Just the seven bosses in nine years (OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)
Val Gibson and Karen O’Hara, who run the community hub in North Ormesby, on the outskirts of Middlesbrough, remember the attack with a coolness befitting residents of the most lawless region in the United Kingdom. It takes several minutes before O’Hara recalls: “Oh. That man who came into the office? Yeah, he had a machete. He was going to slice us all up.” Gibson lets out an indomitable chuckle. “We forgot about that,” adds her colleague. “Water off a duck’s back.”
Given nobody was hurt, and given the relative frequency with which such events take place, perhaps they can be forgiven for failing to remember such a striking event: data published by the Office for National Statistics this month revealed that the Cleveland police area had the highest total recorded crime rate in England and Wales. The district — which covers Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Stockton and Redcar — had 114.9 offences per 1,000 people (the lowest, North Yorkshire, had 50.5). None of this is news to those on the front line in North Ormesby, the most deprived ward in Middlesbrough (itself the fifth most deprived local authority area in England).
The suburb — already struggling with high unemployment and widespread drug addiction — has become notorious as a kind of national “human dumping ground” for refugees and newly released criminals. A 2017 analysis by the BBC found the ward to have the cheapest property in the country, with an average price of £36,000. “I’ve met a few people who’ve come out of jail in London and they’ve sent them straight up here for the cheap housing,” says Gibson, who adds that many properties are in such a state of disrepair that the residents try to spend as much time outside of their homes as possible.
The area used to have a post office, which shut down after it became a magnet for thieves and the owner was repeatedly attacked. One local says: “You never see an old lady walking around here on her own. They’re always in twos or with family because of the bag-snatching.”
“I’ve been burgled and that,” Gibson says with a shrug. “I’ve had two cars stolen. Insurance – that’s the only protection you really have.” Gibson, 64, and O’Hara, 63, are among those trying to turn things around. They are employed as part of the Big Local initiative, which has been given £1 million of lottery funding to spend over ten years. The cash has been used to install 38 CCTV cameras (the one in the market place has a speaker so officers can warn stallholders when local pickpockets are spotted) and to buy six houses “to hopefully stop rubbish landlords coming in”.
Though both women repeatedly state how much they love their neighbourhood and its irrepressible community spirit, Gibson admits: “It will take more than us to solve the problem.” Last month, in Redcar, the police station itself was vandalised with graffiti that said: “F*** off. C***s. Shoot police dead.” Only two weeks ago, a police van responding to a 999 call in Hemlington had its brakes “intentionally cut”.
Cleveland’s Assistant Chief Constable described the latter as a “dangerous and callous act” — but it was also symbolic. The police force could provide enough scandal for a new series of Line of Duty; the wheels have all but come off.
In 2019, Cleveland became the first force in England and Wales to be rated ‘inadequate’ across all areas. Officers described their force as “directionless, rudderless and clueless”, while inspectors found it was failing to identify staff most at risk of corruption and “putting the public at risk”. When I put this to the police force, a spokesman told me: “We are particularly focussed on addressing serious violence and will continue to bid for additional funding in this area. Cleveland Police is working hard to address these challenges by protecting the vulnerable and preventing and detecting crime. HMICFRS have noted significant improvements since 2019.”
Yet despite these “improvements”, the force is now seeking its seventh boss in nine years. Sean Price was sacked for gross misconduct in 2012, the first chief constable in the UK to be dismissed in 35 years, after he lied about his role in the recruitment of the former police authority chairman’s daughter. It was announced in August that Mike Veale, who resigned in 2019 after less than a year in the role, is to face gross misconduct proceedings.
Even Cleveland’s Police and Crime Commissioner is leaving residents wanting. In September, Steve Turner — the Conservative elected only in May “to be the voice of the people and hold the police to account” — was accused in Parliament by a Labour MP of having been sacked by a former employer for “systematic theft”. Mr Turner demanded the “unsubstantiated” claim be retracted, 24 hours before admitting he had accepted a police caution in the late 1990s “in relation to an event at a supermarket store where I was employed” (the event, he later revealed, was handling stolen goods).
As if that were not enough, after being told Mr Turner was available for an interview for this article, I was told he was suddenly unavailable after he was accused of a historical sexual assault. He appeared on the local ITV news last week to maintain that he was “completely innocent” and the victim of “a co-ordinated witch hunt”.
Whatever the truth, the blame for Cleveland’s extraordinary crime levels cannot solely be placed at any individual’s door. If anything, the violence and theft that grips this part of the North East is the result of a perfect storm — one that has been made worse by the ineptitude of the local police force.
It is hardly surprising, for example, that Cleveland has two of the three areas with the highest rate of drug deaths in England — Middlesbrough and Hartlepool. Then there are its soaring levels of deprivation. Between 2015-15 and 2019-20, the North East saw the most dramatic rise in child poverty, up more than a third to 37%, while Middlesbrough has the highest proportion of people experiencing destitution in the country.
At the Genesis Project in the town’s Grove Hill housing estate, you can see the weary faces behind the figures. A sign on the wall of St Oswald’s church hall reads: “Some days you just have to create your own sunshine.” The volunteers are doing their best, catering to about 500 people a week arriving from across Teesside and queuing in all weathers for the basics of life: clothes, bedding, toiletries, fruit and vegetables.
Inside the church itself, a homeless man has just been given a makeshift bed. One distraught mother recently presented herself in tears because she could not afford to buy formula to feed her baby. And, since the removal of the £20-a-week uplift in Universal Credit in October, it is getting busier each week. “I feel a little bit aggrieved that we’re having to find the money to do it,” says project head Reverend Kath Dean, “because this is what I would consider to be a very poor church. We don’t have enough money to pay our gas bill, so in the winter we can’t afford to worship in the church. Why aren’t the authorities coming and helping?” She says she sees a connection between the poverty and the disturbing crime rate, and adds: “There are certain areas that I certainly wouldn’t walk through in the dark. I just know that there are certain areas in town that the police avoid as well.”
Cleveland is also the region with the highest rate for sexual offences in England and Wales, 3.7 per 1,000 people (its own former head of communications was sentenced for making indecent images of children in August). “It’s not necessarily a negative thing,” says Nicky Harkin, chief executive of Arch Teesside, a specialist sexual violence service, from her base in a converted house in the Middlesbrough suburbs. “We want people to come forward, we want people to report. Potentially that is a good thing that people feel that they can and that there are greater mechanisms for them to do that.”
But Harkin is also seeing “greater mental health needs, greater complexity in the cases that we support” and an average waiting time for cases to pass through the criminal justice system that has tripled — to three years — in less than a decade.
She wants to see long-term investment in vital services. “We need to be able to get on and do the job that we know is needed without having to, in the voluntary sector, scramble around year on year to try to sustain the provision that we’ve got.”
Simon Winlow, professor of criminology at Northumbria University, is generally wary of police crime data, which he believes can be “strewn with problems”.
But, he says: “That’s not to say such stats can’t offer some basic indications of what’s going on in the real world. Cleveland has some of the poorest postcodes in the country. Residents will tell you that public order crimes, violence, low-level quality-of-life crimes, drug dealing and so on are a standard feature of everyday life. Some crimes become so normalised that they’re scarcely worth remarking on. “There’s also a general absence of reasonably remunerative and secure jobs. Middlesbrough town centre is a wonderfully evocative place. The world has moved on and much of Middlesbrough has fallen out of history.”
The town’s Dorman Museum tries to put a positive spin on things. Yes, Middlesbrough was once such a centre of manufacturing that it provided the steel for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the area’s heavy industries have now largely disappeared. “However, many new industries have developed, such as call centres,” says one display, while visitors are told the town has a bustling shopping centre.
Mark Horkan, founder of the White Feather Project, which delivers hundreds of emergency food and care packages a month, does not quite see it that way. “Everybody worked in the factories or the steelworks or on the railways. Things got privatised. There’s nothing for them to go into. You go down the town centre and it’s atrocious, the amount of shops that’s closed down because there’s no money.”
On the morning of our interview, Horkan discovered one of his units had been broken into and thieves had made off with treats for the children’s Christmas hampers. He is baffled why anyone would steal from a charity that gives its wares away. But he says he can see why penury inexorably leads to crime. “They’re going out there trying to fend for themselves to feed their families. That’s wrong, we know it’s wrong. But it’s happening.”
Cleveland’s residents have become inured to living with a failing police force, rising levels of deprivation and housing as ramshackle as the social safety net. And they are under no illusions: it is going to take hefty investment and long-term commitment to even begin to fix the problem. If levelling up is a soundbite in search of a policy, Britain’s wild west is a land of despair in pursuit of something more than nebulous promises.
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SubscribeI hope he’s right though I am not sure.
This gave me a cold bitter laugh – from the paper tracking cancellations in CAN/US:
3/23/2021 – Donna Hughes – University of Rhode Island
She quite literally gets cancelled for daring to point out that people are getting cancelled. Reminds me of the religious nutjobs who burn effigies and riot in response to being called intolerant. Points well proven…
Why ‘Religious Nutjobs’? Has this happened to you or do you have a source of where this happened? “who burn effigies and riot in response to being called intolerant.” I just do not get this analogy, as in the few billions of religious people in the world, this is an unheard of reaction, which seems a gratuitously agenda driven comment. If you call Christians intolerant do they riot and burn? Do Hindus? Buddhists? Muslims? In Fact, as you prove, the ONE group you may attack in print are the religious, they are not protected, and as proof try swapping Religious for any other group.
I think the intolerance remark was aimed at the “Religion of Peace”
If you believe in diversity – and strive to increase Ethnic numbers as a result – why dont universities also believe in diversity of opinion . And make an effort to appoint right wing as well as left wing academics?
Because they”re so cocooned that they’re not even aware that they are not diverse.
Reversion to mean theory often applies, so it is no surprise that a superforecaster uses it. An example of reversion to mean is Leicester City FC – perennially mid to bottom of the premiership, wins one year to everyone’s surprise and is back where it normally is the following season.
Academia often comes up with bad ideas, which catch hold for a while, then fizzle out because they are bad ideas. However these bad ideas don’t often escape academia in the way this one has. When a bad idea escapes into the corporate, political and media world the way this one has, it can be decades before we see a return to mean (sanity). An example, which took mass murder before the global realisation that it was a bad idea dawned, was eugenics. In my view Global Warming / Climate Change theory is an example of a bad idea that has yet to reach its apogee in terms of acceptance and is still way off reaching its apogee in terms of the unintended harm it will do to millions – particularly the poorest, who see their potential for development curtailed and all the problems that it already bringing for us all. At the moment, I don’t see what the catalyst will be that leads to the lancing of the Global Warming / Climate Change theory boil. However I am slightly more hopeful about the woke / Social Justice Theory boil, as at least some politicians see lancing it as a vote winner.
The medieval universities evolved to supply educated men to furnish ordinands for the church, the Catholic Church originally and then the reformed churches. It’s not surprising then that a certain level of orthodoxy might be expected and required. Of course, as the main protectors and conduits of literacy and knowledge, they did become centres of enquiry and experiment. I don’t think ‘academic freedom’ would have been a concept most of those era would have recognised ; ‘ heresy ‘ was a more prevalent concern.
Perhaps we are seeing a return to this format?
Yes. Also, for much of its history, Cicero’s rather conservative values were dominant in academia. They taught that everything important was already documented. The best way to gain knowledge was to read ancient authorities. There was less demand from academics to push the boundaries of knowledge.
I see you are a total kool-aid drinker with your anti-Christianity. The Dark Ages and Medieval Church was the source of all intellectualism which evolved in the West. Thousands of monks hand copied tens of thousands of classic books to promote learning across the barbarian lands. Of the top worlds 120 philosophers 100 were Christian. The Scientist Priests and Monks invented the Scientific Method, all the universities were from the Church, the armies of multi-lingual Priests sent out were educated at university level in a world where literacy was almost non-existent. All the intellectualism of the West came from the amazingly intellectual Church. All the communication, opening of roads, treaties, thinking, were spread by the lines of communication the Church kept, reaching into every land and city, and bringing forth civilization.
Turning and argument on its head is an excellent way of testing its validity. However I would suggest your analysis has missed some key points.
Firstly “the mean” in terms of academic freedom is not a horizontal line over the millennium but a steadily improving trend which has had its peaks and troughs.
More importantly, what is happening here is not the classic suppression of academic freedom, which is aimed at preventing the debunking of popularly held misconceptions in a manner which inconveniences the powerful. The earth revolving round the sun and humans evolving from apes as classic examples. I put it to you that what we are seeing this time is heretics using their own invented witchcraft to set fire to the clergy. Ie it is not the normal peaks and troughs around the trend line.
The whole perversion of reality the cancellers are promoting is based on the idea that discourse is at the root of the problem they think they can solve (for the greater good of humanity!). The masses either don’t really understand the situation and either think it is about not saying hurtful things to people who are different or know it does not make sense but are either unable or too afraid to articulate why. Those being cancelled are able to articulate it and are prepared to do so, they are the greatest threat to the heretics so must be burned, but getting a few parishioners on the bonfire too serves to ensure there is no rescue by the people’s fire brigade.
It will only be a “blip” when it runs out of people to silence, but at that point, who’ll notice and who’ll be left. And this began before 2015; it’s just become far more pronounced since then.
Yes, long before.
I think rather than the deep history of it all, the relevant truth here is that middle aged academics were all raised to value open enquiry. They hate all this, that’s what Tetlock means and I think he’s right. But there’s still a big worry.
Not being a professor, I would rewrite the article above –
“People are now bored with silly academics trying to compete in the game called – ‘I can say something more shocking than you can.’ Like every else, it will run its course and go into reverse. The driving force for the reversal will be the fact that the new graduates will not get jobs.
Perhaps. Alternatively, many of them will continue to get ‘jobs’ in government, and as teachers, and in think tanks and NGOs etc, where they will continue to wreak hell upon the world.
Higher education institutions are going to run themselves into the ground at this rate.
The brightest and best will never entertain entering academia whilst this derangement continues. Furthermore, they will take their disdain into their future careers. It might be too late before the universities realise this
This is a really good, in-depth analysis. Worth the time reading it.
https://quillette.com/2021/04/09/georgetowns-cultural-revolution/
I read that too. It was good.
I find it hard to feel sorry for Sandra Sellers; a legal academic, wrongfully dismissed, without due process and too timid to fightback. Of course, to do so would require her undermining the ethos of liberal academia which, no doubt, she shares. But even if Philip Tetlock is right and this thing just has to run its course over a few years, it still seems like it’s going to take some concerted action to help it along. A reaffirmation of the principles of academic objectivity might help. But if academics are too timid to take up the cudgels, its course may be a long one.
Why wait. These left wing thugs need to be defunded. Let them enjoy their anarchy on the dole, we cannot afford to wait and let them pollute our society with intolerance and thuggish behaviour.
Johnathan Haidt pointed out recently that there are a lot of people holding their tongues in academia at the moment, and that’s my experience too. Also Cory Clark’s talk which is the second talk in the link above shows good data for this. That was an upbeat talk I thought, and meshes well with my own intuitions.
When it becomes a little safer to do so, all those ordinary university people will be happier to speak up. Universities are full of scientists and philosopher types. They are mostly not journalists or motivated by public opinion. They are just highly educated people who chose to make a relatively meagre living talking, thinking and teaching instead of making more money. They do skew left, but what is going on is not really a left right thing at heart, so much as a hysteria. Those aren’t sustainable, we’ve seen them come and go before.
Once they know their jobs are safe, people will speak up about what they think. Academics do that for a living. So I’m hopeful too, but not complacent. It’s true that significant craziness has gripped certain portions of the humanities. I can’t deny that. It was evident in the 90’s and got worse. I have no idea what will happen.
But organisations like “heterodox academy” seem to be doing well, most academics aren’t at all crazy and it might all be OK if we keep trying to fix it.
I think it’s a matter of scientists, who are typically not so political, waking up as this stuff begins to concern their careers. There’s data in Jussim’s talk to support that.
I do not really believe it, I think they are kool-aid drinkers. When Pangloss finally had to admit his utilitarian ‘All’s for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, ‘ philosophy was flawed he then decided he could not refute it as it was something he had thought and said for so long there was no point; he may as well just keep saying it, even if he no longer believed it. You know, the old War Horse and hearing the bugle call.
I don’t know who Pangloss is actually, or exactly what utilitarianism has to do with the authoritarian left.
Anecdotally speaking, my friends and colleagues and I are all university scientists. Although we are unlikely to vote for Donald Trump or Brexit, we aren’t keen on this stuff either. It’s now starting to affect jobs and funding, and also our ability to discuss obvious scientific facts (like “human beings are sexually dimorphic”).
So there’s likely to be gradual pushback. Indeed that’s why I’m writing this.
Pangloss is a character in Voltaire’s Candide, based on Leibniz and notable for an incurable optimism encapsulated in his frequent deployment of the phrase “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.
Oh right. I never read Voltaire. I saw it when I googled it but Voltaire predates utiliarianism.
Tetlock has been cancelled, I assume?
No, he is just one of those ‘Good men who do nothing’ who allow evil to succeed.