CROYDON COMMENTARY: There are many problems in our town centres, says EMMA GARDINER, but Mayor Perry is going the wrong way about putting them right
Embarrassing: who does Mayor Perry think he’s ‘reclaiming our streets’ from?
Croydon’s elected mayor, Jason Perry, recently treated the public to a selfie in the town centre while he was out on a “Co-ordinated Action Day”, aimed at “tackling the broken windows effect in our town centre”. He brought along mounted police, as he reckoned they “sent a clear message that we are committed to reclaiming our streets”.
I’m not sure how you tackle the broken window effect (people not looking after their neighbourhoods because no one else does) with police on horseback. Maybe so they can reach the broken windows that need repairing?
Worth a try though I suppose: Got a social problem? Get more police in! Real ones, transport ones, pretend ones hired by businesses, whatever! Just having more of them should do the job! Any job!
To really hammer home Perry’s lust for the boys in blue, he opted for Sound of da Police to accompany his little post. Leaning back in his chair and cracking his fingers, I bet he was chuffed at that one. The perfect song choice. Down with the youth.
Jokes aside, white men in power appropriating liberation anthems like Sound of da Police and using the language of the dispossessed in a borough like Croydon has more than an undertone of racism and would be insulting to the rest of us if the post itself wasn’t so embarrassing.
Police do not solve social issues. I could write it a thousand times. Especially not police on horses. I’m not sure what the Mayor even thought this would look like in his head.
Perry did not clarify from whom he was “reclaiming the town centre”, but his recent obsession with anti-social behaviour would suggest he was talking about the lost souls of a broken society. Our shadow community. Homeless people, beggars, addicts.
Perry’s ill-thought-through post wasn’t an error of judgement by the Mayor. It speaks directly to Perry’s thuggish attitude towards the homeless and the addicted of our community. A thuggishness that often goes against his own council’s policies. Croydon Council recently published a new Homelessness Strategy that emphasises the need for a “refreshed” approach to the growing issue, requiring a “tailored response” involving intervention from mental health and drug and alcohol services to prevent people becoming stuck in a cycle of homelessness. Commitments are made to work in harmony with charities and community groups supporting rough sleepers.
Perry’s council has got off to a cracking start by threatening the homelessness charity Croydon Nightwatch with legal action for… ermm, supporting the borough’s rough sleepers.
Two years ago Perry attempted to use another blunt instrument to rid himself of the troubling nuisance that is homelessness. He reintroduced Public Space Protection Orders – PSPOs – in the town centre and Thornton Heath, banning anyone from drinking outside (unless you’re paying for it in a pub garden, of course).
What does a successful PSPO look like? Moving street drinking to residential areas, making it someone else’s problem?
One of the biggest protective interventions for a person with drug or alcohol addiction is to make sure they eat and drink fluids. Croydon Nightwatch have been running for nearly 50 years to make sure the homeless community’s basic and urgent needs are met. Yet the powers that be have moved Nightwatch from pillar to post, denying them a space to do what they do. They have the funding to install their own shelter, all they need is permission from the council.
Anti-social behaviour is defined as “acting in a manner that causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as the defendant”.
Does the screaming alarm from the Lidl supermarket on Church St that residents had to put up with nightly for two years count as anti-social behaviour?
Or the anti-homeless furniture that stops people being able to lie down and get some rest if they are sleeping rough?
Or the way Croydon police unnecessarily cuffed a 14-year-old boy on his way home from school?
Or a big old police horse shitting its way down the high street?
In reality, what it sounds like to me is a law against any behaviour that is not in keeping with the dominant culture, and that probably explains why Perry is so into it.
The Broken Window Theory is about the knock-on effect of the look of a place, not of its people, but those in power continue to distort the original findings of the 1980s study in order to give themselves an excuse for attempting to “vanish” people who they don’t like the look of.
Failing to deliver: for all his walkabout photo-ops in the town centre with police, Jason Perry is presiding over the worst homelessness in outer London
Goodness knows, there’s enough broken windows and signs of neglect on the council’s own properties around the borough. If anything, The Broken Window Theory argues for the need for institutions of power to (at the very least) meet its people in the middle. You get out what you put in, after all.
If you, the authority, don’t fix up the town centre, people aren’t going to look after it. If you disrespect young people, they will not respect you back. If you have a go at a drunk trying to quietly mind his own business, then they are very likely going to take a shit outside the Town Hall.
I am yet to see a meaningful holistic intervention from Croydon Council to help its homeless population, which they have allowed to become the biggest in outer London. We need more bed spaces, more drug and alcohol services, more therapeutic services, more risk reduction, more open-access social centres where people can eat and feel like a human being again. Not more police. Or their horses.
Rough sleepers, alcoholics, drug addicts – they hold a mirror up to us all, and remind us of the ruins we find our society in, the lost art of caring for one another. That’s why we love to hide them away – anywhere, but where the truth can be seen. Like a wound, though, you cannot just cover it up and expect it to heal.
History teaches us that the slippery slope towards atrocity begins in this way. Wishing the undesirable to disappear from our streets is not so far away from wishing them to disappear from the face of the earth entirely.
- Emma Gardiner is a regular guest on Inside Croydon’s news podcast, The Croydon Insider, and works as project lead at the South Norwood Community Kitchen. This article is written in a personal capacity
Croydon Commentary provides a platform for any of our readers to offer their personal views about what matters to them in and around the borough. To submit an article for publication, just email us at inside.croydon@btinternet.com, or post your comment to an Inside Croydon article that has caught your attention
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London
ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Thank you for writing something so sensible and sensitive
Excellent article.
Perry, and many others in the Council, have no experience outside their own privileged lives and show no interest in understanding how other people live. Perry is stuck in that stupid way of thinking that he can make problems go away by making life more difficult for the people suffering those problems. But you can’t police your way out of social problems.
In the US you often hear the phrase ‘defund the police’ on protests. That’s because their politicians think they can solve problems by just pumping more money into policing. The protestors are pointing out that the money should be going into schools, housing, social services, health services, and all the other support services that people really need.
In the UK the Conservatives haven’t given the police any more money, they’ve just passed laws that give the police much more power and responsibility. This actually makes the police’s job much harder and still does nothing to help the people who actually need help – in fact it makes life worse for all of us.
If Perry really cared about making Croydon better he would stop the gimmicks and photo opportunities, stop wasting money on consultants and overpaid senior officers, and put money back into Council services and supporting all of the wonderful volunteers and community groups we have in Croydon who really do make a difference.
Defund the police in the US means exactly what it says. The term started during the Black Lives Matter protests and where it’s been implemented, in Washington DC for example, crime has rocketed – violent crime up by 37% in 2023 compared to the previous year, while homicides are up 25%. Please God don’t tell me this is a Green policy.
It was your Conservatives that defunded the police, Chris. To save our money as part of their austerity policy, they slashed police staffing levels, closed police stations, allowed crime to soar in this country and, as Partygate shows, broke their own laws while applying them to the rest of us.
Your claim about Black Lives Matter is straight out of the Daily Mail (or from the Britain First website) and ignores the very reason why the BLM protests started: white police getting away with murdering black people.
Regarding Washington DC, in August 2024, the US Attorney General reported that the violent crime rate there was down 35% and on trend to be at its lowest level for over 20 years.
The gimmicks that Perry and Philp laud don’t deter or prevent crime. Big Brother Watch is the UK civil liberties campaign group fighting the surveillance state we’re being sleepwalked into. They reported how the man stabbed near East Croydon station last week was attacked just 100 yards away from a facial recognition camera van.
They’re also choosy about which crimes they think need enforcing. Cracking down on motorists racing through our streets and crashing into people isn’t on their list of priorities. Nor is tax-dodging. And as we know from their involvement in the ULEZ Facebook crime site, causing criminal damage and being racist about the Mayor of London is tolerable if they think it’ll help their political agenda.
To top it all, Conservative Party members now have to choose who is going to be their new leader. BadEnoch who admitted the crime of hacking into Harriet Harman’s website, or “Bobby J” who unlawfully approved a £1 billion luxury housing development for porn-merchant Dirty Desmond to try and save him £50 million. Which one will you vote for Chris?
Lots of words in response to how some view the rights or wrongs of those in positions of authority. That’s fine but how about saying something constructive in support of making things better. It’s very easy to attack people from behind the protection of Social Media.
The author of this piece, if you bothered to read it, daily provides assistance to people through one of the borough’s social enterprises.
Croydon Nightwatch feeds dozens of homeless and working poor every night.
Plenty constructive. Plenty of support.
All do so openly, without any “protection” of social media, as you snidely assert.
Meanwhile, the £82,000 a year Mayor has a growing record of failure, misjudgements and lies.
He closes libraries and ignores scrutiny over nurseries, as the number of people sleeping rough reach record levels.
Solutions are available. But the Mayor ignores them.
Sums up Perry very well!
Mr Perry can be contacted at mayor@croydon.gov.uk
Perry is clueless, to help solve Croydon’s issues you have to get the big things changed, such as making central Croydon thrive again. He’s done nothing on that front other than supposedly having closed monthly meetings with Westfield with no genuine progress throughout his whole tenure… elsewhere St George’s Walk is sealed off and Nestle building is just a hollow carcass. His solution is to roll up his sleeves and scrub some graffiti. It’s like putting a plaster on a chest to help a heart attack. It would be laughable if it wasn’t true.
It’s very much like his approach to bankruptcy, sell everything off in the short term so in the medium and long term there is no hope and no future. No approach whatsoever is even attempted to try to improve or utilise any asset, the closest seemingly being that Urban Room, which is about as productive as putting the cast and crew of Blue Peter in charge of the Exchequer. Just over 18 more months of this clown show to endure, hopefully the next person who comes along understands how not only to fix things, but to improve them too because Perry has achieved the complete opposite.