Broadmead shopping centre was ticking over with shoppers on the Tuesday afternoon after Bank Holiday Monday. Towards the centre of the pedestrianised open-air mall is a branch of Savers. At the door stood an SIA-badged security officer in black blazer and trousers, seeing off the premises a larger, bulkier man carrying a plastic bag in one hand, having shoved the security guard in the chest. The guard remained cool, keeping his hands low, while flanked by two female uniformed members of staff. Across the way, a pair of Bristol business improvement district (BID) Rangers were answering a call from the shoe retailer Deichmann. The female officer went inside while the male (pictured) stood on the door, facing out. Later they went on their rounds further, talking to shops and on-mall kiosk-holders.
The BID also hires similarly-liveried โnight Rangersโ to patrol the city centre on Friday and Saturday nights when itโs at its most raucous. As in other places, this snapshot shows that private uniformed security is doing what some may call low-level and you could term everyday policing, response to anti-social behaviour or theft from shops.
Police centres
Note that in Bristol, Bath down the road and across the Avon and Somerset Police force area, the trend under the public sector austerity of the 2010s was to concentrate police in โcentresโ, such as at Patchway on the outskirts of Bristol, efficient in terms of locating car-based police near motorway junctions; not so in terms of long and tedious journeys if police have to take a prisoner into custody if, say, called to do so from the security officer on station inside the door of Broadmeadโs Tesco Express. The authorities have ever since been shaving the edges off this policy which (whatever police said and no matter how it made sense financially) looked like a retreat from a presence in city centres. Hence a police โenquiry officeโ opened in Bath city centre this summer.
Reading a hug
The policeโs retreat from where people actually live and do business, may be perceived or real, but in Bristol as elsewhere, the authorities have been surprised to find small retailers selling stolen goods, or tobacco products to the under-age, or doing business in an anti-social way generally that under-cuts legitimate businesses. How strongly businesses feel about this got through to the Labour police and crime commissioner (PCC) for Avon and Somerset, Clare Moody, this summer when visiting the St George district of Bristol, to witness a closure order on a โmini marketโ. As she related, she saw โother local business owners thanking and even hugging officers at the sceneโ. A hug can be interpreted in more than one way, as a way of showing gratitude (for police stopping on-street criminality, which could hardly be more in plain sight) or an unspoken plea for the police to stick around and truly get to grips with issues (the operation was part of an anti-social behaviour โawareness weekโ).
Back to Broadmead
Like in Plymouth and Birmingham, Bristolโs city centre shopping area Broadmead, re-built after Second World War bombing, and hit by rivals on the outskirts (the Cribbs Causeway mall) and trends away from in-person retail to online (as in most places, the Debenhams is unfilled, half a decade after the department store chain went out of business, a mute comment on stagnant demand for retail property). Yet into an early evening weekday, Broadmead feels safe and busy enough. Under the BID, the city centre has made efforts to beautify itself in terms of (to use the jargon) โplace makingโ. In an interview in the free Bristol Life magazine, the BIDโs interim head of place Anna Farthing described the โLove Bristol, Love Bristolโ scheme, such as โthe first professional overnight deep cleaning for a decadeโ. She stressed the support of volunteers: โWe soon realised that energetic groups of people not only spruced things up, but also drove back anti-social behaviour.โ As the BID does not deny, giving buildings and spaces โloveโ is one thing, having the financial and political muscle to tackle social and economic problems behind crime and nuisance behaviour โ which BIDs lack – is another, and obvious to any visitor. A few minutesโ walk from Broadmead is the harbourside, again, popular and safe-feeling, with plentiful bars and hotels. And, if you sit on the wooden benches outside the Llandoger Trow historic pub beside the harbour โ Robert Louis Stevensonโs setting for pirates to set off for Treasure Island โ itโs not long before you are bothered by beggars. While Bristol (and Bath) are hardly the only places to have a โstreet populationโ (to use more jargon), they feel particularly noticeable, and (to stress again) an obvious sight, sticking out as they do in their scruffiness, clothing of indeterminate, unbright colour, and ambling gait. Homelessness, begging and outright theft (from shops, and of parcels, see a recent case of a cross-Bristol thief given an unusually large, year and a half, prison sentence) may not be the same problems, but thatโs academic to convenience stores who routinely have one or more of the โstreet populationโ sat outside their doors, or to council and business workers with vans who have to watch out for such people, in case they dart into vehicles to steal something. Itโs a painful contrast to any โplace makingโ. And while the police can point to prison terms for homeless people doing crimes, do criminal justice โoutcomesโ make any difference, except for giving a respite to the law-abiding?
Getting along
And yet it would be wrong to end on a sour note. Beggars only hang around places doing well economically, for the pickings. Private security has filled the gap left by austerity-hit police (who, more to the point, have remained into the 2020s a fire brigade-like, emergency response service). Diverse people in Bristol get along: to return to that incident outside Savers, the badly behaving man was black, the security guard Asian, the two female staff white.
