they see in their streets.’

As Mayor, a post he held as an independent between 2019 and 2023, he recalled a scheme to put public CCTV cameras at known crime spots on steel masts.

But the gangs soon took industrial angle grinders to those, and despite the obvious noise, no one reported a thing. So the council took a leaf out of Northern Ireland’s book and bought more robust so-called ‘Belfast towers’.

The criminals responded by felling those by crashing stolen trucks into them, so the authorities had to place huge boulders around the base to protect them.

‘That tells you something about the level of lawlessness we were dealing with,’ said Mr Preston.

‘This happens elsewhere, of course. Middlesbrough isn’t another country. But some of these problems are simply more concentrated here.

‘And behind all the statistics are the majority of decent people whose lives can be absolutely destroyed by it.

‘People become frightened to leave their homes. If someone is even suspected of being an informer, their house can be attacked. People worry about their homes being set on fire. Someone can spray “grass” on a nearby wall as a warning.’

He recalled: ‘I saw that first-hand as Mayor. I met people who were so frightened of reprisals that they wouldn’t even meet me within a mile of their homes.

‘None of this is new. It has been going on for years. Police and politicians deal with individual issues and crimes, but over time they become desensitised to a level of criminality and intimidation that we should never regard as normal.’

He said the loss of heavy industry in the 1980s did hit towns such as Middlesbrough hard.

‘People and communities didn’t know how to adapt, but eventually most people did. Middlesbrough today is full of people who work hard, start businesses and find ways to get on.

‘But some people didn’t adapt and were left behind. Then some of their children grew up in that kind of household – used to worklessness and the problems that go with it.

‘And I think our welfare and criminal justice systems have sometimes made it too easy for that marginal existence to continue from one generation to the next.’

And so the cycle continues, with or without the sudden ‘surge’ of more than 200 police officers from neighbouring forces announced this week.

With more violence and lawlessness expected across the town this weekend, Andy McDonald, the MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, told Times Radio: ‘People are saying that they are going to their shops and not feeling safe to do so and feeling trapped in their own homes.

‘That is just unacceptable. This is terrorism and we’ve got to have an appropriate response to deal with the people who are causing such mayhem in our communities and to allow people to lead their peaceful lives.’