"BID-funded SIS officer Lewis continues to provide support to vulnerable individuals"
The latest Broadmead Business Improvement District (BID) minutes provide an update on the previous quarter at the shopping centre. This area of interest contains the Galleries, Merchant Street and the surrounding commercial properties and businesses. At each meeting there is also an update from the police on business crime reduction.
At the November meeting, the police update included the following statement:
"BID-funded SIS officer Lewis continues to provide support to vulnerable individuals."
The relevant "support" includes a civil injunction, criminal behaviour orders & various referrals. The referrals are presumably handled by the council and organisations such as St Mungo’s and Bristol Drugs Project, as mentioned on the BID website.
Lewis Monk is part of BCC and A&S Police’s team of Street Intervention Services officers, and is co-funded by the BIDs. His work focuses solely on the three BID areas. The Business Crime Reduction Partnership (BCRP) state that: “The aim of SIS is to tackle anti-social behaviour (ASB) caused by members of the street community, which could include persistent begging, public drug use or threatening behaviour.”
Broadmead BID say, “In February 2022, Lewis Monk took up this role joining the existing team of the Street Intervention Service (SIS) that is run by Bristol City Council, supported by two officers from Avon and Somerset Police and features valuable contributions from seconded personnel from Bristol Drugs Project and St Mungo’s.”
Bristol Central ward councillor, Sibusiso Tshabalala was at this meeting. He wasn't in politics back when Destination West and centre manager John Hirst said: ‘I'm not prepared to have begging in my centre. People will have to do it somewhere else.’
The tone is gentler but what started as “Retailers in Broadmead trying to club together £90,000 for three dedicated police constables" has turned into what seems to be a publicly funded role of dealing with ASB in service to business.
I hope the councillors are asking questions.
Karma police, private cops, and the city centre
In Bristol’s city centre, the businesses have been paying Avon and Somerset Police for access to their own police officers.
So to put the salient point, as I see it, bluntly: if an individual or group of individuals have the financial wherewithal, he/she/they can hire cops to do the work they’re paid with public money to do in the first place? That’s tiered policing, isn’t it? Policing FOR the wealthy, and BEING POLICED for the rest of us.
Broadmead is a microcosm of what is happening in society at large: the attempt to contain, regulate and manage people through ubiquitous surveillance (Broadmead is saturated with CCTV), allied to a plain clothed militia working for the police and council and retailers, linked via their headsets and a messaging app to the people studying the CCTV, who are able to switch between external street views and internal store views. And there’s always enough money to pay for all this.
But never enough money to house people or pay them adequate benefits. And as for homelessness and begging, I think it’s critically important that people’s dire circumstances are not swept under the proverbial carpet.