Spider wrote:
Maybe it's worth talking to your neighbours and finding out how wide-spread
this problem is. I am the Neighbourhood Watch Coordinator for our road and,
when we had these problems - and worse - we all stood together. I arranged
a police meeting in my home and the result was an Anti-Social Behaviour
Order (ASBO) on the hooligans involved. We still have occasional problems,
but we continue to have police support - and the two-legged rats know it.
If they forget, we remind them )) !

If you do approach the Police, you will need to make contact with your local
Beat Officer.

Thanks for the advice. Part of the problem is actually indifference from
the neighbours, so I can't exactly see us standing together. One of my
neighbours is the Parish Council and trying to get them to fix their
fence after its been vandalised I have to wait for the next monthly
meeting then go and put my case to a panel of 10 councillors, then wait
another month and go back to see if they've decided to do anything, etc
- not the best of neighbours. Another neighbour is the church. The
people who rent the house from them seem to have no intention of getting
their fence fixed, or even stopping it being vandalised further, and
they wouldn't even tell me who the owner was. In the end I found out who
the owner was from HM Land Registry and wrote them a letter telling them
their fence had been vandalised and asking them to fix it, I'm still
waiting for a reply. The local council aren't much better, when I
reported graffiti to them they turned up and removed some of it but left
the rest. Given that the police seem to think its our problem, not
theirs, I don't see any hope of an antisocial behaviour order, although
I will definitely take up your suggestion of contacting our local beat
officer. Even though we've called the police quite a lot lately, we
still haven't seen the guy in our area yet. Reporting incidents to a
single point of contact will at least mean that someone in the police
gets a feel for the scale of the problem, which they don't seem to have
at the moment.