Northumberland Park - do not despair (From Haringey Independent)

Northumberland Park - do not despair

2:48pm Monday 18th August 2008

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So Northumberland Park was named by police last week as having one of the highest levels of ex-cons living there. Big surprise, you may say.

But actually it is quite shocking. It came in the top 15th across London. That's compared with Southwark or Croydon, where the latest murder happened only this weekend.

Just because ex-convicts are known to live at an address in Northumberland Park does not necessarily correlate to the crime figures there, I understand that. But there are patterns to suggest that criminals in prison for just a few months will reoffend within two years when they're released back into the community. So it's probably a fairly good guess that there is a link between the higher number of crimes committed in the ward and the higher than average number of ex-crims living there.

One may be prejudicial to think so without any proof, but apparently there is some. And it's top secret. The Ministry of Justice has compiled research on the top 15 wards with high numbers of ex-offenders, but it is not willing to release these stats. Sitting here I can only imagine the figures are detrimental to the profile of Northumberland Park. And the fact the police refused to comment on the situation is even more telling. They hate to look like they're putting a place down, even if they're just telling the truth.

While there are a high number of ex-offenders living in North Tottenham, we must not forget there are those living there who are leading decent, honest lives apart from this wave of criminality.

It may sound obvious to say, but headlines so often just condemn one whole area rather than the individuals who are the cause of the story. We try our very best not to do this, but with the sparse amount of information we have it is not always easy to make this distinction clear.

Someone said to me they feel sorry for the poor people of Northumberland Park for the bad press the area is getting. But in a culture of statistics and league tables, there will always be a winner and a loser.

Residents of North Tottenham should not dispair - there will be another statistic released soon to blow this one out the water. After all, it was only recently that a survey of boroughs named Haringey as having the least number of beautiful people living here. This is a bigger problem I'd say.

Oh well, if we are going to have lots of ex-cons living here, at least we've got the satisfaction that they're not going to win the next beauty contest any more than we are.

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