Bad company

My niece is following my footsteps and decided to move to England. She is going to live and work in Brighton for nine months. The good news is that she first stopped by my flat for a few days before her move south.
Sadly, I am not very good company at the moment because I am skint and have a bad cold. So she is left to her own devise. However, she is an independent young lady so she manages.

It turned out that she never read Jane Austen so we have spent the evenings catching up on my Austen DVD collection. I love my dear Jane!

My niece posted a picture on the mushrooms growing in my shower on her Facebook page and her Swedish friends are shocked. Life here in the ghetto is different from the high living standard in Sweden...

On Saturday night there was some commotion in the staircases at 11pm and I went out to have a look. Seriously, one day I will fall victim for the “curiosity killed the cat” wisdom. On the stairs I found six teenagers loitering about. A young couple were making out and the rest were just making noise. They all stood tall as I arrived and looked like small innocent angels, ‘we haven’t done anything’ they explained. A wee boy of ten or so said he was waiting for his mum. I told them to keep it down because some people are sleeping. It did actually get quieter after that.

The next morning I had to sweep the stairs from chicken bones and empty take away boxes. I do suspect the kids but maybe I am wrong.

Apparently I live within the area where they will have a trial period of dispersal zone for youngsters; only two can stand together without being dispersed. Should I contact the police about the kids? Is it really right? Where should they go?

Yes, I do get fed up by the noise, the litter and the fact that they nick my flowers and destroy the curve appeal. If I call the police to disperse them then they will just end up on someone else’s doorstep.
Maybe I should interact with them in a more positive way, get down with them so to speak, “give me five, man”.

Ignorance

This morning I went down to Brixton town centre where the metropolitan police had parked a van on Windrush Square. The van showed images from CCTV footage during the riots and asked the public, “Do you know this person?”
I walked up to the van to have a look, curious as I am and saw that some of the images were on children!
I think it is wrong to publish images of people (suspects) before they have been proven guilty of any crime and especially so when it involves children.
I asked the officer by the van what they are doing and he said they are trying to identify looters. I then said, “But you show images of children”.
He then responded that they are old enough to do the crime!
I then said that they are not proven guilty yet and their crime is poverty.
Then the police man said that he is poor too but he don't steal!

I get so tired sometimes. If you work as a police man you earn more than minimum pay and therefore you are not poor. However, more than 50% of the children in Lambeth live in poverty. The poverty I talk about here are children who have to go to school hungry because their parents can’t afford breakfast, children living in poor housing with mould on their bedroom walls and with various infestations and overcrowded situations putting their health at risk.

This ignorant police man actually compared his own situation with real poverty.

He then asked me if my windows were smashed during the riots and when I said no he insinuated that I then have no right to say anything because it didn’t affect me.
I nearly told him that the riots would never have happened if it wasn’t for the police murdering Mark Duggan!
But I thought I better hold my tongue or I get myself arrested! You can’t be too sure nowadays when it comes to the metropolitan police force. Besides, talking to him was like talking to an ignorant football hooligan or skinhead – nobody was home, the light was not on.

Surely the looting by the bankers cost us all far more than the riots in August.

Why don’t they show images of the greedy bankers as well?

Why don’t they spend their time finding out how Sean Rigg could die whilst in police custody at Brixton Police Station?

That this sorting the wheat from the chaff can go on without any protests or opposition is cheer ignorance to me. It is scary to have a police force that treats people different depending on their wealth. Where is the justice in that?