Something ugly has erupted in Middlesbrough. Nine people are dead after two separate incidents days apart – first a high-speed crash on the weekend, then what appears to be a deliberate arson attack on a family home. Police strongly suspect that both events were gang-related. Around 200 extra officers have been sent to the city to aid investigations and quell the growing sense of anarchy.

And right on cue, the excuses have started. I’ve already seen Labour and Green politicians talking about deprivation and a lack of opportunities for young people. What bloody lack of opportunity?

On Friday, I stood beside the flowers left for PCs Matthew Blades and Tom Clough – two victims of the weekend’s head-on collision. Barely 200 metres away is Boho X – the gleaming, 60,000 square-foot global headquarters of games developer Double Eleven, packed with ambitious young people working in a global industry. Clustered around it are dozens of vibrant small businesses, cashing in on the opportunities the world presents.

Teesside has enormous industrial investment, booming businesses, apprenticeships, great colleges and one of Britain’s biggest digital sectors. But we’re being told that our underclass is violent and criminal because society hasn’t provided enough career options.

Total bollocks. I spent four years as the mayor of Middlesbrough, and many more working with charities in our poorest neighbourhoods. I’ve seen the worst of poverty, addiction and genuinely awful childhoods.

I’ve also seen something our political class avoids acknowledging: people are behaving appallingly because we’ve allowed them to. They discover that breaking the law doesn’t cost them anything, that intimidation works and that police are stretched. Even if they are arrested, the courts are clogged for years ahead and prisons are already full. Then we’re astonished when they become more brazen.

The high-speed crash appears to prove this observation. Four of the five drivers of the car that caused the collision had pleaded guilty to a combined 37 offences. Yet none of them had ever seen the inside of a prison cell.

As mayor, I massively expanded CCTV because residents desperately wanted action against crime. Criminals arrived with industrial grinders and cut down the camera masts, so we strengthened them. So they used vehicles to ram them instead.

This wasn’t a cry for help. It’s contempt for law and disrespect for those who comply. And the people suffering from it aren’t MPs on nice streets or Guardian journalists. They’re cleaners, warehouse workers, bus drivers and their kids. Their lives can be made unbearable. Literally.

I’ve met residents too frightened to talk to me near their own homes. Some were even too scared to contact Crimestoppers anonymously. Where is the national outrage about them?

Instead, whenever criminality becomes impossible to ignore, Britain conducts another national therapy session about the criminal. What happened in his childhood? Was he excluded from school? Do we need another youth club? Stop it.

Of course circumstances matter. I’ve spent years helping homeless people, addicts and ex-offenders, and I’ve seen people turn their lives around. But sympathy or empathy before punishment is wrong. This approach has emboldened the people who are wrecking lives and communities.

The working classes work when they can. They pay taxes and obey the law. And we leave them to watch a minority deal drugs, intimidate neighbours and create chaos around them.

The truly compassionate response is to protect the victim. That means enough police to make getting caught a likely outcome of committing a crime. We need courts that swiftly judge and punish offenders while the crime is still fresh in everyone’s minds. And we need enough prison cells to keep dangerous and prolific criminals locked up.

Prison works for the simplest reason imaginable: it separates a criminal from his victims. He isn’t intimidating his neighbour, burgling someone’s home or recruiting another youngster into dealing drugs.

Here’s the most important thing about what’s happening in Middlesbrough: this isn’t really about Middlesbrough. My hometown isn’t some uniquely dysfunctional hellhole. Most people here are doing exactly what people everywhere do: working, raising families, building businesses and getting on with life. My 83-year-old mother still gets the bus into town and volunteers on the local council estate. She experiences no crime. That’s Middlesbrough, too.

What’s different today is that Middlesbrough has exposed something Britain has preferred not to confront – namely, the nationwide existence of small and poisonous groups, living outside the social rules that everyone else accepts. We’ve indulged them, coddled them and now we’re paying the price.

Don’t blame Middlesbrough. Look at the criminal underclass we’ve allowed to develop across Britain. Stop asking what society failed to give them and start asking why society tolerated them.

Andy Preston was mayor of Middlesbrough from 2019 until 2023.