An ASBO Debate?

I’m not quite sure what to make of this.

In the course of what we’ll laughingly call, ‘growing up’ (whatever that means) I toyed with a number of job possibilities.  Naturally as a kid I wanted to be a doctor because, frankly, you can’t regard yourself as having a moral centre as a five year old without considering the option.  And because as an asthmatic I used to name all my lego after my inhalers – Sir Ventolin always being the hero.  Then I got a bit older and wanted to be an astronaut.  Then I studied science at school and realised that being an astronaut essentially involved sitting in a tin can on top of a hydrogen bomb while being blasted at 11 km/s into an ionizing vacuum driven by a computer system that made windows 3.1 look like something from the works of Arthur C. Clarke, and so that idea bit the bucket.  Then I thought maybe rocket scientist would be a bit safer… but I quickly discovered that while I can just about cope with Newtonian mechanics going in straight lines, the second things start to curve, I get very confused.  There was, I feel fairly confident, a moment during Physics A-Level when I got general relativity.  It was a Thursday afternoon and the sun was bright and I remember leaving class with an overwhelming sense of profound comprehension and well-being followed almost immediately by the realisation I didn’t get it after all.  Then I went to LSE and considered being a historian, until I realised that while I love history, I’m pretty rubbish at historiography and that the sacred words ‘that’s an interpretation’ are only good to about MA level.  Then I left LSE and considered all my various options, including a strong musing on whether to be a copper.  Bizarrely.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, there was a good deal of reasoning and a heavy dose of solid belief that went into this thought process, but it probably wasn’t what my dissertation supervisor had in mind when asking if I’d thought about the next few years of my life.  (Chose technical theatre.  Slightly different.)

Which brings me right back to where this ramble started… the Good Behaviour Zone.

This Good Behaviour Zone, if you’re wondering, seems to be somewhere around Brick Lane.  Which is odd, because I never had Brick Lane pegged as a badly behaved area.  I lived around there for a while and what with the large number of Jack the Ripper tours coming through at all hours of the day and night, it’s hard to see where your average criminal would get the chance to do their nefarious deeds.  I mean, as a homeowner in an area not renowned for its surplus of good manners, I cheer for any vibe which says oi, you jimbo, don’t litter, don’t shout too loud past 11 p.m. when I’ve got a tech to get to tomorrow morning, don’t mug little old ladies, you know, be good!  And I entirely cheer for coppers.  You ask a group of people to wade through all the things that society can’t deal with by itself – all the things that are frightening, and ugly, the big bads that we don’t have the equipment to process or the courage to face; the damaged, the angry, the violent – you ask coppers to wade through all of that and then at the end of the day give them grief then really, you’re having a bit of a failure of imagination.  Which isn’t to say that the Met Police hasn’t had its off days – people are people regardless of the organisation you’re in and the Met has had its share of officers who have either done wrong directly, or done wrong by not doing right, as with all things – but to deride an entire institution, one dedicated soly to your protection, is pretty damn daft.  And that’s what it is – an institution dedicated to keeping people safe, which is very much not the same as control.  It’s what keeps the police of a functioning democracy different from the police of a totalitarian state; although there is a whole can of worms about the nature of law, since by definition the cops enforce law and the law varies state to state but hell, different conversation….

So what then, to make of the Good Behaviour Zone?

For a start, what is Good Behaviour?  Who decides?  Any lawyer will almost certainly turn their nose up at the merest mention of ‘good’ in a bit of legal practice, which implies that some very firm rules have been laid down about what this means, but there’s no indication on the sign. This does lend itself to some iffy interpretation, which is especially iffy considering the diversity of the East End.  Within fifty yards you could have a devout Muslim and a hippy household with a thing for skimpy skirts shopping at the same newsagent and both will have a definition of ‘good’ that can be at once morally valid for either party yet completely and utterly different.  Basically, one man’s half pint is another man’s binge drinking spree; one woman’s cheerfully sozzled is another’s outrageously debauched; and so on.  Which is not to say that there are not moral absolutes – do no harm starting up fairly high on the list – but ‘behaviour’ is far too vague a word to merit absolutism and surely, you’d hope, the legal system already protects against those things which society as a whole can agree are wrong.

Who judges these things?  Who says what is and is not within the law of ‘good behaviour’?  And why, as we’re on the theme, is this one particular area subject to Good Behaviour?  Why if there is the legal concept of ‘good behaviour’ is it not applied across the entire city, is only Brick Lane worthy of this special attention?  It does kinda imply one law for here, another for there. Is it to do with this great hurrah-word of the time – community?  Is the community of the area so diverse that no one can agree on a universal absolute and so they bring in the police to enforce conformity?  That’s not law, that social policy, which is beyond the remit of a copper any day.  The whole point of the law is to inscribe as precisely as possible what society accepts and enforces, and I cannot but wonder if this may not be a matter a little bit beyond our present statute book.  Where does the law stop and subjective, messy, flexible morality begin?  (Discuss.)  If what’s happening is in fact the fear of the minority imposing a badly thought of bit of morality into our statute books, and declaring that here is Good and here is Bad and the police are here to enforce the difference, then it seems like we’re well on the way to taking our first step down a really iffy path.

Tragically, as a good ex-humanities student, I may have to say that there is no tidy answer…

… merely an interpretation…