GovanhillL was today revealed as the most violent neighbourhood in Glasgow.

The troubled South Side community now suffers more of the most serious crimes than any other police beat in the city, David Leask takes a look at the new trouble hotspots.

They're telling horror stories outside Neeson's. But only some of them are true.

Anthony Molloy has the most to say as he soaks up the last rays of autumn sunshine outside the door of his Govanhill howff.

The 51-year-old explains that a pal of his has just been mugged.

"Old Sean got rolled on his way home from the pub," he says, talking so much his cigarette, after just one puff, burns out between his fingers. "This place just isn't what it used to be."

A fellow regular points across the street at a group of Roma, a few of the perhaps 2000 who have moved into a dozen streets around Neeson's from central Europe.

"I am not being racist," he says, his face red with lunch-time beer, "but ..."

Mr Molloy and the other drinkers are right to be worried about such violence.

But, police intelligence reveals, they are well short of the mark about who they are blaming for it.

Govanhill is riddled with crime – yet most of it, the Evening Times can reveal, is being carried out by people who have lived there for years.

The beat police call it Golf Echo 68 – essentially the western part of Govanhill – the most violent area in the city.

There were more than 62 serious violent crimes in the neighbourhood during 2010-11, up from 43 per year before.

This is the first time any beat outside the city centre has topped the unofficial Evening Times league table of violence since we started looking at detailed police statistics five years ago.

Stephen McAllister knows these statistics better than most. He's the chief inspector at Gorbals police station, the area commander for the whole of Govanhill and much of the rest of the South Side as well.

Are the locals at Neeson's – or any other corner of Allison Street – correct to say the Roma people are behind their current problems?

"Absolutely not," Mr McAllister answers.

"It simply isn't true. When you have a situation which is difficult and demanding at times, it is the easy way out to pick on a particular element of a community to blame them for all the ills."

Police, he explains, keep descriptions of people who carry out crimes, all of them.

And they note who they "detect" as the perp. So they know who the most troubled and troubling members of the community are.

He says: "If you look at the figures, you would see you get more criminality from the indigenous population, the population that had been there for some time or for a couple of generations, than you get from some of the more recent migrant communities.

"There is a proportionate amount of criminality that emerges out of every community.

"It is important not to demonise a particular element in the environment."

In other words, local statistics show that the Roma – and any other new migrant communities – have about the same number of criminals as any other group.

That doesn't mean they don't have their problems, or that the sheer number of people packed into Scotland's most overcrowded neighbourhood aren't pumping up crime figures.

Crucially, overall crime in GE68, Govanhill West, is not actually going up. It is simply staying the same.

There were 1712 offences recorded in 2010-11. That compares with 1784 the previous year and 1761 during 2006-07.

But the area's figures now stand out because crime is falling so quickly elsewhere. Govanhill West now ranks as Glasgow's fifth-busiest beat, after four city-centre neighbourhoods that clock up hundreds of shopliftings and drunken Friday-night brawls.

Mr McAllister and his superiors stress that such figures have to be seen in the context of a quickly growing population, albeit one that hasn't been properly counted yet. In others, with the population rising, the per-capita crime rate is probably falling.

"I don't think anyone is denying that Govanhill is a difficult community to police," he says. "We have had, over the past few years, particularly since 2007, significant inward migration to that environment, an environment that was already heavily populated.

"So we certainly find particular streets suffering from overpopulation. We have large family groups living in one and two-bedroom flats. There is a lot of poverty in that area and, as a consequence, we get the attendant criminality."

Mr McAllister's team has had some successes recently – not least in solving a spate of the unpleasant muggings that worried the drinkers at Neeson's.

The cases are live, and can't be reported on.

However, the Evening Times understands that those accused of the crimes are not Roma.

The police are also investigating much-repeated claims of under-age prostitution in the community.

Most reports have not proved to be true, although there remain serious concerns about the overcrowded conditions in which many Roma children live in the Govanhill flats owned by the area's slum landlords.

As the Evening Times reported this summer, police rescued a 16-year-old girl from a brothel not a stone's throw from Neeson's. And, as the bar's regulars would suspect, she was indeed Roma.

Meanwhile, the guys outside Neeson's recognise the irony of complaints about newcomers. This neighbourhood, after all, has been the entry point into Scotland for several waves of migrants, variously Irish, Jewish, Pakistani and now central European. For Mr Molloy – who is no racist – he finds the changes more stark because he has recently returned from living in Ireland for a few years.

"I couldn't believe how the place had changed," he says, forgetting yet another cigarette in his hand. "It's like when somebody gets fat. If you see them every day you don't notice, but if you spot them after not seeing them for a while, you can't believe the change."