AS MUCH OF A ticket to the Job-centre as this may sound, you don’t want a column from me this morning; you want one from my father. He works in Canning Town, you see. Has done for 40 years. The revelations of the last week have been his exclusive story since 1966: the slow collapse of a community; the failing policies of benign neglect; the mayhem waiting to happen. You heard it here, first, folks; or rather you didn’t, because ordinary people do not get prime-time opportunities to document the everyday dreadfulness of life in Britain’s abandoned inner cities.

That is why this column would be better dictated from a resident of E16. The world is not short of anguished bulletins from the frontline written by middle-class journalists on whistle-stop tours with 4pm deadlines. Two Hours in Canning Town: An In-Depth Report. Oh, the deprivation. Oh, the crime. Oh, the betrayal. Oh, the feeling of relief and satisfaction as the copy leaves my laptop, the features editor gives the thumbs-up, my company car points west and I depart this poverty-ridden p***hole never to return. National newspaper journalists being good professionals, these passers-by ticked the boxes expertly. Threatening teenagers in hooded tops, cowering shopkeepers, absentee coppers, despairing locals. Given a happy news story to stand up when London won the Olympic bid, the same reporters came to the same locale and found bouncing schoolchildren, optimistic business people and chirpy Cockneys of just the right ethnic mix. That is what they do.

So we are tourists, really, both writers and readers. On this occasion, our brief is to feel Canning Town’s pain for a few days, while the murder of the young father Peter Woodhams is front-page news, before moving on. Later this week inner-city turmoil will be down the page and the nation will be up in arms over a fresh outrage, maybe bugging devices in wheelie bins. (Although I’ll solve that problem for you with one word — screwdriver — and if you all did it tomorrow, the councils would be stuffed.) In this way, Canning Town is our New Orleans. Remember last year, when America’s collective heart bled for the city’s impoverished citizenry, drowning, stranded and desolate? And then the circus moved on. Now a fresh storm brews off the coast of Louisiana and, guess what? It turns out that once NBC quit town, nobody cared much for the Crescent City after all.

Canning Town will soon know that abandonment. You haven’t been able to move for bleeding hearts since Woodhams died but this is an act, a show. On one side is government propaganda, the laughable Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, and the masters of irony at the council (slogan: Newham — A Place Where People Choose to Live and Work). On the other is life as it is lived. Enjoy:

“It was a like a village. Everybody knew each other; there were two banks, one on each corner. All gone now. Anybody who can get out, gets out. The banks have shut because of the crime, the building societies that opened closed quickly, too. There was a young Pakistani chap bought the chemists in the market. Nice guy. Every week these four kids would come in, clear out the perfume counter, put it in a bag, run off. One day, he fought back. Caught one of them, had him up against the wall.

He was screaming to the girls in the shop to call the police. This kid, cool as you like, just kept saying: ‘Take your hands off me, man. Take your hands off me, man.’ He wasn’t scared. In the end, the owner let him go. The kid pushed him away and ran. The police didn’t come anyway.

“This is what we have lived with for years. Nobody listened. We shouted for help but nobody came. Now all we hear is regeneration: but if the degeneration had not taken place, there would have been no need for it. Newham is a poor borough and Canning Town is the poorest of the poor. Every social crisis, the people are expected to deal with it. The Olympics are not about sport, it is about trying to get a corner of London out of the mess that has been created. But how will they build this place up again? Canary Wharf is less than a mile away. It makes no difference. People commute to work, and go home. They don’t stay. Who wants to live side by side with the gangs and the little one-man crime waves? Unless you sort them out who is going to come here? Now the Olympics are going to save us. The people of Canning Town didn’t want runners. They wanted coppers.”

Woodhams wanted a copper six months ago when he was stabbed. His girlfriend said after five weeks of trying to report the crime, his family gave up. Police finally took his blood-stained clothes away last week, by then as part of a murder inquiry following his shooting. Long before this tragedy, police had zero credibility with the locals. They see them as part of the problem, not the solution.

We looked aghast at the disintegration of society in New Orleans, yet who seriously believes Canning Town would be any different? If the Thames flood barrier failed to work and the locals ended up isolated and floating with the flotsam from the gang that murdered Woodhams, why would our fragile society hold strong? “The type of crime we have here is no different to anywhere else in London,” said Michael Johnson, Canning Town’s Chief Superintendent. He meant it as a comforting thought.

The reality is that every main British city has its Canning Town, its New Orleans, its time bomb of benign neglect waiting to blow. It makes the headlines once in a while and then the camera pans away, bored. For now, Canning Town has had its 15 minutes. Random violent death in our inner cities? Haven’t we read that somewhere before?

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• Graham Spiers