Rather a coincidence – after Friday’s launch of a new scheme involving Neighbourhood Watches, today I am giving a speech to the Haringey Borough Neighbourhood Watch AGM. I am talking about anti-social behaviour etc – but use the opportunity to have a rant about ‘care in the community’ or lack of it.

Part of my speech is about the importance of us all working to tackle crime:

“I would like to pay tribute to Neighbourhood Watches and all those who serve on them. The work they do is invaluable and beneficial and they create and forge a strong sense of community and looking out for each other, working with the police safer neighbourhood team, the Council’s anti-social behaviour teams and health partners is the way to go.

“Fighting crime isn’t just something you can pay for through your taxes and can then ignore. It’s something that the whole of society has to do.”

I also talk about how it is both crime levels and fear of crime we need to concern ourselves with:

“Haringey Council’s own research indicates that crime is the number one concern of just under half (49%) of Haringey residents. However, crime levels, measured by the number of total notifiable offences is dropping – 19% down (5,346 fewer) than the same period last year.

“Even with this drop the figures are still high, but also it is often fear of crime and the experience of small misdemeanours as well as major crimes themselves that worries local residents and that most people contact me about. Far too often fear of crime is treated as if it isn’t really a proper problem to acknowledge – ‘oh the problem isn’t actual crime, it’s just people’s whipped up fears’ etc. But fear is real, it affects people, it hurts lives and it hinders freedom.”

Although crime is a much debated issue, I feel that one key aspect is talked about too little.

Part of anti-social behaviour that arises from people with mental health issues. Many of the cases I see of neighbour disputes are caused by mental health problems – not youths, not petty vandals – but people living in the community who have mental health issues and for whom the ‘care in the community’ package cannot be enough to watch over them 24 hours a day. There is a gap that people are falling through. More love and attention needs to be focused in this direction.

I am not talking about the major headline cases that burst, only occasionally but totally unacceptably, into our papers, when someone who should be in residential care is released and murders their next door neighbour – those are tragic cases which we all gasp at and wonder how such a person could be thought to be safely let amongst us. I am instead talking about the far less obvious cases.

It’s a difficult issue. But this gap in care – despite best efforts of those who work so tirelessly in this area – does lead to a chain of events or experiences – both for the person themselves and for those around them.

The person themselves can be shunned by their neighbours and feels depressed, upset and socially excluded and isolated – which helps not their situation.

Neighbours feel aggrieved that they live close to someone who behaves oddly, or aggressively and sometimes feel or are genuinely at risk of assault, or verbal abuse, or fear of arson or whatever. And the police cannot intervene before such an offence has been committed. This all means that such situations can get out of kilter and ratchet up the behaviour scale. In the end it is the police and the prisons that end up dealing with what is not – and should not be – their job. This is a health issue.

Think of it this way.

If you imagine a person with mental health issues lying in bed in hospital to be treated – you wouldn’t imagine a policeman being called on to intervene if such a patient starts shouting out and swearing at a nurse.

And yet – that is pretty much what is happening when such a person is out on our streets – the police are having to deal with what is reported as anti-social behaviour but which is an area of care or behaviour exhibiting as anti-social but in reality mental illness.