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Three weeks ago, BBC Newsline covered a District Policing Partnership meeting in Loughbrickland, Co Down.

There we heard residents concerns about what lay ahead on Halloween night. For years, people had complained about teenagers coming into the area to cause trouble.

The PSNI had said this year would be different, and agreed to take me, and the vice chairman of Banbridge District Policing Partnership, Stephen Moreland, along on the night to see for ourselves.

The man we went out with was Sergeant Billy Stewart, a community officer with 23 years experience.

From about 10pm on there was a constant police presence in the area. PSNI officers stopped and searched groups of youths and asked them to move along. They also picked up a small quantity of fireworks dropped by youths who saw them coming.

For a while it was a game of cat and mouse. Eventually the notion of the chase began to lose its appeal, and the kids just went home.

And it wasn't the case that other local villages suffered as a result of a concentration on Loughbrickland. Officers said they were less busy than they could remember for many years, right across the district. 

It had been the quietest Halloween night in the village in many years, testimony to the fact that high profile and robust policing, can stop anti-social behaviour.