INSPECTOR Pete Wilson looked at the Leominster 999 list for this time last year - and its litany of fights, assaults, rowdiness and calls made out of fear.

There's a man attacked by five youths in the street, 40 youths harassing another, kids climbing onto a house roof, menacing gangs gathering on corners waiting for something to kick off and a "naked bloke" running about.

That was a weekend on the Leominster beat in August, 2006. Insp Wilson had just come back to the town, some 20 years after he first patrolled its streets.

"There was a nasty, intimidating atmosphere some nights and things were getting a little bit beyond what we might expect of a weekend," he said.

The log for last weekend looks very different - kids playing hide and seek around parked cars, a teenager walking with a traffic cone on his head, kids playing football in the street and a barking dog.

The gangs still gather, but the groups are much smaller, their ringleaders behind closed doors, under curfew or locked up.

Faced with the potential for real trouble, Insp Wilson went after a special order that let his officers clear streets if they suspected trouble was brewing.

Section 30 powers allow police to break up gangs and arrest anyone who doesn't go away quietly. A Section 30 order, covering almost all of the town centre, was put into effect in October. On the street, the officers knew who to look out for. The gangs could be 40 to 50 strong and range in age from 12 to 20, but there were only a small number of ringleaders.

Many of the rest were merely onlookers, so PC Tracey Lewis, the town centre beat manager, didn't want to go in gung-ho. "We didn't want to put the same tar on with the same brush. If the kids were doing nothing we'd chat to them about the order or what was going on in their lives. If they were playing up, they'd be asked to leave and if they wouldn't go, then we'd use Section 30," said PC Lewis.

Between October last year and the end of the order in March, officers issued 149 Section 30 orders to gangs of youths inside the dispersal zone. Three youths were prosecuted for not going when they were told to, two went to court on assault charges and came away with ASBOs as part of their sentence, another two ASBO orders are pending, and one youth is behind bars for breaching his order.

Eight others are on Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs), the next step down from an ASBO.

Around 1,400 policing hours were put into making the order work and around £5,000 of overtime.

The four months since the order ended have given enough time for its impact to be measured. Insp Wilson said this showed a "noticeable change".

Talking to the youngsters has given the town centre patrol team plenty of insight into the kind of facilities Leominster needs for its kids and the team can play an active part in trying to get them.

They learned about the extent of underage drinking in the town and a street drinking ban is now enforced across the town centre on the back of the Section 30 operation.

Leominster Town Council wants an eye kept on areas outside the zone where, with the warmer weather, gangs have started gathering again, and similar effort put into tackling vandalism and other deliberate damage - the last call on Insp Wilson's latest list is a report of graffiti sprayed all over a tourist information sign at The Grange.

"Section 30 showed what we can do, but no-one's complacent," he said.