2 February - Councillors, cops and robbers
A council busy period is coming up. There’s a Resources Scrutiny Meeting
scheduled for Wednesday this week, a People Scrutiny meeting the following Tuesday (10th
February) and a Places Scrutiny meeting on the 18th February. Then another Cabinet meeting on Monday 23rd.
The Audit Committee will be meeting too. All at 19:30 in the Civic Offices. Gone are the days of proper
scrutiny when there were seven different meetings spread more evenly over the quarter.
So that gets some way towards answering a site redesign suggestion from a
reader. i.e. To provide a Quick Link bar beneath the menu and make council
meetings a featured link. Council meetings are currently linked from the Menu.
Home > Links > Council > Calendar of meetings. No promises for a Quick Link
bar though, there is quite enough to maintain already without adding more.
Quick
Links wasn’t the only reader suggestion last week. One came from the local Safer
Neighbourhood Team - or in plain English - the police. The SNT's constant
Twittering and Newsletters has to be a good thing overall but it doesn’t make me
feel any safer. Far from it.
Until I started to follow MPS Thamesmead on Twitter and subscribe to their
Newsletter I thought my personal safety was mainly threatened by the over takers
on Abbey Road who ignore the Keep Left signs after councillor Peter Craske authorised making it
dangerously narrow.
In the whole of my 28 years in Belvedere I have been threatened twice. Once a neighbour picked me
up bodily and threw me on the bonnet of a car for untidily leaving a ‘corrugated bottle’ (See
image) on a window ledge. A police officer told me he believed it to be an old
bellows camera trained on his bedroom window. Eventually he went to prison for
persistently beating up the wife he went to Russia to buy.
The second time was when a drunken young thug on a train decided he would beat
me up for smiling at a joke he’d told his travelling companion. Out of nowhere a
much larger and older ‘thug’ picked him up by the throat and threw him backwards
through the open door of the train as it was about to leave Woolwich Arsenal
with the words “You do not go around attacking old men”. I wasn’t even 60 at the
time and it reminded me that books should not be judged by their covers. My
saviour had a badly broken nose. Now I have PC Chris
Molnar telling me that every passer-by could be a knife wielding robber. Not only that
he has sent an email to alert me that there has been a spate of burglaries in
roads within sight of home.
But overall I suppose it must be a good thing.
PC Molnar thanked me last time I put one of his newsletters on line and suggested I might
do so again. Here’s a selection that may have borough-wide appeal. Click on any
of the four images for the related PDF.
Chris has promised not to do me for copyright theft.
Please be aware that these files are large. Hover over to see size.
