Reports reach me from Paul Convery of trouble in the neighbourhood – it seems the outbreaks of graffiti are only the tip of the iceberg. We need huge investment in large scale youth work to give kids, who are essentially decent something more useful to do. And palliative measures to help out the overwhelmed estate staff. Paul Convery in a mail to Councillors, police, youth workers and officials says:
‘The Bemerton has gone through a very difficult couple of weeks as upwards of three to four dozen teenagers from all over the Borough have begun to socialise, drink, smoke and then get pretty aggressive and destructive. Almost every day there are smashed bottles, graffiti, urine, scattered foodstuffs, up-ended garbage and other damage to the estate’s fabric. I’ve run into these kids almost every day and evening over the last 10 days and their behaviour is completely unacceptable. It needs tough and determined action right away to provide some relief to residents on the estate … combined with some longer term solutions to stop it happening again.
‘I hope that the combined efforts of the police, HfI’s anti social behaviour team and others will have the desired effect over the coming few days. Islington Council has this evening issued a press notice saying that all necessary measures will be used to crack-down on the trouble that has blighted the estate over the past couple of weeks….I speak for all the local Councillors when I say it’s appalling that it has taken this long for the penny to drop: ordinary, decent kids when massed in a gang and left to their own devices end up causing damage and distress.’
‘For too long, Islington’s policy has concentrated resources on a tiny minority of very bad offenders and has ignored the majority of young people – only when these kids start to run amok does someone start paying attention. We need proper investment on a significant scale.’
Alex Scourgie who manages the estate with a high degree of professionalism says:
‘Again we start our day on Bemerton with 8 caretakers spending the next 6 hours clearing graffiti, clearing broken bottles, clearing drugs paraphernalia, mopping urine and alcohol from our stairs and not carrying out any caretaking duties on the schedule. The office will be fielding calls for our residents who were too scared to leave their homes last night. If this was a one off then we would just get on with the clear up and try to pacify our residents.
Unfortunately this is not a one off and it seems that every day we are sending photographs of graffiti around in the hope that someone will actually help us. We never get as much as a call back!
‘The overall and immediate concern…is that tonight the situation will return and the residents on Bemerton will have to endure another frightening night in their homes.
‘We urgently require action today to prevent this situation escalating. There are resources out there to deal with this type of circumstance and we need to pull them together today. We all need to rise to this challenge and see it as an opportunity to demonstrate to the residents the effectiveness of the services we provide.’
Kings Cross Environment 
Once again the pissing and tagging are side issues to real concerns we should have for more serious problems to start. It is understandable that Alex who has responsibility for keeping the estate clean is concerned with the cleanliness, but once again the only way of dealing with this is through the young persons themselves. We can not stop the tagging without transforming the territorial issues amongst these young persons. It can be done, if like I suggested, youth workers,community safety officers, the police and residents are aware of it and pull their strings together and work as a team on the issue. The dirt is secondary to the wave of violence that could erupt.
There can be no going back, in their own so destructive ways these teenagers are telling us a message: “I have got nothing to do, I am worthless, so I’ll be a Cally or a Boston kid, get pissed and hang around with others trying to be cool and feel powerful!” Every child even raw teenage breed like them are “our” community children. We all own responsibility to them, what happens to them and why they develop such patterns of behavior, should be more of our concern that how to keep the walls clean. Consider seriously the first riddle (territorial kids) = solving the second (the walls). Making them our children in thought, Boston or Cally, the silliest of primeval divisions, is important too, though it may be that first professionals should work with the kids, followed by residents thereafter.
In any case I feel for all of you, the local residents, the care taker, and the kids too!