SAFE STREETS ARE NOT JUST NICE TO HAVE!
THEY ARE YOUR RIGHT IN A CIVILISED SOCIETY . . .
Safe Streets are becoming a distant memory with the incessant rise of street crime and it is easy to allow yourself to slip into ‘armchair mode’ as you read about violent knife attacks on our once safe streets. Street muggings, knife attacks, car theft, drug dealing and the most hideous of them all, the sexual assault and rape of lone women, in broad daylight on our streets.
Day in and day out you read about them and become slightly numb and a little dismissive as you attach, what would at one time never occur. . . You then attach a second thought to what you have just read, about safe streets, a thought, that seeks to place this awful news into some kind of box, which your brain then attempts to justify.
That process is called the ‘Overton window effect’ where the boundary of what seems normal shifts in light of repeated events of the same nature, constantly appearing in the news, or the seeming indifference that others show to such atrocities, in day to day conversation.
Phrases like:-
“That’s the way it is these days”. .
or . .
“That area of Oldham is going downhill, compared to what it once was”
Even . .
“Thank goodness it is there and not here”
Justification of what is now viewed as the new normal, with a stark example being knife crime and knife killings in London. Now just accepted and viewed as “all part and parcel of living in a big city”. Just like so many other things that are now just part and parcel of living in 2022.
But when the incidents start to happen on a street that you walk down every day, then and only then, do you really sit up and pay attention. That phenomenon is called localism and the Police and Council, both rely heavily upon it to alter your perception and get you to accept failure, as just the way it is!
Additional officers have been allocated and local residents need not be concerned are thrown into the mix of reassurance as they allow your Overton window of acceptability to shift and localism, to paper over any momentary distress you might be feeling.
Because by making you believe that it is always somewhere else, that is going down the pan, some other town that is in decline, you continue to believe that your area is still doing relatively OK.
They rely on you sitting up and paying attention for one incident that happens near you and then easing back into your armchair, as time passes and the incidents seem to be somewhere else again. . . Well let me tell you, YOUR AREA, wherever, that area is located, is not doing OK!
All areas are being dragged down by street knife attacks, vehicle crime, petty crime, thefts and drug dealing at the park gates and yes, sex attacks on lone women who are subjected to assault and rape. One Ward area in Oldham recording three in a one month period, like some epidemic of depravity and lawlessness.
Waterhead, Littlemoor Lane and Shrewsbury Street are no different than, Royton Park, Chadderton Park, or the canal tow path in Failsworth. Oldham Borough like so many other boroughs throughout Greater Manchester is being failed by GM Police Service.
A Police Service without the overseeing eye of a crime commissioner, but instead the Teflon coated excuse machine of a Labour Metro Mayor and Labour members of the police and fire panel that are more interested in playing with the blue lights on the emergency service vehicles and the lovely lunch and pampering that goes with those committee meetings, than actually, holding anyone to account for the failing standards.
Ninety thousand unrecorded crimes got GMP onto the ‘special measures’ register at the Home Office, (the first time) of which 18,000 were of a sexual nature. Just think about that next time you read one of the many news stories that no longer seem to shock you into action.
Then remember that GMP got a second stripe of ‘special measures’, for failing to do anything about the first! At that point the Teflon coated Mayor was forced to throw someone other than himself under a bus. . .
Oldham is being failed, day in day out, as the, once safe streets, become more dangerous, as policing and council supervision fails to protect and finally dragging our streets to a level where vigilante groups and so called ‘reformed’ friends of councillors patrol them.
CSE, rapes on the street, serious wounding with knives, human trafficking, exploitation, drugs, vandalism, car-theft stories every week, every day . . . Take a look in the local press like the Oldham Times, Chronicle, MEN, Bolton Evening News, and as you get to the part that says where it happened. Instead of thinking, ‘that area is declining’, as you adjust your inbuilt ‘Overton Window’ of acceptability, substitute Oldham Labour majority-controlled council are failing.
Failing, in their duty to direct and demand adequate Policing strategies to provide you with safe streets, in YOUR neighbourhood safe streets, for you to live and walk along in a civilised society!
Keeping your head down is no longer an option, you really do need to Vote for those that will provide you with a voice!