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
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