Occasionally an event happens so spirit-sappingly depressing to make us wonder if those millenarian, "hell in a handcart", death knell-sounding types in the Mail's employ might actually have a point after all. Here's one: two cops are on sick leave following an attack by a mob in Croydon, after they had the temerity to ask a 15-year old girl to pick up her litter. The mob, some 30 people strong and made up largely......

Another advert, another controversy, it seems. Just a couple of weeks ago a Grand Theft Auto IV ad was removed from Streatham because its gun-toting avatar was deemed insensitive in an area that had recently seen two gun-related murders. Now an ad in Crystal Palace train station for Chris Ryan's new book, Strike Back, will also be taken down because of its pro-violence message. With a recent spate of stabbings making headlines, it's no surprise......

It wasn't so long ago we were discussing the ease of scoring Es and whizz in Croydon. Perhaps stung into action by such reports, it appears that Croydon council are getting tough. They've invoked anti-terror legislation, in the form of the RIPA, six times in the past 12 months for offenses such as illegal trading and fly-tipping. RIPA, for those who don't follow the ever arcane activities of our increasingly Orwellian society, is the......

Operation Blunt 2 cracking down on knife crime made its first big arrest on Saturday night on the top deck of a bus in Deptford. An astonishing 24 teenagers were stopped and searched after boarding the bus en masse and police officers recovered the following makeshift arsenal: six knives, two screwdrivers, a corkscrew, a golf club, a metal baseball bat, a mallet, two wrench handles, a claw hammer and a metal bar were found......

Ah, the transformative powers of education. Last week, we saw the kiddies philosophizing. This week, we learn of prison inmates dramatizing. And this isn’t just any kind of dramatizing, nor is this just any prison: This is Shakespeare as performed by the inmates of the California State Correctional System, in collaboration with the London Shakespeare Workout Prison Project. Forgive us our naiveté if upon spotting this photo we weren’t immediately reminded of a scene......

A quarter of all 'youth gangs' reside in Lambeth. Now there's a statistic to make the Borough's residents sleep easy at night. According to Auntie, an unpublished report has linked 40 gangs to the area, one with over 2,500 members. That's not a gang, that's a Union. With increasingly more depressing reports coming through every day on the nature of gang / youth violence, and increasingly more hysterical attempts to find a London shaped......