A farmer who used a telehandler to pick up a car and dump it in a road to defend his property has been cleared of dangerous driving and criminal damage.

Robert Hooper, 57, had told Durham Crown Court he felt “frightened and threatened” when he took the action.

He had argued an “Englishman’s home is his castle”, and he had been assaulted before he used his vehicle to remove the Corsa in County Durham last June.

His partner Kate Henderson said he had been through “eight months of hell”.

Supporters cheered the couple outside the court after the jury cleared Mr Hooper following a four-day trial.

The murder of 14-year-old Jayden Moodie on Tuesday night highlights how youth violence continues to devastate the lives of young people, families and communities in London. Jayden’s death marks a new low point as he is the youngest victim to die on London’s streets so far this year.

We don’t know whether Jayden was himself involved in gangs or if his death was gang-related. All we know is that he was struck by a vehicle while riding a moped, then chased by a group of three men and stabbed to death in what police believe was a targeted attack. However, Jayden was killed in Leyton, part of the east London borough of Waltham Forest where the threat of gangs and gang violence looms large.

Last year, we published the results of a study looking at gangs in Waltham Forest, that provides some context for Jayden’s murder. As one of the many areas in London affected by rising youth violence, Waltham Forest has been at the forefront of gang interventions ever since the ground-breaking Reluctant Gangsters study was published in 2007. 

A decade ago, gangs in Waltham Forest were organised around postcode territories that young people defended from outsiders. Gang membership was a physical and emotional commitment – exhibited through gang “colours” and a real sense of local pride at being visibly present on the street.

Our research highlighted that gangs in Waltham Forest today view turf differently; less as symbolic hallowed ground, and more as a marketplace. Gangs are now more focused on profits, not postcodes. Two factors were responsible for this evolution: the ready availability of illicit drugs and the rise of social media.

Gangs had come to reject outward signs of gang membership as “bad for business” because they attracted unwanted attention from law enforcement agencies. They instead grew up and moved on to develop lucrative “county lines” operations in new areas where they were unknown to police.

County lines are predicated on an exploitation of people, not places. Leveraging young people’s boredom, poverty and lack of future prospects, gang elders cynically lure children into the drug trade with false promises of more money and status that rarely materialise, then entrap them through debt bondage and other coercive means. County lines have been linked with an increase in stabbings involving known drug dealers as victims or suspects, partly because grievances in illicit drugs markets cannot be settled through legal channels.