JABA: The St James and Bartonsham Community Newsletter | 5 August 2008

"Are you a young offender, then?" asked the man. "Or"—as though it came to much the same thing—"are you with the Council?"

Hard to know what to say to that one. But as I was at that moment in the middle of High Town, dressed in a fluorescent red jacket, clutching a black bin bag and in hot pursuit of an errant coke bottle with my grabber, perhaps that's not surprising.

The jacket didn't actually say Notorious Criminal, the bag didn't actually have SWAG emblazoned on it, but it was clearly all very suspicious to the upstanding citizens of our fair city.

It shouldn't be. In fact I was on a litter pick, just one of a team of crack volunteers operating under the name of HALTER, or Herefordshire Against LitTER. The city of Hereford knows a thing or two about putting troops on the ground in hostile terrain … and I don't mean Gaol Street on a Friday night.

But believe me, when it comes to litter nothing compares to the battle-hardened veterans of HALTER clearing up the debris the following day. Like the rolling tide of the wide Mississippi, or a plague of well-mannered locusts of uncertain age, they sweep all before them.

And lurking among those cans and sweet papers, nestling in between the plastic bottles, chip wrappers and cigarette butts, there is a serious point. Ours is a beautiful city, in the most gorgeous county in England. And it is full of litter. The streets are full of it, the hedgerows are full of it and we need to do something about it.

But hold on a second, I hear you say: whoa there, Jesse old boy. We're talking about pieces of paper here. This isn't about hospitals, or schools, or crime or care for the disabled or any of the 1001 things we rightly consider major social priorities. As they say in American sitcoms, nobody died.

And who exactly is this "we" as in "we need to do something about it"? Litter is no big deal, and anyway the Council gets paid to clear it up. So what on earth is the point of a few good folks getting out with their grabbers? It'll be just as bad again a few hours later.

To which the answers are: Wrong and Wrong. Look at what happened in New York City. The city had long been notorious for crime, with many parts seen as virtual no-go areas. In the mid-1990s, however, the city adopted the "broken windows" theory of policing. In "broken windows", small crimes like graffiti and littering are treated like big ones. So petty criminals, instead of being ignored, were tracked down by a much-enlarged New York police force, and vigorously prosecuted. Soon the message got out that small crimes were not to be tolerated, and crime rate started to fall. And it fell, and fell. Today New York has less crime than London.

Broken windows was about cultural change. That is what we need for litter in Hereford. It's not about diverting time and energy from other, bigger priorities, and of course the police and the council have their parts to play too. But the big goal is a cultural one: simply to get the message across that dropping litter is publicly unacceptable, so that a large number of people make some small changes to their behaviour.

Once that's happened, we can move on to other ways to make our city and our county still more beautiful. More tourists will come to see them, boosting the local economy. We will know better what we stand for, and regain a measure of our missing pride. And we will live better. Time to pick up some litter, I say.