Colchester always looks prosperous when I go there. There are designer clothes at prices I cannot afford in its charity shops. I think of it as a place where the last serious incident of anti-social behaviour was in AD 61. Not so, according to the Telegraph:
How libraries changed from local sanctuaries to antisocial behaviour hotspots
All the crime in British libraries has traditionally been contained between the covers of our books – any rowdiness instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”
But in Colchester, Essex, that idyll increasingly resembles fiction. Over the past three months, the city’s local library has recorded a shocking 54 incidents of antisocial behaviour, forcing librarians to consider donning bodycams for their own protection.
Books have been snatched from the shelves, tossed about and destroyed. An irreplaceable collection of local 18th-century maps has been defaced with obscene sketches. A glass door has been shattered, fires have been lit on the carpet tiles of the quiet study area and staff have been subjected to appalling verbal abuse and – on one occasion – a physical assault.
Non-paywall version of the story here.
It continues,
Perhaps most worrying of all, however, is that the Essex librarians are far from alone, with similar learning sanctuaries across the country now battling a wave of criminality and disorderly behaviour.
In Kent, such institutions witnessed a 500 per cent increase in antisocial incidents affecting staff and library users between 2020 and 2023, while in Bristol, several libraries were forced to close or change their opening hours over the school holidays last year to deter unruly young visitors.
Note the timeframe. I suspect that this startling 500% increase in antisocial incidents in Kent public libraries between 2020 and 2023 was a ripple from the Black Lives Matter tsunami finally making landfall after crossing the Atlantic. However that is but the latest book in a multi-volume saga. The article speaks of any rowdiness being ‘instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”’ When did that last happen, 1975? Perhaps there really were Shh-ing librarians like that once. My imagination gives them beehive hair and cat-eye glasses. Never actually saw one though, and in the 1980s I spent vast amounts of time in the local public library. All my life, trendy young librarians lived in terror of being thought to be that sort of librarian, and the fear never went away while they gradually turned into old librarians who’ve still got their CND badges in a drawer somewhere.
No longer the silent book storage and study areas of old, libraries have evolved to become “community hubs” offering a wide range of free or affordable services to visitors of all ages. You can go to a library to access the internet and use printers and photocopiers. They host knitting clubs, manga drawing sessions and bereavement support meetings. Often they’ll loan out medical equipment such as blood pressure monitors, with many becoming Covid vaccination centres during the pandemic. A new Scottish scheme even offers up musical instruments for users.
In Colchester’s library, parents and grandparents are supervising toddlers clambering around a small soft play area situated on the two-storey building’s ground floor.
There is nothing wrong with the manga drawing or the soft play areas in themselves. Nor do I have any automatic objection to a library, in the sense of a place whose primary purpose is to make books available to the public, also hosting activities such as Drag Queen Story Hour, as Colchester library has done. Although I do think the famous Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey whom Redbridge council commissioned to do the rounds of its children’s libraries in 2021 might have been a little off-putting to certain demographics.
If public, government-run libraries were private, commercially-run libraries as once existed in the UK – Boots the Chemist used to run a mass-market circulating library – we could have lively competition between the “We’re not your grandma’s library” libraries and the “We are your grandma’s library” libraries. I am sure there is room for both.
But that is a dream. In the real world, low as its fees were, “Boots Book-Lovers’ Library” could not compete with the government-subsidised version which proudly boasted it was free to all. And the generations of public librarians since then thought they were being non-authoritarian by taking that “to all” literally. “The library isn’t just about books”, they said. The banks of computers pushed the books into a corner. “The library isn’t just for swots”, they said. “We won’t make you stay quiet”, they said. It stopped being a quiet haven for swots. “We are inclusive”, they said. “The library is for all sorts of people.” And, lo, no one was excluded and all sorts of people came.
Some libraries in the US have the same problems. I worked in one for a few years. It isn’t just librarians want the statistics, which include the number of souls that come in, and they do because funding is tied to statistics. So librarians do want people crossing the threshold. And if there were problems we could always call the police and they were more than welcome to show up. We had fights in the stacks, bums, drunks, hookers and johns in the restrooms, at least one sexual assault that I know of, and sex offenders we kept an eagle eye on when they were even near kids.
The problem in the US is the courts have ruled more than once that all the problem people of the world have the same right to show up as the law abiding people who contribute to society. And I understand the rulings, but in the real world those rulings have consequences that judges just don’t foresee. But here’s the thing: the library directors get sued and that money to pay off those suits come out of budgets already strained. And some directors get very, very gunshy after being sued. So the directors and librarians in front of the public have to give a lot of leeway, sometimes too much leeway. And there are some people who live to go right up to the edge and push and then sue. I know from first hand experience how that works.
It’s not as simple as “throw them out of the public library.”
FWIW, you won’t find to many people as pro privatization to me, but TBH public libraries are pretty far down my list. They are relatively inexpensive, they are run at a very local level often by a separate government entity than the local council, and they are extremely valuable in the services they offer.
I guess the internet is definitely making them a lot less relevant, but I have to say I have a soft spot in my heart for public libraries. I love walking down the stacks, especially the non fiction books where you can pick up a book on some random subject and realize that it contains the complete distilled work of the whole lifetime of its author — all packaged neatly into three hundred pages for you.
Things are definitely a bit different in the UK and the US in regards to public libraries, how they are run and funded, but they really are one of the few really good functions of local government here.
…’but in the real world those rulings have consequences that judges just don’t foresee.’
FTFY: ‘…but in the real world those rulings have consequences that judges just don’t care about because they don’t fall on them or their families.’
JuliaM
‘…but in the real world those rulings have consequences that judges just don’t care about because they don’t fall on them or their families.’
But judges should NOT care about those consequences. It is not their job. Their job is to enforce the law as written by parliament or congress based on the facts presented at trial. If judges are given wide discretion to modify their judgement based on what the consequences of a law are then they become mini legislators, and that is the last thing we want.
I don’t know if it wasn’t the judges didn’t care or if they just didn’t think ahead or what. I mean, yes I agree that the taxpayers, of which the homeless are ostensibly a part, and citizens of all stripes shouldn’t be excluded from publicly-funded enterprises without good reason. But the do-gooder organizations like the ACLU and activist judges in the 1970s and 80s who made those rulings didn’t think about how their rulings in a real world setting. It’s almost like the law exists in some hypothetical lab and is just perfect instead of just another construction human make. And it doesn’t help matters that legislatures simply don’t care about libraries.
Our policy ended up being if patrons complained about a very pungent person, the librarian would take him aside and give him a card with a name and address of a local organization where said person could get a shower and maybe wash his clothes. But it couldn’t just be staff saying he stank to high heaven because then it could open us up to litigation. Or because of the various rulings we couldn’t actually exclude an adult with no children from juvenile activities like a club or using the computers in the kids part of the library, but we would watch that adult like a hawk, especially when we knew that adult had a record as a sex offender. There is no reason an adult with no kids should want to be a part of a kids group for playing D&D but we couldn’t say no because of lawsuits. A parent showing up and helping out or someone from the community with expertise is one thing, but an adult with no kids wanting to hang out with kids sets off alarm bells.
It’s one of the big reasons you see stuff like drag queen story hour. Yes, most librarians are left-leaning, but mostly it comes down to not being able to say “no” because of the rulings. What they could do is say “during normal story hours we have X number of kids, but when drag queens do it we have significantly fewer kids because parents aren’t bringing their kids so we just aren’t taking up the drag queens on their offer to read to kids.” Again, it all comes down to usage statistics. I will admit that even though the librarians lean left, they will go out of their way to stock books and materials from all viewpoints and not just those that parrot their own. They love recommendations on what to get from the public because the new book listings in journals and catalogs mostly hit the best sellers and those books on various lists.
Fraser Orr, at the very least the judge should put in his ruling that he knows he has to rule this way, but he can foresee real problems coming from it like X, Y, or Z may happen and the legislature must do something about the situation instead of just having the Pikachu shocked face when X, Y, or Z actually does happen.
One of the best libraries I use is my local university library, that I pay an annual fee to use.
Society is in terrible decline – and not just in the United Kingdom.
In the United States the courts (the same courts that handed over the streets, in some cities, to violent vagrants) declared that libraries were “public places” – and, therefore, that drug addicts, the mentally ill, and-so-on could not be excluded from them.
And the proportion of people in Western countries are from these groups keeps increasing.
Libraries as such, eg the communities’ store of knowledge is a completely failed 20th (19th?) century business model. The benchmark performance metric for libraries used to be “stockturn” – the number of times per year, on average your collection turned over. Stockturns have been in drastic, irreversible decline over the last ten years. The basic business model is kaput, and the few remaining borrorwers are rapidly becoming extinct. They are as doomed as video libraries.
In response to these horrific numbers, libraries have reinvented themselves as “community resources” – providers of free wifi, playstation based child minding, coffee shops, council bill paying counters and probably analogue windows for all government services if they had their way. Anything to try and keep themselves relevant.
Of course, relevant is the justification for ongoing funding. From you, the rate payer and tax payer. The books are just kabuki now.