Erosion of Trust

There are a few incidents over my career that have eroded my trust in the idea that if we just reform public services, move them closer to neighbourhoods, then all will be well. And whilst communities and neighbourhoods are often messier I’d put my faith in them first and foremost. I’ve found you always know where you stand with communities. There’s a straightness that just can’t exist within an institution.

Here’s a story to illustrate how the trust I’d been brought up to have in the establishment started to erode. I’ve 100s of these stories, but this one really hurt.

During the time I was off timetable convening the children and families transformation work within two neighbourhoods in the borough of Wigan, it became really clear, that in one of the neighbourhoods, our place of work was directly across the road from a heroin dealer. It wasn’t difficult to spot the signs. On Fridays there’d literally be a steady stream of folk, mainly men, occasionally women, injecting in the street, or round the back of the houses or at the side of the youth centre. There were kids living in the dealers house too, and social care involvement, at child protection level. So, as responsible helping professionals we invited the police in, to collect the evidence required to bust the place. And they came and made notes, took photographs and recorded. We put our reputation and community trust on the line, and at the same time we knew that there was a real desire to see this dealer ousted. The community couldn’t grass, so we were happy to play that role. 

And then what happened flabbergasted us. It would be clear from the evidence collection that if you wanted to recover a stash of heroin then Thursday or Friday would be your days to go in strong. So when the police raided on a Monday and didn’t find anything we realised there was something afoot.

Maybe the dealer was providing information about the supply? ‘It’s not as simple as that’ we were told when we indignantly enquired. Why bust the place on a Monday and not a Friday? It just didn’t make sense to us and local people who were fed up of the way heroin was draining the life out of the place. 

What started to make real sense and could be seen with increasing clarity was that the kids round here didn’t matter. They were collateral damage. And, we as a team were supposed to accept that. That’s when the rot in the public service reform dream started to form. The folk in that community, if asked what mattered to them, would say, get rid of the smack dealer.  That was never going to happen. It was as if he was on the payroll. This idea of going for the top gun causes real harm to the communities we seem to care least about. Instead they had to make do with lots of yellow vested Council officials showing up to celebrate how they were working together to make the place greener and cleaner. The photographs are still doing the rounds.

When I left this job, disillusioned, I spent some time in Kampala, Uganda, learning more about the children who live on the streets. I saw the same approach with the police there, albeit with much more force and violence. Like the kids who lived on the street didn’t matter, as if they weren’t  human and didn’t count. I happened to visit the place with  representatives from UK uniformed services and was involved in offering training to social workers and police officers. To listen to police share stories about how the mobile phone and its video camera led to the police in the UK having to clean its act up, or at least not get caught on camera reinforced to me, who the state is really working for.  

It didn’t feel like it was for the folk at the margins, that’s for sure.

There’s also a fear of sharing stories like this out loud. I can feel it in my stomach.