I was shocked, but not necessarily surprised, to learn from the Telegraph that theft has effectively been decriminalised across two thirds of England and Wales’ neighbourhoods. And that in at least half of our countries’ neighbourhoods, not one personal, bike or vehicle theft was solved. Harvey Redgrave, a former No 10 adviser and chief executive of crime consultancy Crest Advisory, is quoted as saying: ‘We are at a point where many will start to wonder if calling the police is worth the effort and criminals will be left emboldened’.
Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, claims they are: ‘doing their part, working together to make sure we improve the experience of those affected by these devastating crimes.’ What does ‘doing their part’ mean? Are the police no longer responsible for fighting crime? Likewise ‘improve the experience’. Surely the object is to solve crime not make us feel better about it? If they see themselves in this diminished managerial way, and regard victims as little more than dissatisfied customers, it is right to ask what has gone wrong with policing. Police in Maryport, a seaside town in Cumbria, report a near halving of anti-social-behaviour since re-introducing local ‘beat’ policing. Perhaps this old fashioned approach is worth revisiting. But it’s not enough.
I wrote about Mizzy quite recently. Remember him and his few days of infamy culminating in an interview with Piers Morgan? He came to briefly embody the recurrent problem of anti-social behaviour. But only a few months before the TikTok panic, the government announced its intention to ban nitrous oxide i.e., the laughing gas canisters littering our parks. And nobody took it seriously. Admittedly, as commentators rightly argued, this ‘legal high’ posed no danger to the young people involved. Still, I couldn’t help but feel they were indifferent to what young people get up to and what locals might think about their public places being treated in this way.
The problem of knife crime in the UK, particularly in London, raises similar concerns. While we might expect the police to be dealing with this much more effectively than they are - and I go into this more here - there are surely questions to be asked about how this problem has emerged in the affected communities. Darren Rodwell, leader of Barking and Dagenham Council, has threatened to evict the parents of young people involved in knife crime. ‘Everyone must play their part in stopping these crimes’ he has said. ‘As parents, it is up to us to know where our children are, and that we play an active role.’ Whatever you think of his solution - and I have my reservations - he is surely right.
Anti-social behaviour, while a problem, is obviously not as serious as knife crime. One might even ask how useful the idea of anti-social behaviour is in the first place. It is reported that King Charles’ Strand, St James and Mayfair neighbourhood is the most blighted in the country with 370 incidents per 1,000 residents. That’s well ahead of Swansea Central, the anti-social behaviour capital of Wales (79 incidents per 1,000 residents). Research commissioned by the Home Office found that the biggest impacts of anti-social behaviour were ‘annoyance’ (56%) and anger (42%). Shouldn’t we be dealing with these kinds of encounters ourselves?
I think so, but the political class has something else in mind. Shadow Justice Secretary Steve Reed, talking about the opposition’s anti-crime policies, says victims should be empowered to decide what unpaid work offenders undertake. They should also sit on so-called community payback boards, and Labour are proposing ‘respect orders’ to target repeat offenders. The current government, perhaps under pressure from a Labour administration in waiting, has announced that vandals will be required to repair the damage they have caused within two days of receiving an Order.
Not only is the policy-thinking, however ‘involving’, performatively punitive in its orientation. It’s therapeutic too. As well as promising to put more police and police community support officers (PCSOs) on the streets, Labour has sourced the problem of anti-social behaviour to ‘trauma in early years’. Not a new idea, or a particularly good one. But, in the absence of any broader thinking about how to fix what is a social problem, the opposition are left with supposedly targeting toddlers before they turn troublesome.
They’re not alone in putting people on the couch - offenders and communities both. According to the chief executive of charity Victim Support, Diana Fawcett: ‘Anti-social behaviour is often thought of as low level but it can actually have a devastating impact, destroying people’s sense of safety, taking a huge toll on their mental health and massively disrupting their day to day lives.’ Or is it more that a growing sense of unease, fragility and anxiety has predisposed people to becoming or seeing themselves as victims?
How do we deal with the decline in civility in our public spaces? Perhaps the problem is not so much out of control young people as anxious, anti-social, indifferent adults. Whether out of fear, or because we don’t see other people’s children as our responsibility, we just don’t get involved anymore. That has to change. I long for the socially responsible grumpy old neighbour of my childhood, who would shout at us for trampling over his neat grass verge. Where have these people gone?