Public concern about joy-riding and car crime is hugely variable. In recent months, the riots in the suburbs of Paris – which involved hundreds of cars being burnt out on a nightly basis – generated widespread alarm, and prompted far-reaching debates about the links between social cohesion, social exclusion and crime. Meanwhile in communities throughout Ireland, the regular, almost nightly occurrence of young people burning ‘robbed cars’ in front of appreciative audiences goes, in the absence of a fatality, unreported. Once a fatality occurs the young people involved are portrayed as hyenas and pariahs amidst public uproar. Shortly afterwards, the media attention dies down and the joy-riding and car-burning returns with customary regularity as a nightly occurrence played out before local spectators. It is however a nightly occurrence which impacts in profoundly negative ways on the quality of life of entire neighbourhoods, whose residents are faced with the nocturnal public spectacle of joy-riding and who awake to the squalor of burnt-out vehicles outside their homes. It also brings the risk of serious injury and death, and absorbs huge financial resources.