Posts Tagged: crime


24
Jul 08

Positive citizens or trainee consumers?

Growing up in Sutton just got a little more confusing.

You may remember that this is the place where the council spent £15,000 to remove a set of steps on which young people liked to sit. It’s also the place where a housing association sees fit to impose a 9pm curfew on its tenants’ children.

Now the borough’s police and town centre retailers have teamed up to hand out “Positive Citizen” discount cards for local shops and businesses to the area’s youths — which they’ll lose if they misbehave.

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19
Jun 08

The Stepford Wives of Worcester Park

To some it must seem the very vision of Utopia: an elegant New England-style enclave with neatly clipped lawns, docile residents and a 9pm curfew for social housing tenants aged under 15.

This is The Hamptons — not the real ones on Long Island, New York but a housing development in the south London suburb of Worcester Park.

But as ever there is trouble in paradise, or at least the contemporary spectre we call the fear of crime and “anti-social behaviour”.

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