In Brighton we have a great many Police Community Support Officers. I have blogged about them before, suffice to say that are universally hated by the poor and serve only to act as a local band of state Stasi. The strange thing about them is that they are neither 'police', nor do they 'support' the 'community'. All they are is a group of officers.
Tony Blair, presumably, decided they were a good thing, because he wanted to crack down hard on 'crime' and the 'causes of crime', which seemingly, in the eyes of the PSCOs, is a few people milling around on a lawn having a beer. Now, I'm not as naive as I was. I know that the people on the lawns of London Road can get lairy. However, the PCSO's are employed to pour people's beer down the drain and take their names and details and ask them to move on. So they do, they move on, and get another beer. I don't know, maybe Blair just wanted to crack down hard on the poor, who can't afford to drink champers like he does, or earn £100,000 every time they open their mouths. Ironically the average poor man of London Road has things to say which are a thousand times more profound and important to the World than anything that emanates from Blessed Tony of the Faith Foundation's mouth.
I went out busking today in Brighton and saw quite a bit of my friend, 'J'. God provided for my needs and I had some left over for another. Jason is confined to the London Road, by and large, because of an ASBO which lasts until 2012. He has been beaten up 4-5 times in the last week. He now has a blood clot in his head, which if it spreads further down to his spine could kill him. I have offered to take him to hospital but he doesn't want it. He was released from jail and thrown onto Brighton's streets with nothing and nobody.
Two weeks later, he still waits to be housed or get a place in a hostel. He is trying desperately to go to his meetings at the drugs rehab day centre in Brighton to get off drugs and avoid a 2 and a half year sentence in Lewes prison. He is confined to London Road, where he encounters only people with the same addictions from which he suffers. He begs, he drinks. He drinks, he begs. He forgets to eat, he starves. He has nothing to do. He cannot work, for he has no home, no clothes but what he wears and suffers alcoholism and drug addiction. He wanders down the valley of the London Road again and again, back and forth seeing friends and foes. He goes to the Probation Service. He is told there is no hostel places for him at the moment, 'Come back and try again soon,' they say.
I tell him I am worried about him with his blood clot. He says he doesn't mind if he dies. I tell him I mind and so do others. He says he has struggled on his own since he was 10. He never had a mother's love or a father's love. He was in and out of care homes, most probably abused. He has always been unloved. The society now, which penalises him, still refuses also to house him or help him or support him. The community support officers see him with a beer and tell him to pour it away down the drain. They cannot see his pain, his suffering, only his sin or his vice. They cannot bring themselves to enter into, even slightly, the sufferings which mark him, nor look upon the scars on his head from his 5 beatings, for they are 'professionals'.
They cannot bear to see that Christ suffers in him. They cannot care, they can only penalise and criminalise. He swears at them. I swear at them. We are both told not to swear in the street or to a policeman. I tell them they are nothing but trumped up administrators and they're not even police. They hound Jason and other street drinkers or beggars. That's what they do with their day. Further up the London Road I see two men in suits filming with someone from BBC South on the 'regeneration' of London Road, which doubtless means hotels and shops and flats. I tell them about my friend who is homeless for two weeks out of jail, naively. He says, 'we're filming about this regeneration project'. The man being interviewed talks about 'regeneration' and 'business'.
I meet a friend later called 'G' who was arrested this week for begging, while singing in the town centre. We both wonder what on earth is going on when you cannot even busk for your dinner. Brighton and Britain are turning fast into a police state. The effects of the breakdown of society are all around and the poor suffer it the most. The State, the police, feel compelled to penalise, just to make sure that society doesn't go under, but they serve only to criminalise the very poor and to exclude men and women from society further. I look around and wonder whether one day the police will have the power to remove everyone they deem problematic or unsightly from society altogether, like the street-children of Brazil who are picked off at point blank range by the State police.
Keep 'J' please in your prayers. St Philip Neri, Wonderworker, please pray for him and the poor of London Road.
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