I feel in a better position to answer this than ever after events from last night, where a guy was attacked by a machete on my front doorstep. We've had the cops and CID round, and the house was cordoned off with police tape.
We do have a problem in certain areas with young men and women involced in extreme violence. This does need to be clamped down upon, and I would like to see stiff penalties imposed for possession of weapons. However, these incidents are really quite rare and I'm certainly not scared to step outside. I've never been threatened or suffered any anti-social abuse.
General anti-social behaviour needs to be tackled as well, but I'd like to see the estate kids given more to do, youth clubs and facilities etc. Round our way they've got a park with nothing in it, not even any goal posts. There are no clubs etc, so they all hang around on the streets. Get a big enough group of them and sooner or later boredom and bravado is going to result in a disturbance.