Feral teenage gangs - what can be done to protect us?

Last night on Ringsend Rd(between Pearse st and Ringsend bus garage) in Dublin I was in my apt at the back and I heard constant screaming from teenage kids at the front.

Now me thinking, they are noisy kids playing whatever they get up to and they always trot about while passing on the main road. I could hear girls screaming and fella's shouting, all about 15 yrs of age. This went on for a few minutes and when I finally went to look out the front window to see what the commotion was, i couldn't believe what I saw and heard. Squad cars lined up at the neighbours gate with the family next door at their gate in tears while a bunch of scum teenagers laughing and joking at them with about a dozen Gardai between the 2 sets.

From what I could make out especially from the teenagers mocking impersonations of a fight, punches were thrown from the teenagers at the father and kid(yeh, he's about 8). Now, whatever happened initially between the 2 groups over maybe words exchanged, there was no justification for a mob like that to pick on a father & mother & child huddled together with the father under severe distress while his wife and kid were balling with tears on the street.

I asked the neighbours afterwards what happened and they wouldn't say, I reckon they just want to move on and deal with it privately so i didn't pursue it. They were still crying over what happened. They are foreign(think Polish) so maybe their English was not great and they were probably still in shock. Very nice people, the last you'd think of who would of been involved in such an incident. It was such a sight to see the mother and child still crying about 30minutes afterwards when i did approach them, i'll never forget it and i''ve seen some nasty crap over the years while growing up in a deprived area.(yeh for the smart aleks i'm not really from D4 :P)

The Gardai(fair dues to them for being quick in response) moved the perpetrators on after a few words and they headed on their way towards Pearse St flats. No arrests though:mad:.

Thing is, do these kids have no moral awareness of what they just did?
I asked myself, was this a racist attack? If the family was Irish and local, would they not have been so persistent in picking on them?

It might seem fun to them having a few punches with a strangers family and bragging about it to each other but the damage they caused to that family is immense. Its not the first time i've seen teenagers up to no good picking on strangers, it makes you think how often this harassment goes on. I've seen security guards in shops locally been picked on by groups of teenagers 'for the fun of it' and co-incidentally all those security guards were foreign.

Vandalism along the busy road has occurred in the past few weeks, like bus shelters and panes of glass on the nearby bridge put in(there goes anyone else's safety as protective barrier on McMahon bridge is made of glass). Rumours from speaking to other neighbours was that it was passing teenagers doing the damage.

Should there be a law thats enforced restricting large groups of teenagers congregating at that hour of night(incident happened just after 9pm) like in the US or something else done to prevent teenagers harassing people?